Opening Doors or Narrowing Opportunities? The Coalition’s Approach to Widening Participation, Social Mobility and Social Justice

Spohrer, Konstanze

doi:10.1057/9781137491510_8

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Yet the significance of removing student number controls was all but ignored, particularly by those who wished to paint the Coalition's reforms in a negative light (see, for example, Temple, 2015). Only by ignoring the policy altogether was Konstanze Spohrer able to argue that 'the measures in relation to widening participation adopted by the Coalition mean a move away from a general concern with opening up higher education to a wider share of the population towards "creaming off" academically high-performing individuals' (Spohrer, 2015). As well as aiding social mobility, removing student number controls was likely to produce a sharper element of marketisation than loading the costs of higher education on to graduates in the form of income-contingent loans.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Coalition’s higher education reforms in England

Hillman¹

2016

Oxford Review of Education

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The Coalition Government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats in office from 2010 until 2015 sharply increased the maximum tuition fees for UK and EU undergraduates at English universities to £9,000. Although this is often portrayed as a radical change, it is argued that the reform was an evolution rather than a revolution. Common pessimistic predictions, such as the claim there would be a big fall in the number of full-time students, were wrong. However, the policymaking behind the increase in the fee cap was rushed, and this contributed to shortcomings such as a decline in part-time students. The article considers a series of political mistakes made by the Liberal Democrats, including making the abolition of tuition fees a key part of their election strategy in 2010 when the party's leaders lacked faith in the policy. The article also notes that critics of the Coalition's higher education reforms were largely ineffectual because they lacked a strong intellectual case or a clear alternative and fixated on fees to the exclusion of other important issues. The piece ends by asserting that the Coalition's plan to remove student number controls was a change of overlooked importance.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Coalition’s higher education reforms in England

Hillman¹

2016

Oxford Review of Education

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“…While not actually writing government policy, the role of the SMC has been to produce research to evaluate progress on a number of measures relating to social mobility and outline policy recommendations for local and national government, universities, schools, and the private sector. The creation of the SMC formed part of a broader shift in how inequalities were approached through education policy (Lane, 2015;Spohrer, 2015). This has seen a movement away from broader notions of access, including 'lifelong learning', to a focus on equal opportunities of entry to elite universities and elite corporations.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Talking the Talk of Social Mobility: The Political Performance of a Misguided Agenda

Ingram

Gamsu

2022

Sociological Research Online

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Since 2010, the language of social mobility has been increasingly utilised by UK politicians from across the political spectrum to denote a commitment to ‘fair access’ to opportunity in both education and the professions. Within this policy discourse, the default understanding of inequality is premised on a narrow notion of access to elite education and employment positions, where a deeper understanding of the politics of social reproduction and inequality, or any meaningful emphasis on redistribution, is absent. The social mobility agenda is axiomatically an equality of opportunity agenda where the focus is on ‘levelling up’ those who are considered to be falling behind. Its focus on opportunity to the detriment of outcome thus rules out considerations of structural solutions to inequalities. In this article, we unpack the discourses of social mobility that are prevalent in recent UK government papers and political talk, with a specific focus on the Social Mobility Commission (SMC) in order to consider how these shape policy approaches to education and labour market participation. We argue that the presiding ‘race to the top’ mentality undermines the very equality that the social mobility agenda claims to be seeking to achieve, and in doing so we implicate the SMC in purveying contradictory understandings of mobility that compound and conceal existing inequalities. Through a focus on graduate employment, we problematise the role of higher education in the promotion of social mobility. We consider the role of employers participating in the Social Mobility Employer Index and expose the contradictions between the performance of social mobility and the reality of corporate practices that entrench social inequalities. Our work underscores the need for a new political conversation about social mobility and a redirection of attendant education and employment policy to focus on dismantling rather than reinforcing social hierarchies.

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Opening Doors or Narrowing Opportunities? The Coalition’s Approach to Widening Participation, Social Mobility and Social Justice

Cited by 2 publications

References 19 publications

The Coalition’s higher education reforms in England

The Coalition’s higher education reforms in England

Talking the Talk of Social Mobility: The Political Performance of a Misguided Agenda

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