Raising the proportion of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds progressing to higher education has been a key policy objective for successive governments in the UK since the late 1990s. Often this has been conceptualised as a problem with their ‘aspirations’, with the solution being seen as the provision of ‘aspiration‐raising’ activities to promote higher education to those thought to have the potential to progress. Recent large‐scale studies cast strong doubt on this hypothesis by demonstrating that aspirations are not generally low, that different social groups have similar levels of aspiration and that school attainment accounts for nearly all the differences in participation rates between social groups.
This article draws on data from a national project exploring efforts to widen participation across two generations of practitioner‐managers in England, focusing on their conceptualisations of the field and their constructions of ‘successful’ activities. It uses the lens of ‘possible selves’ (Markus & Nurius, ) to argue that too much policy emphasis has been placed on the aspirations of young people, rather than either their academic attainment or their expectations, which are shaped by the normative expectations of the adults surrounding them. In addition, the more expansive concepts of widening participation that were present a decade ago have become less common, with a shift towards activities with a clear role in institutional recruitment rather than social transformation. The article concludes with alternative suggestions for policy and practice.
Framed by discourses of lifelong learning and widening participation, further education Access to University courses attract mature students from a range of social backgrounds. This paper focuses on eight women students who, to varying degrees, share educational and occupational histories and aspirations. We explore their experiences of the Access programme by referring to developing learner and class identities and related femininities. This transitional phase is not a straightforward one of simply shedding old identities and donning unproblematic new ones, but is instead a period of reflexivity and risk, confusion and contradiction. Based on interviews held on termly basis throughout the one-year course, we draw on an analysis of risk to examine the gendered complexities of transitional class and learner identities and developing educational histories. In so doing, we challenge the assumption that a changing learner identity necessitates a corresponding shifting class identity.
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