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, we show that state secondary schools located in Scottish remote or rural areas are not well served by the indicators capturing socio-economic, educational, or geographical deprivation widely used in the selection of schools for these outreach interventions. We construct a marker that identifies schools facing higher levels of deprivation than the Scottish average. We argue that (1) this marker is a step in the direction towards levelling the playing field between remote or rural schools and urban schools; and (2) it selects a wider range of schools for outreach interventions.
We investigate the dynamics of a cobweb model with heterogeneous beliefs, generalizing the example of Brock and Hommes (1997). We examine situations where the agents form expectations by using either rational expectations, or a type of adaptive expectations with limited memory defined from the last two prices. We specify conditions that generate cycles. These conditions depend on a set of factors that includes the intensity of switching between beliefs and the adaption parameter. We show that both Flip bifurcation and Neimark-Sacker bifurcation can occur as primary bifurcation when the steady state is unstable.
This paper explores some of the unique issues in accessing Higher Education (HE) faced by pupils living in some Scottish rural communities in Argyll & Bute, Highland, Eilean Siar (Western Isles), Orkney Islands and Shetland Islands. Many of these communities are hard to reach and in some of the least deprived areas of Scotland. Despite this, some pupils come from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds. All pupils face large pecuniary and non-pecuniary costs in studying at HE. This paper presents views of barriers to HE entry drawing on interviews with S5 and S6 pupils and their educators living in these areas. All respondents believed that those in rural areas faced higher barriers than for their peers because of additional costs due to their location. The paper also highlights the need for better information about access to HE and improved communication about the transition between secondary schools and HE institutions for all.
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