Increasing numbers of students are applying to university with the International Certificate of Christian Education (ICCE), an alternative to mainstream qualifications based on a biblically-based, individualised curriculum called Accelerated Christian Education (ACE). No formal validity arguments exist for the ICCE, but it claims to prepare…

This paper applies an original framework to disentangle the concept of meritocracy, and the relationship between meritocracy and fairness, in elite university admissions. In Britain, elite universities are regularly criticised for being unmeritocratic and by implication unfair, but stakeholders often lack a shared understanding of meritocracy and…

Previous research suggested that candidates from some black and minority ethnic groups were less likely to receive an offer of a place from an "old" university. These findings were disputed in a re-analysis carried out for HEFCE which found that only Pakistani candidates were significantly less likely to receive offers (from both…

We report a small-scale study investigating the perceptions of postgraduate students who are non-native speakers of English and those of academic staff with regard to those students. Previous research has focused only on the former and identified a number of linguistic and cultural challenges these students face in adapting to Anglophone…

Applications for places in UK Higher Education are usually made before the results of A-level examinations are known, so references from schools and colleges normally refer to expected (or predicted) grades. Inaccuracies in these predictions may be systematically related to key characteristics of the applicant and could lead to…