A Foundation Year offering talented students from backgrounds of educational and social disadvantage a new route to undergraduate study at Cambridge has been launched and will be free to students thanks to the generosity of founding benefactors Christina and Peter Dawson.

This programme is aimed at an entirely new stream of applicants who have the ability to succeed at Cambridge, but have been prevented from reaching their full potential by their circumstances.

The one-year course will prepare students for further learning and offer them the chance to progress straight to an undergraduate degree at Cambridge or another university. Entrance requirements will be significantly less than the usual Cambridge minima.

The first intake of up to 50 students under this programme will be in 2022. Applications should be made through normal UCAS channels in 2021. Further details can be found here.