KCL students lead letter campaign urging state school pupils to apply to university

Students from King’s College London are leading a letter campaign which urges pupils from state schools to apply to university.

The letters will be addressed to young people in some of England’s most deprived areas, and each one is written and personalised by a university student who has come from a similar background.

The campaign, overseen by the Department for Education, will see almost 10,000 high-achieving GCSE students receive correspondence from current undergraduates at KCL, the Guardian reports.

The letters detail the writers’ own experiences, aiming to challenge the perception that university is exclusively for the privileged.

One such letter, written by Kemi Adeyemi, a final-year medical student at King’s, has been sent to a sixth former named Rahamat. In it, she reveals she is a “working-class student from a not-so-good area who was in care, went to state schools and was on free school meals.”

“Do not let financial considerations hold you back when choosing the right course and university for you,” Kemi advises, before saying: “Do not ever feel like those spaces are not for people like us.”

The initiative forms part of the Labour government’s drive to break the link between a young person’s financial background and their academic success. Official figures show disadvantaged pupils are almost half as likely to progress to higher education as their more advantaged peers.

Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, said: “Talent, aspiration and hard work – not postcode or background – should decide a young person’s future. Universities need to do more to make sure they’re reaching the most talented people in our country, wherever they come from.”

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The policy is supported by research from 2017, which found that personalised communication increased the likelihood of a student accepting a place at a selective university from 8.5 per cent to 11.4 per cent.

The campaign’s impact was evident at Christ the King Aquinas sixth-form college in Brockley, south-east London, where students who received the letters met Kemi earlier this September.

Adam Dragan, 17, had been considering a degree apprenticeship or studying in his native country, Poland, to avoid debt. “Then I learned all about the bursary schemes and contextual offers,” he said. “It made it feel accessible.”

He is now hoping to read economics and management at the University of Oxford.

Another student, Kaira Freeman, 17, said the correspondence made her more aware of the financial support available, while David Zheng, also 17, said it offered reassurance that he was “not alone on his journey.”

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