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

Marketisation and widening participation in English higher education : a critical discourse analysis of institutional access policy documents

This paper uses critical discourse analysis of English higher education institutions’ policy statements about access to explore the changing ways that institutions have used language to shift their market positionality away from widening participation for all and the process of higher education to ‘fair access’ (i.e. social mobility for the ‘brightest’) and the outcome of producing ‘professionals’. Analysis is drawn from the Access Agreements two sets of sampled institutions (ten large prestigious pre-1992 universities and ten former polytechnics, known as post-1992 universities ) at two points in time: 2006-07 (the first wave of Access Agreements) and 2012-13 (the first set of Access Agreements in the new funding regime)

The impact of the changing English higher education marketplace on widening participation and fair access : evidence from a discourse analysis of access agreements

This article uses a discourse analysis of access policy statements to trace the impact of differentiation and marketisation among English HE institutions that was evident before but accelerated by recent policy developments, including the increase in tuition fees. A result of this has been a shift in institutions' policy discourses that indicate less propitious circumstances for widening participation, particularly among post-1992 institutions which are now expected to improve retention and employability outcomes. Pre-1992 institutions including members of the Russell Group of selective, research intensive universities have been encouraged by policy changes to differentiate further by concentrating their outreach only on the 'brightest' of applicants from poorer backgrounds. The article concludes that widening participation of the traditional 'raising aspirations' kind becomes a much more difficult project for post-1992 institutions and correspondingly a more difficult basis for a future business model

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

Does Aimhigher work? evidence from the national evaluation

During 2005 the Centre for Research and Evaluation in collaboration with the Widening Participation Policy Unit at Sheffield Hallam University conducted three surveys on behalf of HEFCE to evaluate the impact of Aimhigher . Surveys were sent to all higher education institutions and a sample of further education colleges and work based-learning providers. All three surveys contained a set of core questions for the purpose of comparative analysis. The surveys focused on which activities are delivered through the Aimhigher partnerships, how the activities are perceived to impact on the provider and the apparent effect they have on the progression of target groups to higher education

An ecological fallacy in higher education policy: the use, overuse and misuse of 'low participation neighbourhoods'

One form of ecological fallacy is found in the dictum that 18you are where you live 19 13 otherwise expressed in the idea that you can infer significant information about an individual or their family from the prevailing conditions around their home. One expression of this within higher education in the UK has been the use (and, arguably, overuse and misuse) of 18low participation neighbourhoods 19 (LPNs) over the last 15 years. These are areas that have been defined, from historic official data, as having a lower-than-average propensity to send their young people on to university. These LPNs have increasingly become used within the widening participation and social mobility agendas as a proxy for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds who have the potential to benefit from higher education, but who would not attend without encouragement, support and/or incentives. In this article, we explore the various uses to which LPNs have been put by policy makers, universities and practitioners, including the targeting of outreach activities, the allocation of funding and the monitoring of the social mix within higher education. We use a range of official data to demonstrate that LPNs have a questionable diagnostic value, with more disadvantaged families living outside them than within them, while they contain a higher-than-expected proportion of relatively advantaged families. We also use content analysis of university policy documents to demonstrate that universities have adopted some questionable practices with regard to LPNs, although some of these are now being actively discouraged