Lone parents in Brighton & Hove: engagement with education and training

This briefing paper focuses on research on constraints and solutions for lone parents in Brighton & Hove accessing education and training. It draws on perspectives of service users and providers. Service users had accessed help through an Action 21 (A2) Project, though they were not necessarily currently doing so

Lone parents: addressing barriers to participation in post-compulsory education

The research was part of Equal, a European Social Fund initiative addressing labour market discrimination. Increasing educational participation amongst ‘non-traditional’ students can be viewed in terms of the philanthropic goal of extending opportunities to individuals, or structurally in terms of the globalised economy’s demand for skilled labour (Naidoo & Callender, 2000:227). Decreasing numbers of school leavers necessitate casting the net beyond traditional groups (Gallagher et al, 1993:2; Edwards, 1993:5), implicating responsibility for promoting positive student experiences for non-traditional students targeted by the education system. Lone parents report sacrifices in pursuit of education including debt, placing children in childcare, and loss of family time, support networks and jobs. Mature and working-class students’ low completion rates (Yorke, 2001:148) highlight difficulties managing learning with other adult responsibilities. Hands et al observe student parents’ particular susceptibility to non-completion (Hands et al, 2007:25). Institutionally, non-completion represents ‘wasted’ investment. Providing inadequate support also fails vulnerable students, setting them up for failure and exacerbating frequently low self-esteem and confidence (Murphy & Roopchand, 2003:247,256; Greif, 1992:570). The present research illustrated how negative school experiences often result in lengthy educational gaps. Institutions are responsible for ensuring that individuals’ self-esteem is not further damaged by failure through inadequate support

[Review] Martina Klett-Davies (2007) Going it alone: lone motherhood in late modernity

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Negotiating the risk of debt-financed higher education: the experience of lone parent students

Widening participation has opened higher education (HE) to diverse learners, but in doing so has created challenges negotiating situations of disadvantaged positioning compared with peers con-forming more closely to the ideal ‘bachelor boy’ student. As one of the most financially vulnerable groups of students, lone parents occupy a doubly precarious position negotiating the challenges,including financial constraints, of both university participation and raising children alone. Their experiences of HE participation are particularly important to understand as increasing financial precariousness of both studentship and lone parenthood squeezes them further through concurrent rising university fees and welfare cuts. This paper draws on insights from longitudinal qualitative research with 77 lone mothers in England to explore the negotiation of social and economic risks and rewards involved in their undertaking of a debt-financed higher education

Lone parents as higher education students

This paper focuses on how the personal experience of lone parents who become students informs their learning and experience of university life. Longitudinal qualitative research with a sample of 79 lone parents studying at a range of UK higher education institutions (HEIs)demonstrates the powerful impact personal experience has upon successful and satisfying higher education completion for this group of learners. The research found personal experience to impact upon university life across a range of causes and effects. Work on the conflicting demands of the family and university as ‘greedy institutions’, each making insatiable claims on individual members’ time and energies, is particularly relevant (Acker, 1980; Edwards, 1993). The paper explores the relevance of lone parents’ wider lives in particular their experience of housing, mental health, social inclusion/isolation, family ties, friendships, employment, on-line social spaces and leisure time

Roma women’s higher education participation: whose responsibility?

There are striking gaps between Roma and non-Roma higher education (HE) participation rates, with less than 1% of Roma possessing a tertiary-level qualification [United Nations Development Programme, World Bank and European Commission. 2011a. “The Situation of Roma in 11 EU Member States.” Accessed 3 April 2015. http://issuu.com/undp_in_europe_cis/docs/_roma_at_a_glance_web/1#download]. As the Decade of Roma Inclusion (2005–2015) closes, this renders the present a salient moment to reflect on Roma students’ HE experiences. Widening educational access for marginalised groups raises specific questions about where responsibility for doing so lies – with tensions between individualised articulations of raising aspiration and notions of collective responsibility framed in a social justice agenda. Drawing on interviews with five Roma women students, this paper unpacks the contradictions between desiring access to HE for individual self-betterment and concurrent pulls towards educating for the wider benefit of ‘improving’ Roma communities. Using Ahmed’s [2012. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press] work on institutional belonging, we explore the specifically gendered nature of these narratives in how ‘doubly’ marginalised bodies are positioned as outsiders, in receipt of an educational gift

Power, pedagogy and the personal: feminist ethics in facilitating a doctoral writing group

The paper explores questions of power arising from feminist facilitators running a doctoral writing group at a UK university. Butler’s (2014) theorisation of precarity and vulnerability inspired us to re think normative constructions of research writing and the academic identities and subjectivities this presupposed. Our doctoral writing group was imagined as a space to think collectively and reflexively about the thesis, the multi-faceted power-dynamics at work in its production, and our relations to the text as both writer and audience. This paper antagonises some of the pedagogic consequences of inviting seemingly ‘personal’ matters into the space of the writing space and, subsequently, the doctoral text itself. We speak back to discourses that position doctoral writing as always and only an individual, and individualising endeavour, that eschews encounters with the personal and relational. Indeed, we recognise that configurations and spaces for research writing are always ‘political’

Marginalisation and Mixed Feelings: Supporting Students of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller Heritage Imagining Higher Education in the UK

Gypsy, Roma and Travellers (GRT) are a highly marginalised UK higher education minority with patchy targeted policy interventions. Drawing on qualitative interview data with education professionals working with GRT and with GRT young people, families and activists, the article compares attitudes, expectations, and desires around higher education. Firstly, the way in which university outreach can essentialise GRT people and the need to nuance these regulatory and normative practices is discussed (Burke 2012). Tensions for GRT people imagining higher education and navigating complex identity transitions of ethnic invisibility are next explored (Abajo and Carrasco 2004; Padilla-Carmona et al. 2017) alongside worries around coming out (Pantea 2015). Finally, the article identifies the cruel optimism (Berlant 2011) in desiring education as a form of social mobility, particularly when institutions are not inclusive of GRT. From this, an urgent need is identified for contextually-sensitive GRT outreach for the academy’s promises to be meaningfully inclusive

The shifting subjectification of the ‘Widening participation’ student: the affective world of the ‘Deserving’ consumer

In this chapter, we focus on the emotional dimensions of widening participation (WP) that are often obscured through much activity and evaluation surrounding National Collaborative Outreach Programmes (NCOPs). We consider, using data collected with young people, what focusing on their affective worlds or emotional states might reveal about current and future imaginings of the ‘potential’ higher education (HE) student, as well as the current state of play within the practices of WP. This draws from our experience leading regional research and evaluation of Phase 1 of the Office for Students-funded UK-wide NCOP, which ran from January 2017 to July 2019. In this chapter, we draw predominantly on insight from qualitative learner data generated through individual and group interviews with 83 young people aged between 11 and 18, carried out as part of a larger mixed methods data set. We argue that the targeting of geo-demographic measures, and the surrounding socio-economic and policy climate risks obscuring the persistence of more pervasive forces against HE progression beyond the individual or community levels

Young people’s educational futures and the ‘value’ of outreach. SLN: COP research and evaluation report

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