Blog19 October 2026
This Black History Month’s theme is “Honouring Our Communities“.
What does it mean to honour Black communities while the structural inequalities affecting their educational experiences and outcomes persist? With the Office for Students (OfS) 2030–31 target of eliminating the gap in degree outcomes between Black and white students drawing closer, there is an urgent need to examine the distance between institutional commitments and meaningful change. What progress has been made, what barriers remain, and who is accountable for ensuring that equity ambitions translate into sustained action?
Confronting persistent inequalities
Black History Month invites us to interrogate how the past remains intertwined with the present, shaping how racial inequalities continue to be produced and reproduced through contemporary systems and practices of educational marginalisation and erasure, and how these inequalities are reflected in different outcomes. The UK Black awarding gap – the gap in degree outcomes (firsts or 2:1s) between Black and white students – makes this connection difficult to ignore.
Differences in degree outcomes emerge from the material and discursive conditions through which educational opportunities, recognition and awarding are shaped and experienced. Understanding the awarding gap, therefore, requires us to examine the relationships and processes through which inequalities are continually produced, reproduced, transformed and given significance.
The distance between ambition and progress
The racial awarding gap in UK higher education has been named, measured, targeted, researched, discussed and written into institutional strategies for years. Yet the gap persists. In 2023/24, only 60.6% of Black students were awarded a first or upper-second-class degree compared with 81% of white students. This is not a marginal statistical variation. It reflects persistent structural inequalities in how the sector designs, teaches, assesses, supports, listens, governs and accounts for Black student success.
The OfS set its 2030–31 target in 2018. Its 2023–24 figures put that gap at 20.4 percentage points among UK-domiciled, full-time first-degree qualifiers. Getting from 20.4 to zero over the seven academic years from 2023–24 to 2030–31 would require an average fall of about 2.9 points per year. We are now at 2026/27 academic year which leaves us three more academic years. That is illustrative arithmetic, not a forecast. But after a net fall of 7.6 points across the preceding 13-year series, it exposes the distance between the ambition and the pace of change.
This is an England-specific regulatory ambition. Across UK higher education, the question it poses is wider: what is the point of naming a date if institutions cannot show how their everyday decisions will change before it arrives?
The conditions that reproduce inequity
When we convened the UK Black Awarding Gap Network webinar, ‘What must change to close the Racial Awarding Gap’ on 16 September 2026, Professor Iwi Ugiagbe-Green following Gloria Ladson-Billings, urged us to “think about award gaps as injustices”. The distinction matters. A gap appears in the final degree classification, but students live through the conditions that precede it – whose knowledge is valued, how assessment is explained, whether paid work fits a timetable, whether help is easy to find, and whether they feel able to belong. Professor Louise Taylor described students feeling they had to “leave their blackness outside the classroom at the door.” A spreadsheet records the outcome; it cannot change those daily conditions. Nor are they revelations. Institutional frameworks can also leave the gap out of view. As Dr Katharine Hubbard noted of Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) 2023, “Awarding gaps don’t even feature in the TEF methodology.”
A credible route to zero must hold universities accountable both for the degrees they award and for the conditions in which Black students work towards them. John Richardson examined ethnic differences in degree outcomes in 2008. Universities UK and the National Union of Students called for strong leadership and institutional change in 2019. Interviews with students and Paul Campell’s work on assessment (at Leicester) have added detail about racism, representation, economic support, curricula and the unequal experience of being assessed. We have enough evidence to act, even as we continue to test which changes make the greatest difference.
This is a wicked problem because its parts interact. Calling it wicked should increase the number of decisions we scrutinise, not lower the standard of accountability. A university cannot assign a target to an access and participation team, while course design, assessment, policy, student finance, timetabling, complaints, staff development and board oversight operate in separate worlds.
Commitments to accountability
Some universities are more practised at displaying a commitment to racial equity than changing the decisions on which it depends. TEF ratings, Race Equality Charter recognition and access and participation plans can be presented as evidence of progress, while proposals to improve Black students’ success and outcome wait for funding, endorsement or yet another round of questions about ‘strategic alignment’. Leaders may call this prudent scrutiny. But scrutiny becomes gatekeeping when proposed remedies face a higher burden of proof than the teaching, assessment and support practices that persist alongside the gap.
If those established practices faced equally rigorous examination, many conditions sustaining unequal outcomes would no longer pass unchallenged. Inclusion becomes easy to endorse in principle and easy to obstruct in practice. Why must an intervention repeatedly prove its worth while the practices it seeks to improve are presumed sound? These universities can learn from Professor Donna Whitehead, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Brighton, who explained that her institution have put in place KPIs that were “accountable to deliver zero inequities in the degree awarded gaps between”. Where required, access and participation plans already identify risks, interventions and how their impact will be evaluated.
The test is whether those commitments reach the places where students encounter the university. Providers should set and publish interim milestones; examine outcomes across courses and, where numbers allow, within broad ethnic categories; and explain what they changed when evidence showed they were off course. Small cohorts need careful interpretation, not invisibility.
That requires named owners. Academic teams can examine patterns in marks and rethink assessment with students. Professional services can test whether financial help, personal tutoring and reporting routes are usable at the point of need. Senior leaders can change obstructive policy and fund the time this work takes. Boards can ask every year which actions improved experiences and outcomes, and which should stop. Black students and staff should influence those decisions without being expected to supply endless unpaid testimony.
The regulator has a role, too, though OfS panellist Suzanne Carrie cautioned that “the role of the regulator and the role of the government can only ever be part of the answer here.” It can demand credible evaluation and question weak trajectories. Universities must do the work between regulatory submissions. The revised TEF offers another opportunity to make unequal outcomes visible, but a rating cannot deliver institutional change on its own.
There is a danger in treating zero as the whole definition of justice. A university could narrow a classification gap while Black students still experience racism or while differences within the broad ‘Black’ category go unseen. Conversely, uneven data for a small cohort should prompt investigation rather than a claim that improvement is impossible. Outcomes and students’ accounts must be read together.
Creating sustainable change
So the answer to ‘what if we cannot close it by 2030–31?’ is neither to abandon the ambition nor to repeat it more loudly. A meaningful target makes delay visible while there is still time to change course. If, year after year, leaders cannot say what changed in the curriculum, assessment, support, belonging and institutional rules and what happened for Black students as a result the date is doing public relations work, not the work of change.
If Black History Month asks us to remember where we have come from, it should also recognise the tireless, often unseen work of so many unnamed Black scholars who have spent more than two decades challenging the Black awarding gap. The Black awarding gap asks us to confront where we are now. But perhaps the more difficult question is where we are going and what we are prepared to change to get there. Institutional leaders must approach the UK Black awarding gap with the urgency of an institutional emergency.
Accountability should extend across modules, schools and senior leadership, with responsibilities for addressing inequities explicitly reflected in performance appraisal, promotion and pay progression. Where persistent gaps are accompanied by a failure to act, there should be meaningful consequences, proportionate to individuals’ responsibilities and authority to effect change. Such accountability must address the institutional structures and practices that shape students’ outcomes.
If universities are serious about closing the gap by 2030, a radical shift in how equity is governed, resourced and rewarded is necessary. There should be accountability, clear expectations, publicly reported progress and enforceable, proportionate consequences for sustained institutional inaction. Without these commitments, 2030 risks becoming another aspirational deadline, while successive cohorts of Black students continue to experience inequitable degree and graduate outcomes which contribute to persistent intergenerational educational and economic injustice.