Ten applicants for every place: what 315 applications told us

We closed applications for the 2025 summer school at five o’clock on a Friday afternoon in July, and then somebody counted them. Three hundred and fifteen.

We had thirty places.

That is roughly ten applicants for every place, and it tells us something plain: there are far more young refugees and asylum seekers in London who want serious, free, science-led education than there is provision built for them. It does not tell us that asylum arrivals rose tenfold — they did not — and much of this article is about the difference.

For a small charity, a number like that arrives with two feelings attached at once, and they do not sit comfortably together. The first is that the programme is working — that years of turning up, of building relationships with social workers and college tutors, of asking UCL for lab space and asking researchers for their August, has produced something young people actively want. The second is the arithmetic. Two hundred and eighty-five young people filled in two forms, arranged a summer around a programme they had never attended, and were told no.

This article is about that number: what the applications actually contained, what national asylum, care and English-language data say about why demand has risen, how our ratio compares with other free access programmes, what genuinely limits our capacity, and what we decided to do — and not to do — about it. We have published it because a ratio like ten-to-one is either the beginning of an honest conversation about scale, or it is a boast, and we would rather it were the first.

How demand grew

The ratio did not arrive suddenly. It compounded.

Applications to the free summer school

Thirty places have been available in each of these years

Show the data as a table

Applications to the free summer school

Category	Value
2022	60 applications
2023	110 applications
2024	180 applications
2025	315 applications

We publish those earlier years with a caveat attached, and we would rather publish them with the caveat than not at all. Our record-keeping in 2022 and 2023 was a shared spreadsheet maintained by volunteers between their own deadlines; it is good enough to show a shape and not good enough to quote to three significant figures. The 2025 number is exact, because by then we had a process.

What the shape shows is a roughly fivefold rise in four years against a completely flat supply of places. Every year more young people knew we existed, and every year we offered the same thirty places.

Is the national picture driving it?

The obvious explanation for a fivefold rise is that more young refugees arrived. It is worth testing that against the official data, because the answer is more interesting than yes.

The Home Office publishes asylum statistics every quarter. Its latest release, covering the year ending June 2026, shows that 85,891 people claimed asylum in the UK in that year, 21% fewer than the year before. Looking back over the calendar years that match our records, claims rose sharply between 2021 and 2022 and have since sat on a high plateau rather than climbing steadily.

People claiming asylum and people granted protection in the UK

Calendar years, main applicants and dependants

• People claiming asylum
• Granted protection or other leave at initial decision

• 201838,483vs 10,097
• 201945,537vs 15,080
• 202037,603vs 8,973
• 202157,942vs 12,953
• 202295,007vs 17,274
• 202387,427vs 61,478
• 2024104,764vs 40,753
• 2025101,911vs 55,117

Show the data as a table

People claiming asylum and people granted protection in the UK

Category	People claiming asylum	Granted protection or other leave at initial decision
2018	38,483	10,097
2019	45,537	15,080
2020	37,603	8,973
2021	57,942	12,953
2022	95,007	17,274
2023	87,427	61,478
2024	104,764	40,753
2025	101,911	55,117

Put our chart next to that one and the mismatch is obvious. Between 2022 and 2025, claims rose by about 7%. Our applications rose roughly fivefold. New arrivals alone cannot explain the curve.

What the second series shows is the part that can. For most of the last decade, the Home Office granted protection to somewhere between about 8,500 and 17,300 people a year at initial decision. Then decision-making accelerated to clear a backlog. Adding up the Home Office’s own annual figures, 157,348 people were granted protection or other leave at initial decision in 2023, 2024 and 2025 — more than the 115,569 granted across the ten years from 2013 to 2022 combined.

That matters for a programme like ours because our applicants are not, mostly, people who arrived last month. They are young people who have been here a year or two, who have a college place and a social worker or personal adviser, and who have started to think about what comes after ESOL. A large, recent wave of grants means a large, recent wave of teenagers moving from waiting to planning. Demand for what we offer tracks the number of young people staying and settling, not the number crossing the border in a given quarter.

The latest year in figures

The most recent release shows the system changing quickly, and it is worth setting out precisely, because several of these numbers will shape demand for education over the next few years.

Two lines stand out for us. Claims overall fell by a fifth, but claims from unaccompanied children barely moved, and the Home Office notes that over four-fifths (83%) of those children were aged 16 or 17. And the queue for a first decision has more than halved, which means more young people are receiving an answer — positive or negative — and moving on to the next stage of their lives, including education.

The rules are also changing. The Refugee Council’s summary of the June 2026 statistics notes that people who claimed asylum after 2 March 2026 and are granted protection now receive 30 months’ leave rather than five years. Shorter periods of leave can affect course planning, apprenticeships and student finance, so anyone advising a young person should check the current position with a specialist adviser; our guide to fee status and student finance sets out the general framework, and none of this is legal advice.

For a fuller set of national figures — school, college and university — see our companion piece, refugee education in numbers.

What the applications contained

An application to us is two forms: one completed by the student, one by a parent, guardian or social worker. Together they tell us more about the state of refugee education in London than any single statistic we could look up.

Age

The overwhelming majority were sixteen and seventeen — the exact age band we describe in The GCSE vacuum, where compulsory schooling has ended and every remaining route is gated on qualifications the applicant was not in the country to earn.

That concentration is not an accident of our marketing. It is where the system stops holding people, and the national data show how many young people are in that position.

Young people aged 16 or 17 claiming asylum in the UK

All claimants of that age, and those who arrived without a parent or carer

• All people aged 16–17
• Unaccompanied children aged 16–17

• 20182,854vs 2,270
• 20193,503vs 2,860
• 20202,589vs 2,093
• 20214,433vs 3,567
• 20226,177vs 4,692
• 20235,171vs 3,860
• 20245,160vs 3,622
• 20254,674vs 3,710

Show the data as a table

Young people aged 16 or 17 claiming asylum in the UK

Category	All people aged 16–17	Unaccompanied children aged 16–17
2018	2,854	2,270
2019	3,503	2,860
2020	2,589	2,093
2021	4,433	3,567
2022	6,177	4,692
2023	5,171	3,860
2024	5,160	3,622
2025	4,674	3,710

Most of those unaccompanied young people become the responsibility of a local authority. The Department for Education’s children looked after statistics recorded 6,540 unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in care in England on 31 March 2025, down 12% from 7,440 a year earlier. The same release notes that 90% of them were aged 16 or older, compared with 27% of all looked-after children. Those young people have a social worker, often a personal adviser later, and specific education rights, which we set out in our guide to the education rights of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children.

That is the population our referrals come from. It is also, not coincidentally, why so many of our applications arrive through a social worker.

Prior schooling

A large share of applicants had no UK qualifications at all. Many had substantial schooling from home — in several cases considerably more advanced in mathematics than the UK curriculum at the same age — and no way to evidence it.

The single most common free-text answer to “what do you find hardest?” was some version of: I understand the science, but I cannot write the answer in English.

Where they were enrolled

Almost all were enrolled somewhere, and the most common placement was an ESOL course at a further education college. As we set out in our practical guide, that is usually the correct and only available placement, and it is also the place where a year of genuine progress can end in a qualification nobody gates on.

How they found us

How applicants heard about the programme

Approximate referral routes, from the 2025 application forms

• Social worker or personal adviser35%
• College or school tutor25%
• Refugee support organisation20%
• Friend or previous participant15%
• Found us directly online5%

Show the data as a table

How applicants heard about the programme

Category	Value
Social worker or personal adviser	35%
College or school tutor	25%
Refugee support organisation	20%
Friend or previous participant	15%
Found us directly online	5%

Five per cent found us unaided. Ninety-five per cent were told by an adult.

That single fact governs everything about how a programme like ours grows, and it is the reason we now write guides for professionals rather than campaigns for students. A sentence in a tutorial reaches more of the right young people than any advertising we could buy — and it explains, too, why the demand curve above rose the way it did. We did not get better at marketing. We got better known among social workers.

Where they came from

The countries of origin in the 2025 round tracked displacement patterns rather than anything about us. Across the programme’s history we have worked with students from 23 countries, and the largest groups among our participants — Eritrea, Afghanistan, Sudan, Ukraine and Iran — overlap closely with the Home Office’s list of the most common nationalities claiming asylum. In the year ending June 2026 the top five were Pakistan, Eritrea, Iran, Sudan and Afghanistan, and grant rates varied enormously between them — 92% for Sudanese claimants and 84% for Eritreans, against 25% for Pakistani claimants, according to the Home Office’s grants summary. Those grant rates shape who stays, and so who is in a London college classroom a year later.

Why demand is rising

We can see our own numbers clearly. The causes behind them are harder to isolate, and we would rather set out what the evidence supports than assert it.

More young people settled, not just more arriving

As the national charts show, the flow of new claims has been high but broadly flat since 2022, while the number of people granted protection jumped. Add to that the young people still waiting — many of them in college while their claim is decided — and the pool of 16- to 22-year-olds who are in the country, in education and looking for what comes next is considerably larger than it was when we started.

Pressure on ESOL and college places

The first year after arrival is usually spent on English, and English provision for this age group is stretched.

The Department for Education’s further education and skills statistics record 168,730 adult learners participating in ESOL courses in England in 2024/25, and 159,440 in the first nine months of 2025/26 alone, which made ESOL the most popular essential skills subject so far that year. Those figures cover adult learners rather than 16–19 study programmes, but they show the scale of demand on the same colleges that teach our applicants.

The most detailed recent look at the 16–19 group specifically comes from the Learning and Work Institute. Its March 2026 report, ESOL provision for 16–19-year-olds, commissioned for the South East Strategic Partnership for Migration, found that 34 of the 37 further education colleges in the region offer 16–19 ESOL, but only half offer pre-entry classes for young people with very low English or literacy. Colleges and local authorities reported rising demand driven by unaccompanied young people, and because most colleges enrol ESOL learners in September with a smaller intake in January, young people who arrive during the year are often left waiting six months to a full year to start learning English.

That is the South East rather than London, and we would not stretch it further than the report does. But it matches what Refugee Education UK told Parliament. In written evidence to the Education Committee in March 2025, REUK reported that 62% of 133 respondents to its survey on “late arrivals” knew of young people not accessing any education for prolonged periods, and that 47% of 222 queries to its advice line concerned young people who were not in education at all, including some out of education for over a year. It described young people spending many months waiting for college ESOL places and then several years in part-time ESOL.

We cover the detail of what 16–19 provision should look like in our guide to ESOL for young refugees aged 16 to 19. The point for this article is simpler: a young person who has spent a year in part-time English classes, with science they already understand and no way to use it, is exactly the young person who applies to a STEM summer school.

Fewer free alternatives that fit

Access provision that is genuinely free — including travel and food — and that is designed for someone without a UK school history is scarce. Programmes that ask a young person to fund their own commute are not free in any sense that matters to an applicant on asylum support. We look at the wider supply in more detail below.

We became better known

The referral chart above is the mechanism. Each year a few more social workers and college tutors know we exist, and each of them holds several young people who fit.

Word of mouth

Fifteen per cent of applicants heard about us from a friend or a previous participant. That share has grown, and it is the most encouraging line in the data: it means the programme is well enough regarded that alumni recommend it.

We are wary of over-claiming on any of these. We can measure our own applications; we cannot measure the counterfactual. What we can say is that a fivefold rise in four years is not explained by our marketing budget, because we do not have one, and it is not explained by arrivals alone, because they did not rise fivefold.

Is ten applicants per place unusual?

Not in the world of free access programmes. What is unusual is who the programmes are designed for.

The Sutton Trust, which runs one of the best-known widening participation schemes in the country, describes its UK Summer Schools as “heavily oversubscribed 7:1” in its own applicant guidance. Our ratio is in the same range, in a much smaller programme. Free, well-run, credible provision for young people from under-represented backgrounds attracts far more applicants than it can take. That is a general finding, not a special feature of refugee education.

The difference lies in the eligibility rules. The Sutton Trust’s published criteria ask that applicants are in Year 12 and “attend, and have always attended” a state-funded, non-fee-paying school or college, with at least five GCSEs at grades 9 to 6 as the desirable academic standard. Oxford’s UNIQ programme is likewise free and aimed at UK state school students in Year 12. These are sensible criteria for the students those programmes serve, and the Sutton Trust is clear that falling short of some criteria does not automatically disqualify an applicant. But a sixteen-year-old who arrived eighteen months ago, is in an ESOL class rather than Year 12, and has no GCSEs sits outside the profile they describe.

There is real good news in that table. Student Action for Refugees reports that, through its Equal Access campaign, the number of universities offering scholarships to people seeking refugee protection grew from seven in 2012 to over 80 in 2022, representing over 200 opportunities a year. Our guide to sanctuary scholarships explains how they work. But scholarships sit at the end of the pathway, after Level 3. The gap is earlier — in the two or three years between arrival and a credible university or apprenticeship application — and that is where our applicants are standing. Routes such as the Access to HE Diploma and foundation years exist to bridge it, and a young person needs to know about them in time.

What actually limits us to thirty

This is the question we are asked most, usually in the form “why not just take more?” It is a fair question and the answer has four parts, only one of which is money.

What binds hardest when we try to grow

Our own assessment, scored out of 5 for how tightly each constraint holds

• Teaching volunteers available in August5 / 5

  Cannot be bought; recruitment runs a year ahead

• Laboratory and teaching space4 / 5

  Depends on a partner institution, not on our budget

• Coordination and safeguarding capacity4 / 5

  The point at which volunteer-run starts to strain

• Cash per additional student2 / 5

  Travel, food and materials — real, but linear and solvable

Show the data as a table

What binds hardest when we try to grow

Category	Value
Teaching volunteers available in August	5 / 5
Laboratory and teaching space	4 / 5
Coordination and safeguarding capacity	4 / 5
Cash per additional student	2 / 5

That last line is worth dwelling on, because it runs against the grain of most charity writing. If someone handed us a large cheque tomorrow, we could not double the programme next August. We would need roughly twice the volunteers, twice the lab space and a coordination layer that a volunteer team cannot carry alongside their own PhDs.

What money does do is remove the constraint that selects the wrong cohort. As we set out in Where the money goes, travel and food dominate our cash budget, and covering them completely is what keeps the programme genuinely open to the young people it exists for. REUK’s evidence to Parliament gives a sense of why: it described a young man on part-time ESOL who was not eligible for a college bursary and whose return bus fare to college took most of his weekly Home Office payment. A programme that did not pay travel would simply not be reachable for students in that position.

The part we like least: selection

Two hundred and eighty-five rejections is not an abstraction. It is a folder of forms, each one completed by a young person who was told this might help.

We are not going to pretend we have solved the ethics of that. What we can do is be transparent about how we choose.

We prioritise fit over attainment. We are not looking for the strongest applicants; we are looking for the ones for whom this specific fortnight would make the most difference. A student with strong grades and a supportive school has other options — as the table above shows, the best-known free access programmes are built around exactly that student. A student in the ESOL loop, with an interest in science and nobody to talk to about it, does not.

We check that the programme is right for them. English is taught by level, so a wide range works — but a student with no English at all would find the fortnight hard, and we would rather point them to language provision first than set them up to struggle.

We look at the consent form. Not as a formality: it tells us whether there is a responsible adult who knows about the programme and can support eight days of travel across a fortnight in August. Where that support is missing, the risk of a young person dropping out mid-programme is high, and a half-attended fortnight helps nobody.

We keep a reserve list, and we use it. Places come free. In 2025 several did.

Incomplete applications are the largest single loss. Every year a number of applications arrive with the student form completed and the guardian consent form missing. We chase where we can, but at 315 applications and a volunteer team, we cannot chase all of them.

What we did about it

Four things, in the order we did them, and three things we decided against.

We ran a reserve list properly. Previously informal, now a ranked list contacted in order as places free up. It converted several rejections into attendances at no additional cost.

We wrote things down. Much of this website — the practical guide for professionals, the detailed programme description, the account of what mentoring involves — exists because 315 applications made it obvious that the information itself is scarce. If we can only take thirty, the other 285 should at least leave knowing what a foundation year is and that sanctuary scholarships exist.

We pushed harder on mentoring. The online mentoring scheme is our cheapest programme per student and our least space-constrained: it runs online, from October to March, and its limiting factor is volunteers rather than laboratories. Since 2022 it has supported 32 students with more than 250 hours of volunteer mentoring. For a young person who did not get a summer school place, it is often the more useful of the two anyway, because it lasts six months rather than two weeks. We have since added a work placements and internships programme as a further route for our students.

We started asking for money differently. Not because money is our binding constraint — see above — but because a broader base of regular donors is what would let us commit to a larger cohort in the spring, before we know what the summer will raise.

What we decided not to do

Charge, or ask for a contribution. A programme that asks for £5 a day towards travel would be able to take more students and would take a different set of students. The ones excluded would be precisely the ones the programme exists for. This is not close.

Cut travel coverage to part-fund more places. A variant of the same mistake. Partial travel coverage converts a fixed barrier into a smaller fixed barrier and adds uncertainty, and uncertainty is what stops a young person in the tightest circumstances from committing their August.

Take fifty students with the same volunteers. The fortnight works because groups are small, English is set by level, and every afternoon group has a demonstrator. Diluting that would produce a larger programme that does the thing we know works less well. We would rather turn away 285 from something that works than 265 from something that half works. Growing an access programme is not the same as growing its headcount: the parts that make it effective are exactly the parts that do not scale for free.

What happens to the 285

Not nothing, but far less than we would like.

Everyone who applies and is not offered a place is told, and told clearly rather than left to infer it from silence. Where we can, we point people towards the things that exist: our own mentoring scheme, which has different constraints; local refugee support organisations and Refugee Education UK’s advice services; and the routes we describe in From 1% to 15% — foundation years, sanctuary scholarships, Access to HE.

What we do not do — and this is a genuine gap — is follow up. We do not know how many of the 285 found something else, and we do not have the capacity to find out. It is on the short list of things we would fund first with an unrestricted grant.

What it would take to double

We have costed this roughly, because people ask. Sixty places, in one August, would need:

Reading that table honestly, doubling the summer school is a two-to-three year project, not a next-August project, and it involves crossing the line from an entirely volunteer-run charity into one with at least one paid coordinator. We are not there yet. When we get closer, we will say so on this website before we do it.

It is also worth being clear about what doubling would and would not do to the ratio. Even at sixty places, 2025’s application numbers would still mean more than five applicants for every place. The national data suggest the underlying population is not about to shrink quickly: claims have fallen, but the young people granted protection in 2023–2025 will be in colleges and sixth forms for years yet. Scale helps; it does not close the gap.

If you run a programme like ours

We publish our application data partly because we found almost none of it when we were starting, and a ratio is a useful planning number for anyone building access provision. Four things we would pass on.

Model demand from referrals, not from reach. Our applications track the number of professionals who know us, almost linearly. If you want to forecast next year’s applications, count the social workers and college tutors you spoke to this year — not your website traffic.

Watch grants and care numbers, not just arrivals. Headline asylum claims are the figure that makes the news, but for education planning the more useful Home Office and DfE series are grants of protection, claims by 16- and 17-year-olds and unaccompanied children in care. They describe the young people who will be in your local college next September.

Decide your selection criteria before you need them. Choosing thirty from three hundred late at night in July, without agreed criteria, is how a programme quietly drifts towards taking the most polished applicants rather than the ones it exists for. Write the criteria down in the spring.

Run a reserve list from day one, and tell people no, clearly and early. Places free up — a change of accommodation, a job, a family situation — and a ranked list fills them at no extra cost. Silence is worse than a rejection, specifically for young people who have already spent a lot of time waiting on decisions from institutions. A short, definite email in the week after the deadline is the minimum.

The uncomfortable corollary is that a well-run programme generates more visible unmet demand than a badly run one, because more people find it and more people complete an application. That is not a reason to run it badly.

What the number does not tell us

Three cautions about our own headline figure, because a ratio is easy to over-read.

It is a measure of unmet demand for our programme, not of total unmet need. Some applicants will have applied to several things and been placed elsewhere. Some had reasonable alternatives. Our 315 is a lower bound on a bigger number and an upper bound on nothing.

It says nothing about outcomes. As we set out in our description of the programme, we count applications, attendance, countries and volunteer hours exactly, and we do not measure progression, because we have never had the resources to follow our alumni properly. A programme can be enormously oversubscribed and still not be the thing that changes a life. We think ours helps; we cannot prove the counterfactual.

It is one year, in one city. London is not the UK, and 2025 is not a trend. The four-year shape above is more informative than the single ratio, and even that comes with the record-keeping caveat we set out at the top. The national statistics we have added give context, not proof: they show that the population our applicants come from has grown, not that any particular young person would have applied.

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Compiled September 2025; updated September 2026 with Home Office immigration statistics for the year ending June 2026 (published 27 August 2026), Department for Education data and new evidence on 16–19 ESOL. The 2025 application figure is exact; earlier years and the referral proportions are drawn from our internal records and are indicative. Summer School 2026 has finished and Summer School 2027 dates will be announced on our apply page. Audited financial statements are filed with the Charity Commission for England and Wales under registration number 1201227. If you spot something out of date, please tell us.

Keep reading

• Refugee education in numbers — the national and global figures behind this article.
• The GCSE vacuum — why the applicants cluster at sixteen and seventeen.
• ESOL for young refugees aged 16 to 19 — what the first year of English should look like, and where it falls short.
• Where the money goes — the cost of a free place, line by line.