At a time when interventions in widening access to, and participation in, higher education aim to maximise impact by engaging with schools located in the most deprived communities, school pupils in rural communities, and who experience deprivation, are, in practice, less likely to benefit. Using statistics available from the Scottish government,…

This paper addresses educational inequality of access to higher education for Scottish rural communities. Inequality results from the sole use of a national socio-economic index in order to meet a key milestone for higher education goal. I show (1) how the use of this index can have adverse effects on these communities and (2) how contextual…