From exclusion to participation in english higher education

Abstract

There has always been diversity within the higher education sector in England, with different views on the role of universities and colleges. Many of the challenges to the socially exclusive history of higher education there, including the development of access arrangements and the strategies and measures designed to both widen and increase participation, have tended to be confined only to a few universities. In other words, the move from a lowparticipation, socially exclusive university sector in England has been largely taken forward by a relatively small part of the sector. The negative consequences educationally, socially, and economically of this trend's continuing have led to the need for the development of a new policy approach. In this chapter, I shall therefore discuss how the position is beginning to change through moves to more holistic planning and the establishment of a strategic approach to widening participation by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). The sector is at a stage of transition in this process, and the chapter examines that approach and seeks to assess the response from higher education institutions (HEIs). The majority of HEFCE funding is for teaching and research, and for many years HEIs have been free to utilize this funding as they wish, while the HEFCE has gently steered the sector in response to the government's agenda. The previous Secretary of State for Education radically changed that approach through the provision of more detailed guidance to the HEFCE in order to influence the sector. A constant emphasis within this guidance has been the highlighting of the government's commitment to widening participation. The HEFCE has responded to this policy initiative by establishing a progressive planning approach and a framework within which to work. It is important, of course, to understand something of the sector that the HEFCE has tried to influence. There has been an increase in students in higher education from 200,000 in 1963 to 1.8 million in 1998, an increase in the number of universities, and a greater balance in the proportion of women students-indeed, women now outnumber men in all forms of higher education. Some of the reasons for the gender shift have been changing attitudes, expansion, and the redesignation of courses that traditionally recruit large numbers of women in higher education, such as nursing and physiotherapy. The number of part-time students has increased dramatically and the provisions of alternative access routes for adults have become commonplace. Similarly, the representation of minority ethnic groups has increased to about 13% as compared to 6% of the population; likewise, initiatives designed to enhance support for the disabled have led to increased representation. The real picture is not that rosy though, since the statistics cover a number of significant imbalances within each category. However, the major gap in seeking a more inclusive higher education is in the filling of places by what is known as low socioeconomic groups. The representation of the poorest in society within higher education, at about 25%, has hardly changed since 1963, which lends support to the criticism from some quarters that universities are essentially the playgrounds of the privileged and bastions of the elite. The challenge, therefore, has been to seek change that encourages and enables young people from low socioeconomic groups to enter and to succeed within higher education, at a time when the student financial support model is undergoing a complete transformation and is less generous than previous arrangements, with support now channeled through a loan system. Often the groups targeted are those most culturally alien to the concept of taking on debt as a means of benefiting themselves, especially when the actual benefit is not immediately clear. Similarly, many young people in these groups will be going to schools that have some of the lowest attainment rates in the country, whereas the higher education curriculum is designed to receive those coming from the most elite school curriculum with high levels of attainment. This mismatch has yet to lead to wholesale curriculum reform within higher education, but instead has led to an approach more akin to a deficit model that argues that it is difficult to widen participation since the students' standards are not high enough or that these groups do not apply to enter. This latter point focuses on the participation levels at the age of 16 and overlooks the lack of a culture through which the community engages with higher education. The government's drive towards an inclusive society is explained through a simple human capital approach, which assumes that people will realize it is in their best interest to upgrade their skills and to make themselves more economically efficient for the good of the economy. This approach provides no real basis for understanding the major shifts that have to take place in many communities for them simply to understand higher education, to say nothing of their participating in it. © 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.