Opinion: The UK should move to full PQA. Now

A post-qualification applications system is the best way to ensure equity in admissions, says Sasha Roseneil, UCL's Pro-Provost (Equity and Inclusion). It is hardly surprising that the UK is a global outlier in expecting students to apply to university before knowing their exam results. If someone were inventing an admissions system from scratch, no one would do it this way - and it is heartening that the government has finally recognised that something needs to be done. Requiring school-leavers to make life-defining decisions about which universities to apply to on the basis of predicted A-level and Scottish Higher results does a disservice to young people. In an increasingly competitive domestic and international higher education market, it ill-serves universities too, requiring them to make difficult decisions about who to admit on the basis of schoolteachers' notoriously inaccurate hunches about what grades their students will ultimately achieve. Research by academics from UCL's Institute of Education, published last year, has found that that only 16 per cent of predicted grades are accurate, with 75 per cent of applicants having over-predicted grades. Moreover, high-attaining disadvantaged students are significantly more likely to receive pessimistic grade predictions - possibly because their performance is particularly hard to predict.