Birkbeck access and participation plan summary 2025 - 2026

What is an access and participation plan?

View the full access and participation plan for Birkbeck.

Key points

The focus of Birkbeck's access and participation plan is to ensure equality of opportunity for all students. To do so, we have analysed our student data across the five stages of the student journey: access, continuation, completion, attainment and progression.

We found that at the access stage, Birkbeck performs well in ensuring equality of opportunity. Therefore, our plan focuses on the outcomes of our students across continuation, completion, attainment and progression. Based on an analysis of our student data, this plan focuses on improving the outcomes of the following groups of students: students with a BTEC or equivalent vocational qualification, Black and Asian students, and part-time students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.

We take any discrepancy in outcomes across our student population seriously and our access and participation plan details what actions we will put in place and how we will evaluate them, to ensure equal opportunity for all our students.  

Fees we charge

Birkbeck fees for UK home undergraduates for the academic year 2025/26 are as follows: 

• Full-time first degree students (e.g. BA or BSc): £9,535
• Part-time undergraduate first degree students: £7,145
• Study abroad year: £1,430
• Foundation Year/Year 0 full-time students: either £9,535 or £5,760, dependent on subject area

Financial help

Birkbeck provides a number of student bursaries and financial support initiatives. These include: 

• Birkbeck Needs-based Assessment: this scheme provides support for students principally with an income below £25,000 and who have accessed all available government financial support. Our assessment judges the gap between people’s income and their needs subject to circumstances. The amount that can be awarded is between £500 - £4,000 depending on study intensity and assessed need. 
• Hardship Fund: this supports students with a household income below £25,000, who are in receipt of the maximum government maintenance loan and who are experiencing unforeseen financial hardship. Awards can be between £150 - £1000 depending on intensity of study.

Find out more about student funding and financial support at Birkbeck. 

Information for students

Birkbeck offers a range of ways that current and prospective students can stay informed about studying at Birkbeck and all other aspects of student life. We run Open Days and Offer Holder Days for prospective and new students and provide opportunities for prospective students to ask current Birkbeck students questions via the online chat site UniBuddy.

Our website holds information on our courses, our fees and student funding, as well as academic schools and faculties, our campus and student life at Birkbeck. Birkbeck students can access further information via the College intranet My BBK and through Birkbeck SharePoint for students via their Microsoft log in.  

What we are aiming to achieve

The aim of our access and participation plan is to address areas of inequality in student outcomes across our UK home undergraduate student population.  

We identified six indications of risk to equality of opportunity for underrepresented groups of students at Birkbeck and we have six objectives to address these.  

• Objective 1: Improve the continuation, completion and attainment rates of students with BTEC qualifications, enabling them equal opportunity to successfully progress through their studies and attain the highest possible degree outcomes. 
• Objective 2: Improve the completion and attainment rates of Black students, enabling them equal opportunity to successfully progress through their studies and attain the highest possible degree outcomes. 
• Objective 3: Increase the number of part-time Asian students completing their degree, enabling them equal opportunity to attain the highest possible degree outcomes. 
• Objective 4: Strengthen our support services for students with mental health conditions and continue to enable them equal opportunity to thrive and excel at university. To build on our student-centred strategy that promotes and supports student wellbeing across all areas of the College, enabling our students to support and look after their peers and to maintain positive mental wellbeing. 
• Objective 5: Increase the number of part-time students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds achieving a good degree outcome, enabling them equal opportunity to thrive and attain the highest possible outcome. 
• Objective 6: Increase the number of Black students who progress onto graduate level professional employment, enabling them equal opportunity to achieve successful careers. 

To read a fuller account of our indications of risk and the objectives that have been set, please see pages 2-4 of our access and participation plan. 

Addressing key risks to equality of opportunity  

Each objective is aligned to a set of targets that look to reduce or eliminate the percentage point gap between the target student group and the comparator group. 

To meet our objectives, we have developed three intervention strategies that cover the different stages of the student journey.  

• Intervention Strategy 1 covers the continuation stage (successfully moving from Year 1 to Year 2) and completion stage (successfully completing your degree). The strategy includes a combination of existing and new initiatives that focus on support for new students, mentoring, our personal tutor system, supporting students who are returning from a break in study, our student equity and race initiatives and our mental health and student wellbeing support. 
• Intervention Strategy 2 covers the attainment stage. Attainment looks at which groups of students achieve a “good” degree outcome; this could be a First or a 2:1 for their final degree award. The intervention strategy includes work from our Student Engagement and Success project, Early Assessment for Learning interventions, a research project that surveys all new undergraduate students on how confident they feel about a range of academic skills, and ensures that students are signposted to appropriate support based on their response, our work on inclusive assessment and our strategy to embed learning development support for all students. 
• Intervention Strategy 3 looks at the progression stage of the student journey, which covers how successful Birkbeck students are at progressing to graduate employment or to further study. In our analysis, we saw that fewer Black students successfully progressed to professional level graduate employment. This intervention strategy focusses on building a programme of work to support Black students at Birkbeck to successfully progress to graduate employment. The programme engages with students across the different stages of the student journey to ensure that interventions and activities can be accessed early in a student’s time at Birkbeck.

How students can get involved

Throughout the development of the plan, we consulted with Birkbeck students through the APP Student Liaison Group. Student Union officers also attended the staff and student intervention workshops. The design of the intervention strategies has been informed by feedback from student surveys. Lastly, the Student Union Chairman read and approved the final version of the plan. 

There are a number of ways that students can get involved in the delivery, monitoring and evaluation of our access and participation plan. 

• Consult with student representatives. The College uses the SU’s Student Parliament to canvas for wider student views. Student representatives attend Parliament and will be able to represent the views and experience of Birkbeck students. 
• Engage with student surveys. Over the next four years as we deliver the plan, the College will continue to engage with and respond to feedback provided through our student surveys. These will inform our evaluation and future iterations of the intervention strategies.  
• Attend student focus groups. We will be running a number of focus groups in response to the awarding gap between Black and White students and between BTEC and A Level students. Students can help shape our interventions by engaging with the research taking place. 
• Become a peer mentor. Peer mentoring is an important programme that supports new students at Birkbeck. By becoming a peer mentor, continuing students can guide and support new students and learn new transferable skills.  

For further information on how students have been involved in the development of the plan, see pages 23-24 of our access and participation plan. 

Evaluation - how to measure our achievements

Evaluation will be embedded in both the planning and delivery of our interventions. Each programme cited under the three intervention strategies has its own Theory of Change, which prompts all programme leads to consider the aims, outcomes and impact of their programmes as part of the planning and development stages. We have engaged with external organisations and networks to receive guidance on our evaluation strategy and ensure that it is robust. Our Student Success Research and Evaluation Lead works closely with all programme leads and with the Head of Student Success to ensure staff delivering the plan are supported to embed evaluation from the start.  

For further information on the Birkbeck APP evaluation strategy, see pages 24-25 of our access and participation plan. 

Further information

For more information please contact Camilla Mount, Head of Student Success.