There is a "real risk" poorer university students will receive less face-to-face learning than wealthy peers, Scotland's Fair Access Commissioner has warned.

Professor Sir Peter Scott also told the UCU Scotland conference that it was important to “beware” of believing Covid-19 had kickstarted an “overdue” transformation of higher education (HE). He said the pandemic had been bad for access to university, adding that progress towards boosting fairness could even be rolled back.

Sir Peter is particularly concerned about the possibility of less well-off students not being as likely to benefit from in-person teaching.

"There is a real risk that students from more deprived social backgrounds will find themselves in the institutions that are either forced to adopt for economic reasons, or are most enthusiastic for managerial reasons, more online delivery, while more socially advantaged students will continue to enjoy the full package with much more face-to-face contact," he said on Wednesday. 

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“St Andrews [University] is not about to put everything online. That split has already been foreshadowed in England where so-called ‘alternative providers’, usually for-profit institutions with the most dubious academic standards, recruit a disproportionately large number of their students from socially disadvantaged and minority ethnic groups.

"Over-enthusiasm for what I will call ‘AI HE’ could, accidentally, widen the gulf between the haves and the have-nots.”

Sir Peter acknowledged that online teaching and outreach offered some potential upsides, among them flexibility and possibilities for connecting with a larger number of people. But he warned that these dwindled "into insignificance" next to the "very real" downsides, particularly given poverty and its impact on access to technology. 

Sir Peter also stressed that schooling during the pandemic had been most disrupted in poor communities. “As a result, the attainment gap is likely to widen,” he added. “And we may not see the results in terms of university applications for some time. As a result of this disruption, young people in the early and middle years of high school may never acquire the momentum to get on the higher education track.”

He said students from more deprived backgrounds may lack the “cultural capital” that is provided by middle-class graduate parents and which supports them in making the transition from school to university. “They really need the real communities created by in-person learning,” he added. “Online support, whether academic or social, is no substitute.” Sir Peter said poorer individuals suffered from “clear material disadvantages” such as having to use a shared laptop and lack of access to a quiet study space at home. Increased levels of stress and anxiety, fewer opportunities for part-time work and an uncertain graduate jobs market were among the other risks he identified.

The Herald: Professor Sir Peter Scott is Scotland's Fair Access Commissioner.Professor Sir Peter Scott is Scotland's Fair Access Commissioner.

Addressing suggestions that Covid had triggered an HE overhaul, Sir Peter noted there had been comparisons with the impact of remote working on the office and that of online shopping on the high street. This, he said, had left him worried.

“Some of the ‘lessons’ of Covid are that a hurried and enforced move online of activities best delivered face-to-face has produced as much bad practice as good,” he continued. “Finally, of course, as I also mentioned, I think there will be a great nostalgia for the ‘old ways’.”

Elaborating, he added: “Nostalgia is not reactionary and nor are the ‘old ways’ necessarily an anachronism - except perhaps in the eyes of those who either want to increase managerial powers in universities and are addicted to managerialism or, more worryingly, those who see higher education as simply a transactional business.”

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Denying he is an “academic Luddite”, Sir Peter insisted that blended learning, “suitably resourced and developed according to professional rather than managerial criteria”, had much to offer.  

But he concluded: “I do think we need to recognise that the pandemic, and the measures taken to combat it, have been bad news for access - and we need to do everything possible to regain any lost momentum.

"Fair access has never been ‘game over’ or ‘box ticked’. But Covid has swept away any justification for such complacency.”