Access agreements, widening participation and market positionality: enabling student choice?

This chapter presents an alternative view of marketised higher education form much of this volume: not only does it focus on how HEIs use marketing strategies to position themselves ethically in relation to competing HEIs of the same type; it also uses the concept of widening participation (WP) as a specific arena of institutions' marketing strategies and discusses the impact on student choice. It will locate evidence for increasing market positionality among HEIs within both marketing theory and in the historical development of widening participation policy in the English HE sector. More specifically this chapter will discuss how Office for Fair Access (OFFA) access agreements came to reflect the marketing positionality of institutions. It will present an analysis of bursary and additional support regimes and types of outreach activities that reveals a tendency for more prestigious and less prestigious institutions to engage in quite different forms of widening participation activity. It will conclude that, paradoxically, the increasingly sophisticated use of widening participation as an arena for market differentiation reduces rather than increases applicants' ability to make informed choices given the complexity of student support arrangements

OFFA Access Agreements, bursaries and 'fair access' to higher education - opening up a new front in the WP wars?

There is a growing body of evidence to support the notion that that English higher education institutions (HEIs) are using the new bursary schemes outlined in Access Agreements (lodged with the regulatory Office for Fair Access, OFFA), designed to widen participation by helping students from poor backgrounds to access higher education, primarily to promote enrolment to their own programmes rather than to promote HE generally. As a consequence of this use of access agreements to sharpen institutions' marketing focus, pre-92 and post-92 institutions perpetuate the differences between HEI types in relation to widening participation and fair access leading to both confusion for consumers and inequitable distribution of support to the detriment of marginal applicants to HE. This is in tune with a general perception that, as the preamble to the 2009 Higher Education Summit in February noted: "The Higher Education sector is becoming increasingly stratified and funding changes increasingly mean that no institution can deliver to all students. All institutions must choose their future and unique University Selling Points"

Trajectories of higher education system differentiation: structural policymaking and the impact of tuition fees in England and Australia

This article explores the impact of student self-financing systems on inequalities of access to higher education (HE) through comparative analysis of two national systems, those of England and Australia. The analysis of the historical development of HE in each nation identifies a set of comparative global themes: the expansion of higher education in response to the needs of the national economy; globalisation and the changing labour market; social pressures for equity in access to higher education; and the growing role of the central state in higher education. The article presents a discussion of system differentiation based around the following characteristics: tuition fee and bursary regimes; institutional autonomy; institutional diversity; the strength of equity arguments; and the role of the state in widening participation. The paper concludes with a discussion of the often complex interactions between these characteristics and aims to add to our understanding of the impact of student self-financing regimes on trajectories of system differentiation and on access and participation

Variable tuition fees and widening participation: the marketing of English institutions through access agreements

This paper argues that the introduction of access agreements following the establishment of the Office for Fair Access (OFFA) has led to changes in the way that higher education institutions (HEIs) position themselves in the marketplace in relation to widening participation. However, the nature of these access agreements has led to obfuscation rather than clarification from the perspective of the consumer. This paper analyses OFFA's 2008 monitoring report and a sample of 20 HEIs' original 2006 and revised or updated access agreements (2008) to draw conclusions about the impact of these agreements on the notions of 'fair access' and widening participation. The authors conclude that institutions use access agreements primarily to promote enrolment to their own programmes rather than to promote HE generally. As a consequence of this marketing focus, previous differences between pre-92 and post-92 institutions in relation to widening participation and fair access are perpetuated leading to both confusion for consumers and an inequitable distribution of bursary and other support mechanisms for the poorest applicants to HE.</p

Modelling diet composition dynamics among North Sea predatory fish using a length-structured partial ecosystem model

Multispecies fisheries management approaches must take account of the array of trophic interactions within the ecosystem. Studies of the gut contents of fish stocks in the North Sea show decadal changes in diet composition, as might be expected when the relative abundances of prey species change. In this paper we explore the extent to which a simple model of prey consumption deployed within a dynamic multi-species population model is able to capture those changes. We make use of a length-structured partial-ecosystem model (FishSUMS) in which the relative preferences of predators for prey are set by a combination of species weightings and predator-to-prey length ratios. The model allows for diets to evolve over the lifetime of the predator species as well as in response to changes in the available prey. Eleven commercially important North Sea species were included in the model with full length structure, together with other trophic resources represented in less detail. The model was simultaneously tuned to various sources of data, including time series of stock biomass and landings. We show that, despite the simplicity of the representation of the predation process, it is capable of capturing some of the large observed changes in diet in four predator species that were sampled during the Year of the Stomach projects in 1981 and 1991: cod, haddock, whiting and saithe. We also quantify how much of the biomass is lost to the fishery, to predation by explicitly-modelled species, and to unspecified mortality

Cultures of career development: senior leaders' and early career teachers' views of career

Background The TDA-funded NQT Quality Improvement Study is a 4 year, England-wide longitudinal, combined methods study of both SLT and early career teachers (ECT's) views of key issues in the first few years of teaching. The first two phases of the study focussed on entry into the NQT year and the NQT year itself; the third phase looked at the second year of teaching. This paper utilises data from this third phase - particularly case study interviews with teachers and SLT members - to consider the issues of ECTs' careers and career development. The topic is of particular interest, since whilst the picture in terms of teacher supply and retention in the profession overall is much improved in recent years (for example, proportions of unfilled vacancies have declined according to DCSF data, and Smithers and Robinson (2003, 2004, 2005) found that the retention issue tailed off and stabilised over the period of their studies), it is clear that schools vary widely in their ability to recruit and retain staff in their early careers. This paper aims to explore these variations in different contexts and school cultures, to illuminate these differences. Research Questions This focus of this paper is to examine how SLT members in different contexts and cultures manage, and view, career development for ECTs in their schools and to compare these views with those of ECTs in the same schools

Arc termination cracks in Inconel 718 and Incoloy 903

The welding of the nickel base, heat resistant alloys that are used extensively for welded Shuttle engine components revealed solidification cracking characteristics at weld termination points. If not detected and removed, these crater cracks may cause costly component failure. To better understand this characteristic, welding termination techniques were studied and methods developed to eliminate crater cracks. It was determined that weld termination solidification cracking can be eliminated by controlled decrease of welding current, welding voltage, wire feed, and travel speed

How can the concepts of habitus and field help us to understand the engagement of educational workers in higher Education?

In ‘Making a European area of lifelong learning a reality’, the EU stressed the role of universities in relation to lifelong learning, a role that entails a need for widening access to universities, particularly for those not coming through the traditional direct route of upper secondary education. As teachers play a significant role in the quality of the lifelong learning as well as in motivating future generations to take part in lifelong learning, education and training for teachers becomes important; not only in relation to initial teacher education, but also in relation to a continuous development of knowledge and skills. This paper represents the first stage of a larger comparative project intended to examine and compare educational workers’ (i.e. professionals involved in teaching in the class room) participation in higher education in England and Denmark, their access and interest. In particular, the paper relates participation and engagement to national and international educational policies and frames this work within an examination of the social background of the professional groups. The key research questions at this stage of the work are methodological and can be summed up by the overarching question, “How can the concepts of habitus and field help us to understand levels of engagement of educational workers in Higher Education”? The paper reports the results of our review of current policies and our efforts to identify the structural relations within the educational professional fields in each country. To do so we are developing a theoretical model using the relational analytical approach advocated by Bourdieu. As such, our work is an early stage attempt at operationalising Bourdieu’s observations regarding the dynamics of field. This seems to us to provide an important conceptual approach to understanding the habitus of educational workers in the context of the dynamics of a fast changing policy arena and the complexities of the backgrounds of individuals working in the educational field. The model attempts to build in the reflexivity that Bourdieu demands for a ‘science’ that is not weakened by over-emphasis on either the objective structural relations or the subjective phenomenology of experience. Thus, the paper presents a preliminary contextual analysis of the factors that enable an understanding of engagement or lack of engagement in higher level learning among school-based education workers in the two EU countries and is related to a larger research project that explores habitus (both individual and collective) among these groups of education workers

Book Review: Access and Expansion Post-Massification: Opportunities and Barriers to Further Growth in Higher Education Participation Jongbloed, Ben W.A and Vossensteyn, Hans (eds.), 2015

Most of us will be familiar with the concept of the journey from an elite to a mass and then a universal system of Higher Education, first introduced by Martin Trow in 1973. Taken as a whole this book suggest that HE systems worldwide are now moving beyond mass participation and into a universal phase with participation rates of 50% or more now common among developed and developing nations. The theme of the book, as its subtitle suggests, is to explore what is different about post-massification in relation to both opportunities and barriers there may be for further growth. The book asks what international policy lessons, about quality, value for money and public spending restraints (especially in the wake of 2008 crash) can be drawn on