Director Ricardo Barker has dedicated his latest film to addressing structural discrimination and the ‘Awarding Gap’.
The awarding gap has hovered over British universities for decades. It describes the persistent difference in degree outcomes between groups of students, particularly by ethnicity. Most institutions acknowledge it, fewer act on it, and a surprising number of academics remain unaware that it exists.
Mind the Gap stays with that tension for 80 minutes, ending in a Leeds Trinity University screening room that fell noticeably quiet when the credits rolled.
Ricardo Barker, the film’s writer and director, has spent years teaching inside the system it critiques. He describes the awarding gap as “a 25-year open secret”, widely researched and yet still capable of catching lecturers and students off guard.
“People have been trying to address it for decades,” he said before the screening, “and there are still big gaps, and still a lot of academics and students who don’t even know it exists.”
Mind the Gap is not a higher education documentary. Instead, Barker leans into satire, the kind of humour that makes an audience recognise itself before it realises it’s being implicated. The message only lands if the audience isn’t on the defensive.
What makes the project distinctive is how it was made. Barker brought students into the core of production, not as coffee-bearing assistants but as collaborators. Undergraduates from different courses joined the crew, analysed script drafts and even solved logistical problems on set.
“We were all in the same boat,” he said. “There were things I knew, and things a first-year student understood better than me. That’s the point.”
Students who had never touched a camera found themselves co-creating a film about structural inequality. Staff who usually teach from the front of a classroom sat beside them, trying to land a shot or untangle a scene. Barker contrasts that with what he calls the “chalk and talk” model of higher education. “I stand at the front, tell you my stuff, you repeat it back, and I mark how well you remembered it. Boring.”
Barker talked about the production process in political terms, too. He argues that universities have spent “25 years making adjustments around the edges” of inequality without changing the core design of how they work. The project’s message is serious, but its method of shared work and shared authority is subtly radical.
The result is a film that makes one argument very clear without spelling it out: that universities are good at producing knowledge, but slow at acting on it.
Mind the Gap suggests how easy it is for an institution to know and critique the truth.
The film argues that the real challenge lies in addressing it.
As Barker sees it, it is not the data that indicts universities, but what they do with it, or fail to.