Kings College London Audit

King’s College University has been a great institution and partner to work with. Valentina first started speaking to them in 2016/17 discussing the lack of data of LatinX youth in higher education, working with Jimmy Pickering KCL’s Widening Participation Manager.

We found out this was not due to a lack of LatinX university students but rather it was that the monitoring form completed when entering university did not have the ethnic box for LatinX meaning that there was no data LatinX students.

As a result of this we have been able to add more amazing young activists to this conversation. LatinXcluded then went onto discuss this issue again with Jimmy and other members of the Widening Participation team. This resulted in an amazing win, including Latin as a separate ethnic category on KCL’s monitoring forms.

MUINPE commissioned Co-Creator Valentina and videographer Christian Ayala to make a film with fellow LatinX students on the support they need in higher education.

Following this, KCL commissioned an audit by the Centre for Education and Youth examining the representation, engagement and participation of Latinx students in higher education.

The audit identified that overall there are 211 students who identify as Latin American at KCL. Out of these only 11 are classed as ‘Home’ students rather than EU or Overseas. While the Latinx community form at least 0.5% of the UK population, and are the 8th biggest population in the UK, they currently represent less than 0.2% of KCL student population, making them a hugely underrepresented group at KCL.

This report also generated a series of recommendations for supporting LatinX students in or into higher education.

You can download the report here.