Access to Success and Social Mobility through Higher Education

Stuart Billingham, Stuart Billingham

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781787439924
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

This edited collection illuminates the benefits, drawbacks, challenges, opportunities of the push to widen access to success and social mobility through university and other post-secondary education experiences in the UK and internationally. It examines a range of particular case studies, and addresses issues including the role of part-time study, the experiences of BAME students, increasing access within rural communities, issues faced by those with mental health problems, and the role of employers.
There has been some progress in some countries; increased access and enhanced success for some targeted populations, but not for others; and improvements in some regions of particular countries, but not for others. Efforts to improve access to success and social mobility, to strengthen the identification and nurturing of talent in every community and every corner of our societies, is, like the 'curate's egg', only good in parts. This collection demonstrates that educational inequalities, unfairness and injustices still remain.

1

ACCESS TO SUCCESS AND SOCIAL MOBILITY THROUGH HIGHER EDUCATION: A CURATE’S EGG?

Stuart Billingham

GLOBAL CONTEXTS

Increasing and widening access to lifelong learning, post-secondary and tertiary education has been, in one guise or another, a political issue for a very long time. In the UK, it stretches back as far as the immediate post-First World War concern with social and economic reconstruction (Burke & Jackson, 2007). Since then, there have been a very large number of government and other reports and initiatives about widening participation (WP).

Globally, efforts by many authorities have produced significant change. For example, a recent report by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) (2017) notes that ‘Worldwide there are DOUBLE the amount of students in higher education now than there were in 2000’.¹ Despite such apparent successes, these matters were included as one of the key Sustainable Development Goals agreed by all 193 members of the United Nations in September 2015.² As UNESCO (2017) puts it,

Target 4.3 states that, by 2030, countries should provide equal access for all women and men to affordable and quality technical, vocational and higher education, including university. Achieving this target will facilitate the achievement not only of SDG4 but also of all other SDGs. (p. 1)

Access to post-secondary and higher education also sits within the core of WISE – the World Innovation Summit for Education – an ‘international, multisectoral platform for creative thinking, debate and purposeful action’ regarding education.³ However, a recent attempt to draw a global map of access to post-secondary and tertiary education (Atherton, Dunmangane, & Whitty, 2016) found that,

Across the 23 OECD countries, a child’s chances of participating in tertiary education are twice as high if at least one of their parents has completed upper secondary or post-secondary non-tertiary education. If one of their parents had a tertiary education, their chances of participating in it themselves are over four times as high. (pp. 22–23)

Whatever the limitations of the data on which these conclusions are based (and which are fully acknowledged in the study), such a picture supports the need for on-going research, global debate and action. Graeme Atherton focusses on this, specifically, in the final chapter of the present volume. Clara Gwatirera examines government approaches to access in South Africa; Margaret Noble and Jessica Grant discuss access to tertiary education in rural and remote areas of New Zealand and Tasmania; and Bruria Schaedel considers aspects of diverse student experiences through a case study in Northern Israel. So, what is the essence of these debates?

Simply, it is about trying to understand, and then change, unfair and unequal patterns of who gets to study at a university (access); what happens to them once they are there (the student experience) and what happens to them once they leave (social mobility). Over the years, the terms of reference of this debate – what I will call its ‘discourse’ – have shifted significantly. This is arguably most easily illustrated in the UK, and on which I will now concentrate.

THE ‘ACCESS’ DEBATE

Throughout the 1960s, 1970s and even into the early 1980s, the primary focus was ‘access’. Initially, this was as much about increasing the number of students in tertiary education as it was about widening the profile of the student population. Inevitably, however, those concerned to increase the university student population realised that this could only be achieved through widening its social and economic base.

Early concerns often focussed on access by ‘adult learners’, or ‘mature’ students, as they would later be called. ‘Access Courses’ sprang up in further education colleges, adult education centres and, later, in some university departments. They were designed to enable adult learners to return to study at a level, which would give them access to university, even though they did not have the standard ‘A’-level entry qualification. And so, the ‘Access movement’ was born.

Such expansion of Higher Education (HE) was built upon a key principle (The Robbins Principle) enshrined in a seminal report, thus:

Throughout our Report we have assumed as an axiom that courses of higher education should be available for all those who are qualified by ability and attainment to pursue them and who wish to do so (Committee on Higher Education, 1963, p. 8).

The idea of an ‘Open University’, developed by Labour Governments throughout the 1960s, was founded on this principle. The UK Open University opened its doors to its first students in 1971. From then until now, it has catered overwhelmingly for adult learners, studying part-time through distance learning.⁴

Later in this book, Liz Marr and John Butcher explore the challenges which policy-makers face with regard to part-time study for adult learners in the current political, economic and access policy climate in which the number of ‘mature students’ in higher education has fallen by over half since 2011 (Tuckett, 2018). From a different angle, Gerard Sharpling and Neil Murray consider the transformative effect on a university teacher’s own pedagogy of studying part-time through distance-learning, whilst still teaching. The access discourse stresses the role of outward-facing (outreach) institutional strategies – explored here, for example, through the case of Coventry University Scarborough Campus by Craig Gaskell and Ian Dunn.

THE WP DISCOURSE

The ‘Robbins Principle’ continued to influence access policy and practice for a long time and, in some ways, very much still does. This is despite the emergence of a ‘new’ discourse in the 1980s, which has largely dominated ‘access’ research, policy and practice ever since.

The WP discourse naturally maintains a concern with access, but goes on to focus more upon the experience of those students encouraged into university by access initiatives. This discourse focusses our attention, therefore, on inward-facing institutional policies and practices – for example, induction, student support, teaching and learning and retention – triggered by sustained sector-wide evidence of systematically skewed patterns of success at university.

Chris Millward, the new director for access and participation in the Office for Students (OfS) (see more in the following paragraphs), summarises the latest picture:

…black, Asian or disabled students and students from disadvantaged neighbourhoods are significantly less likely to succeed at university. The differences are stark: the proportion of students who get a first or 2:1 degree is 10 percentage points lower for students from the most disadvantaged backgrounds than for their wealthier peers, three points lower for those with a disability than for those without, and 22 and 11 points lower respectively for black and Asian students than for white students. (Millward, 2018)

A key part of the debate about how to design, implement and evaluate policies to change this picture often raised the question: do we simply need better student-facing policies for all students, or specific ones targeted at ‘WP students’?⁵

Thomas and Jones (2007) expressed it well, a decade ago,

…achieving more diverse patterns of participation depends not on ‘normalising’ students – i.e. slotting non-traditional entrants into traditional structures and processes. Rather, it is a matter of recognising different backgrounds, experiences and interests in order to develop more progressive, responsive forms of HE. (p. 5)

Liz Thomas picks up this theme in the present volume, drawing on contemporary case study material as well as recent action research with thirteen UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) implementing change in 43 academic areas.

In some respects, Thomas and Jones (2007) were reflecting The National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education – the Dearing Report (1997) – which famously extended the ‘Robbins Principle’ when it concluded that,

The future will require higher education in the UK to: encourage and enable all students – whether they demonstrate the highest intellectual potential or whether they have struggled to reach the threshold of higher education – to achieve beyond their expectations (para. 5).

Stimulated by this report, the WP discourse gradually and progressively ‘morphed’ into one not just focussed on the student experience in general, but more specifically on academic outcomes and social mobility: the language of access to success.

ACCESS TO SUCCESS: POLICY AND PRACTICE

A number of papers in the present volume examine the student experience, and student outcome, dimensions of the ‘access to success’ discourse. Helen May and Mark Jones, both of Advance HE,⁶ examine evidence about what ‘social capital’ can contribute to student success; Siobhan Clay considers the experiences and future-oriented perspectives, of Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic and White students in a specialist Arts university; Nick Rowe and Simon Newton discuss an innovative approach to delivering higher educational learning opportunities to people who use mental health services; Tony Wall...