The standardised admission ratio for measuring widening participation in medical schools: analysis of UK medical school admissions by ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and sex.

Ethnic minorities and women are no longer underrepresented in UK medical schools, but lower socioeconomic groups still are. Given the strong political pressure on higher education institutions to develop “widening participation” programmes, 3 a valid quantitative index of the impact of such programmes is needed urgently. Such an index should be derived from robust and accessible primary data, reflect the impact of multiple independent variables in different population subgroups, allow comparisons across institutions and over time, and be readily understandable by non-statisticians. Statistics on the entry profile of UK medical schools are usually expressed as the selection ratio (the proportion of admissions to applications). We propose that the standardised admission ratio (see box), which expresses the number of pupils admitted to medical school as a proportion of the number who would do so if places were allocated equitably across all socioeconomic and ethnic groups and equally by sex, should become the standard measure of widening participation. It would not, of course, be an index of discrimination at selection stage.