Opening Gates Survey 

Run from November to December 2025, the Opening Gates Survey was UCAN’s first piece of research, designed to establish what young people actually knew about getting to university and paying for it, with particular attention to those not in education, employment or training. Divided across four sections, the survey asked students about their circumstances, their familiarity with the UK undergraduate admissions process, their awareness of scholarships and funding, and how they connected courses to the careers they wanted. 

Questions were mostly Likert-scale and multiple-choice, with open-ended options throughout. The responses informed a report proposing solutions to improve access to higher education. The final section, on career-focused course selection, also asked students whether they wanted to learn to build a CV, set up a LinkedIn profile, or apply for an apprenticeship or internship, and their answers shaped the outreach programmes, expert sessions, database, and manual UCAN went on to build.

Opening Discussion 121s

In June 2026, as part of the Opening Discussions Outreach Program of UCAN, we ran a series of expert-led conversations exploring career pathways across different industries and how students can make inroads into them, whether through university or through vocational training. We reached out by email to professionals across different industries, inviting them to speak at these sessions. The sessions came to cover law, education, business, and human resources. Each one-on-one conversation gave students time to put their own questions to someone already doing the work, and across the series they came to understand how a pathway into an industry is actually built.