Breaking into highly selective universities isn’t just about grades, it’s about confidence, representation, and access to the kind of guidance that helps students navigate a complex and often exclusive system.
Target Bath is our flagship programme for Year 12 Black students designed to support them at every stage of the journey toward higher education. Delivered in collaboration with Rare, a leading social mobility organisation, the programme combines expert-led content, student insight, and practical support to help students apply to Bath and other top universities with confidence.
In 2025, the programme received over 200 applications for just 50 places, reflecting its growing reach, reputation, and impact.
A Blended Programme with Real Progression
Target Bath is deliberately structured to offer sustained, personalised support across several months through a blend of online sessions, mentoring, and in-person events.
The journey begins with a 1:1 conversation with Rare, helping students reflect on their goals and build a personalised plan. From there, students join:
- A launch event and welcome session
- A series of ambassador-led chats and a virtual social, designed to build confidence and connection
- A parent and carer webinar to involve families in the process
- In-person residential events at Bath in July and August
- Decision-making, revision and UCAS application support, with targeted help on crafting personal statements
The programme runs alongside other activities such as Discover Bath with additional support woven in to reflect students’ lived experiences and ambitions.
Representation, Belonging and Challenge
One of the most powerful elements of Target Bath is the opportunity to connect with Black student ambassadors, mentors and graduates. For many participants, this is the first time they’ve had the chance to ask honest questions and hear from people who’ve walked the path they’re now considering.
Representation isn’t a “nice to have” it’s a precondition for belonging. And it’s central to how we design and deliver this programme.
Target Bath also recognises that Black students are underrepresented at top universities not because of a lack of potential, but because of systemic barriers including unequal access to information, support, and networks. That’s why the programme is built not just to inform, but to empower.
It’s about helping students make decisions with confidence, communicate their strengths in their personal statements, and understand how to present their experiences in ways that admissions tutors recognise and value.
Why It Matters
Students from underrepresented groups often face a dual burden: meeting academic expectations while also navigating systems that weren’t built with them in mind. That includes understanding course options, decoding the hidden curriculum of admissions, and finding the confidence to see themselves at institutions where few people look like them.
Black students remain significantly underrepresented at highly selective universities, and that underrepresentation doesn’t start at the admissions stage, it begins much earlier, in the information, access and support gaps that compound over time.
Target Bath is designed to interrupt that pattern.
It provides targeted, structured, and sustained support that recognises and responds to the realities these students are navigating, not just academically, but socially and emotionally. It offers more than encouragement; it provides strategy, insight, and direct access to decision-makers and student mentors who understand the path.
It also builds community. One of the most valuable aspects of the programme and something students consistently reflect on is the experience of being in a space where they’re not 'the only one'. Where Black students from different schools, backgrounds and regions come together, not to compete, but to lift each other up.
That shared space matters. Because when students are the only Black person in their class, or the only person in their peer group aiming for a top university, it can be hard to stay visible, let alone vocal. Target Bath gives students a network, not just a programme.
It’s also a statement of intent. It signals to students, staff and the wider sector that increasing access isn’t just about tweaking admissions, it’s about changing the culture of who feels expected and included.
When students see people who look like them succeeding, sharing their stories, and supporting the next cohort, it changes what they believe is possible.
And when universities build programmes like this intentionally, collaboratively, and with accountability, it helps change what the sector delivers, not just what it promises.
