Widening Participation
A medical school with social mobility at its heart.
With places on medical courses being both limited in number and highly sought after, the competition to secure a place is very high.
Traditionally, medicine has been seen as an elite profession with multiple barriers to entry such as high grades, additional examinations, work experience requirements and several years of funding. A 2011 government report, ‘Opening Doors and Breaking Barriers’, found that just 20% of schools in the UK provide 80% of all medical school applications.
These statistics have sparked an ongoing effort from medical schools across the UK, The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and Health Education England to address this imbalance. One outcome of this effort has been the 1500 new training places in UK medical schools, announced in 2017. These places have been allocated to medical schools within areas with a relative shortage of doctors (such as Aston) and, importantly, to widen the social profile of new medical students.
In keeping with our vision of being a socially inclusive medical school, we aim to offer 40% of our UK places each year to students who meet specified widening participation criteria. Students in the West Midlands may also be eligible for our Pathway programmes, designed to expand knowledge, develop skills, and give an insight into what university life is really like to those students with ambitions to study medicine for university (see below).