The Right to Higher Education

Beyond widening participation

Penny Jane Burke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415568241
• eBook ISBN: 9781136450952
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The landscape of higher education has undergone change and transformation in recent years, partly as a result of diversification and massification. However, persistent patterns of under-representation continue to perplex policy-makers and practitioners, raising questions about current strategies, policies and approaches to widening participation.

Presenting a comprehensive review and critique of contemporary widening participation policy and practice, Penny Jane Burke interrogates the underpinning assumptions, values and perspectives shaping current concepts and understandings of widening participation. She draws on a range of perspectives within the field of the sociology of education – including feminist post-structuralism, critical pedagogy and policy sociology – to examine the ways in which wider societal inequalities and misrecognitions, which are related to difference and diversity, present particular challenges for the project to widen participation in higher education. In particular, the book:

• focuses on the themes of difference and diversity to shed light on the operations of inequalities and the politics of access and participation both in terms of national and institutional policy and at the level of student and practitioner experience.
• draws on the insights of the sociology of education to consider not only the patterns of under-representation in higher education but also the politics of mis-representation, critiquing key discourses of widening participation.
• interrogates assumptions behind WP policy and practice, including assumptions about education being an unassailable good
• provides an analysis of the accounts and perspectives of students, practitioners and policy-makers through in-depth interviews, observations and reflective journal entries.
• offers insights for future developments in the policy, practice and strategies for widening participation

The book will be of great use to all those working in and researching Higher Education.

Part 1

Contextualizing and theorizing widening participation

This part will put widening participation in context by uncovering the histories behind contemporary debates and understandings. It will also make connections internationally by exploring policy of widening access to, and participation in, higher education in the USA and India: two countries committed to widening participation but in quite different and contrasting ways. This will provide some context in which to make sense of the ways in which contemporary discourses of widening participation have emerged and have in turn shaped the discourses over who has the right to higher education, and who does not. In the English context, this is largely framed in terms of aspiration and potential and increasingly of being able to manage and accept the inevitability of large amounts of debt after graduation. Thus, a particular disposition is privileged in discourses about rights and higher education access and participation.

The urgency of making connections between widening participation and the complex ways that inequalities and misrecognitions play out in higher education is emphasized in Part One. This raises the necessity of drawing on the extensive body of theoretical work and research within the critical sociology of education that addresses the workings of educational inequalities and misrecognitions in sophisticated ways, providing conceptual tools to think through ways to disrupt inequalities. Chapter 2 thus considers the different theoretical perspectives available that might help those committed to widening participation to tackle these issues, moving away from narrow frameworks informed by the wider agendas of global neoliberalism to transformative, reflexive praxis which might destabilize long-standing and enduring inequalities. In this chapter, I explore the generative potential of Bourdieu’s theory for understanding the ways in which inequalities in education are reproduced, so that common sense connections between ‘right’ and ‘potential’ are seen as about innate natural inequalities rather than social ones. I argue that Foucault’s concepts of discourse and power are also of great value in understanding the ways that certain subjects are recognized or not as having the right to participate in higher education and how power is complex and unpredictable, so that utilitarian perspectives of widening participation miss the deeper and more subtle ways that power inequalities play out in the discursive fields of higher education.

In the final chapter of Part One, the impact of complex histories of classed, gendered and racialized social relations and practices on the constructions of the university student is examined through concepts of identity formation. This will contribute to a deeper analysis of the ways in which certain persons become recognizable subjects of widening participation policy against the construction of the normalized student subject. The key importance of identity in understanding issues of access to, and participation in, higher education will be emphasized.

1 Deconstructing the discourses of widening participation

Introduction: widening inequalities

Despite the political commitment expressed through numerous international and national policies to widen educational access and participation, we are living in a time of increased, and widening, social and economic inequalities. Although we have largely moved from an elite to a mass higher education system in England and in many other countries, those benefitting the most from policies to expand HE are those with relative social, economic and cultural advantages, i.e. in the English context this would be those categorized in middle-class and/or professional groups.

The Government Equalities Office found that the large growth in inequality of the period of the late 1970s to the early 1990s has not been reversed (Hills et al., 2010: 1). Although women are more likely now than men to participate in higher education (but this is highly gendered across different subject areas), women are paid 21 per cent less in terms of median hourly pay for all employees and 13 per cent less than men for those working full-time (Hills et al., 2010: 11). In terms of ethnicity, ‘nearly all minority ethnic groups are less likely to be in paid employment than White British men and women’ (Hills et al., 2010: 16). Indeed, ‘social background really matters’, for example, ‘young people with GCSE results above the national median who have been on Free School Meals are less likely to go on to higher education than others with the same results’ (Hills et al., 2010: 25). Further, although only seven per cent of the population in Britain attend independent schools, 75 per cent of judges, 70 per cent of finance directors, 45 per cent of top civil servants and 35 per cent of MPs were educated in independent schools (Milburn, 2009: 12). The report, Fair Access to the Professions (Milburn, 2009: 15), points out that, increasingly, entry to the professions depends on having a good honours degree (and this is related also to the status of the university attended). The increase in vocational qualifications and provision has not necessarily enabled wider access to the professions. For example, only 0.2 per cent of apprenticeship learners progressed on to further or higher education, and few directly into the professions (Milburn, 2009: 15). Further, ‘almost three times as many young people with parents from professional backgrounds attend university compared with young people whose parents have routine occupations’ (Milburn, 2009: 39). Yet at the time of writing, the Coalition Government in England has just introduced the severest cuts to public spending since the Second World War, with funding to teaching in higher education cut by up to 97 per cent for some institutions. The cost of HE teaching is now expected to be almost entirely covered by students and their families, especially those studying subjects within the disciplines of arts, humanities and social sciences.

This chapter maps out consistencies and contradictions across time and space in order to provide an analysis of the competing discourses and perspectives of widening participation and their implications for access to higher education. I interrogate and analyze policy, which relates directly to the WP policy agenda in England. However, to provide some sense of international context and comparison, and to consider different policy approaches, a brief outline of relevant policy developments from the USA and India will also be presented. The USA and India have been selected as countries that have expressed explicit commitment to issues of access but in quite different and contrasting ways. Finally, I will deconstruct the policy discourses at play to consider the implications for strategic direction and the central aim of the book to move beyond the current hegemonic discourses of widening participation.

A historical overview of English educational access and participation

Widening access and participation is largely concerned with redressing the under-representation of certain social groups in higher education. However, the concept of widening participation is highly contested and there is no one agreed definition. There have of course been particular policy interventions, for example by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE, 2005), which has attempted to provide a concrete definition of WP and more specifically to offer guidelines to institutions, organizations and individuals who are involved in enacting WP policy. In the English context, during the period of New Labour Government (1997–2010), widening participation, often shorthanded as ‘WP’, gained discursive momentum and hegemony. I will argue throughout this book that the policy of widening participation (WP) has been framed by particular perspectives and assumptions, most powerfully that of neoliberal globalization. However, in order to understand the ‘history of the present’, I will trace the different histories through which particular policy discourses of educational access and participation come to be at play, and are contested with other discourses. In this section, therefore, I will present a historical overview of key policy moments in relation to widening educational access and participation from the late nineteenth century and up to the early twenty-first century. The aim is to provide historical background and insight in the specific English context and in terms of continuities and discontinuities, particularly around social and cultural inequalities of age, class, ethnicity and gender. This will serve as a context later in the chapter when I deconstruct the multiple and competing discourses of widening participation.

Twentieth-century policy developments in HE access and participation

The language of expansion, massification and access have dominated the discourses concerned with issues of the right to higher education, often masking the intricate relations of inequality, which work at the complex intersections of class, gender and race, as well as other formations of sociocultural difference and inequality (such as age, migration, religion and nationality). The discourse of ‘expansion’ became increasingly significant over the twentieth century in Britain. The Education Act of 1944, for example, promised to increase the number of students qualified for university participation, with concerns to expand the supply of university-trained professions. The discourse of expansion became more prominent in the 1963 Robbins report on higher education (Robbins, 1963). A key aim was to raise the percentage of the age group receiving full-time higher education from about eight per cent to about 17 per cent by 1980. Expansion was supported by the human capital arguments put forward by economists and fully argued in the Robbins report, which legitimized the expansion that was already happening and made explicit the policy that all qualified applicants should find a place somewhere within a highly differentiated system (Kogan and Hanney, 2000: 72). This included the creation of 30 polytechnics from local authority colleges in 1970 (David et al., 2009). The Government agreed to fund an expansion of up to 22,000 places in universities by 1971–72, but the University Grants Committee (UGC) told universities that their ‘figures were not being laid down as precise targets or directives’ (Shattock, 1994: 14).

The increasing tensions between aspirations for expansion and concerns to contain public funding came into full play in the 1970s. At the time, the Department of Education and Science was exercising much firmer control in order to achieve a balance between the university and the public sector of higher education. The Government cut back UGC’s planning figure of 320,000 students by 1976–77 to 306,000 students by reducing the number of postgraduate places so as to preserve the more politically sensitive undergraduate places. This is a recurring theme in debates about widening access to HE, with undergraduate education prioritized in WP policy. Expansion was connected with concerns for containment. Thus, in 1978, the Department of Education and Science produced a Brown Paper on higher education, opening a public debate on ways of containing or planning the demographically driven expansion that might occur in the next few years (Kogan and Hanney, 2000: 72). The UGC negotiated with the Department of Education and Science to issue what amounted to an instruction (later withdrawn) that universities should restrict their student intake in 1980 to 94 per cent of the figure for 1979. In 1981–88, the UGC fined those universities that had exceeded their UGC targets (Shattock, 1994: 15). The concern about containment resulted in cuts, and in the early 1980s the UGC imposed a cut of around 15 per cent in total across the university sector (Trowler, 1998).

Funding presented an ongoing tension in relation to concerns about widening access and participation and, in 1984, the UGC developed a further strategy of selective research funding. Concerns were raised that failure to increase participation would lead to long-term shortages in many specialist skills. It was therefore proposed that more explicit guidelines should be drawn up to encourage a greater degree of self-funding, or joint funding and other forms of financial support (Kogan and Hanney, 2000).

Discourses of managerialism and enterprise crept into higher education policy developments. Charged with review and making recommendations about university management, the 1985 Jarratt Report recommended a raft of measures designed to make universities more effective and efficient through clearer management structures and styles (Trowler, 1998) and, in 1986, the research assessment exercise (RAE) began (David, et al., 2009), which has had further implications for WP (see Chapter Four). The announcement of the ‘Enterprise in Higher Education’ initiative was made in 1987. This aimed to increase the supply of university graduates ‘with enterprise’. A series of five-year schemes ran in universities and polytechnics with considerable amounts of pump-priming money attached to them. The idea was to vocationalize higher education, integrating ‘enterprise’ into degree schemes more generally (Trowler,1998). Entrepreneurial discourses concerned with enterprise and efficiency, underpinned by neoliberalism and managerialism, thus increasingly shaped debates about widening access and HE expansion. Simultaneously, diversification of higher education was set in place, with research excellence central to processes of stratification.

The 1988 Education Act established the Universities Funding Council and Polytechnics and College Funding Council. The Act asserted that higher education should serve the economy more efficiently and have closer links with industry and commerce and promote enterprise (Trowler, 1998). The 1988 White Paper, Employment for the 1990s (Department of Employment, 1988), set out the nature and functions of the new Training and Enterprise Council, charged to meet the needs of local communities and government objectives with regard to vocational education and training. The 1990 Education Act (Student Loans) stressed the need for widening access to higher education in the context of a competitive international economic environment.

Meanwhile, racial tensions in Britain led to concerns during the 1980s with the need for more black and minority ethnic groups to enter professions such as social work and teaching. There was also acknowledgement that continuing expansion relied on recruiting mature ‘second-chance’ participants to higher education, as well as young ‘non-traditional’ students. There also emerged a more politicized educational movement, which aimed to redress social inequalities by transforming further and higher education to challenge the status quo and elitism. All of these different interests and concerns led to the development of locally based Access to Higher Education courses. The needs of students and local communities were placed as central in the design of Access courses, pedagogy and curriculum (Diamond 1999: 186). However, the practices across and within different Access courses ranged widely. There were mixed pedagogies; in some ways Access courses were radical in approach, with an explicit articulation of a political stance in terms of critiquing the educational system, paying attention to inequalities and exclusions. Yet, simultaneously, the pedagogical approaches were often embedded in traditional, didactic relations, underpinned by the aim to prepare Access students for hegemonic practices in universities (Burke, 2002). During the 1990s there were significant cultural and managerial changes to Access courses, resulting from its formalization and national recognition. As decision-making shifted from Access practitioners to national policy-makers, underpinning perspectives and values also shifted, from creating locally relevant courses to developing regulative systems of administration and organization (Burke, 2002).

The 1991 White Paper, Higher Education: A New Framework (DfE, 1991), proposed the end of a binary higher education system and established new funding councils, leading to polytechnics gaining university status in 1992. A framework around quality was introduced, with quality assessment to inform funding allocation. Continuing expansion was anticipated, with one in three 18–19-year-olds expected to enter higher education. All universities and colleges were brought within a single funding mechanism, and funding council grants and student grants were announced (Trowler, 1998). Expansion came back fully on the agenda in the 1994 White Paper which proposed to spend £300 million in 1997–98 on accelerated modern apprenticeships for 18–19-year-olds, leading to qualifications at NVQ Level 3. Later, the 1996 Education Act allowed students to borrow from banks on the same terms as from the Student Loans Company.

This brief history highlights the hegemony of a discourse of expansion, which is always in tension with policy concerns about the funding of higher education. This provides a context for the contemporary situation, which has moved increasingly towards the substitution of public funds with private individual fees (Carpentier, 2010). The landscape of higher education, as it has moved towards the aims of massification, has been increasingly diversified, but this has been tied in with processes of increasing stratification, differentiation and selection connected to the discourses of excellence, quality and standards. Higher education policy has been driven by an economic agenda, strongly underpinned by neoliberal discourses. Such discourses have had a major impact on the processes by which some individuals from traditionally underrepresented groups have found new opportunities to access higher education, whilst others have been excluded from such opportunities. Gender has been one key aspect of such struggles over inclusion and exclusion, although it has always intersected with other social inequalities, such as social class and race, in the formation of who is seen, and who is not, as having the right to participate in (certain forms of) higher education.

Examining the intersections of inequality in access to higher education

Women have often been seen as a ‘danger to the men’ in higher education (Mirza, 2009: 116), and struggles over access often recast the gaze on women as threatening to the status quo. Yet women’s recent success in accessing higher education (in certain parts of the world) is over-represented by women from privileged class and ethnic backgrounds. In understanding the history of inequalities in higher education, and struggles for the right to access and participate in HE, it is imperative to examine the complex intersections of gender with class and race.

It is easy to forget perhaps just how recently it was that women as a group were excluded from higher education. It remains that it is mainly women from middle-class white backgrounds who have benefitted from the ‘massification’ policies described above. Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, women from middle-and upper-class backgrounds struggled hard for their right to higher education. Initially, though, this was largely posed in terms that complemented rather than challenged the hegemonic understanding of ‘being a woman’ in late nineteenth-century Britain, emphasizing women’s role in the domestic sphere. For example, Newnham College for women developed a female-oriented curriculum, drawing on constructions of the natural differences between men and women and also allowing women parttime programmes and longer periods for examination preparation. However, Girton College, set up by Emily Davies, insisted that women should have access to the same curriculum as men, to ensure the validity of their achievements on an equal standing. Such approaches were fiercely contested on the basis that such educational participation posed a serious threat to the family. It was often argued that women’s participation in the intellectual pursuits traditionally preserved for men was detrimental to their health and wellbeing, with scientific arguments being made that the rigours of mental labour could cause ‘menstrual disability’ (Jones, 2010).

Despite these arguments, women continued to stru...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by Carlos Alberto Torres
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART 1. Contextualizing and theorizing widening participation
• PART 2. Methodologies and approaches
• PART 3. Widening participation strategies and practices
• PART 4. Imagining the future
• Bibliography
• Index