Our research has shown that while universities offer a lot of financial support for students in the form of income contingent bursaries, these are poorly understood by prospective students. In fact, we found that most people who receive these bursaries didn’t know they were going to until they turned up at university - meaning that they couldn’t be included in their thinking.

Every year, we draw together all of the bursaries offered by universities in the UK, and summarise them in a booklet that contains information for everyone, about every institution, in an easy to digest form. We then work with school groups, like the Sixth Form Colleges Association and SSAT to put the booklets into the hands of as many young people as possible.

We tested this approach using a large scale RCT in 540 schools in England, which were targeted based on relatively low levels of university attendance, compared to what we’d expect based on their grades.

Two years later, we found that schools which received the booklets sent significantly more young people to university than those that didn’t, the equivalent of 1,000 extra young people a year attending university.