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In England, more students from a wider range of backgrounds participate in higher education than in previous generations. This has led to a focus on how students from diverse backgrounds can fit be...

Highly selective higher education institutions (HEIs) are simultaneously mandated to enable access for populations which have traditionally been excluded (‘equality’), and to ensure that admitted s...

The ultimate goal of widening participation work, which unites policymakers, practitioners and academics, is to enhance the experience of disadvantaged students relating to HE access, success and outcomes. This article presents the Office for Students' (OfS) commissioned project Standards of Evaluation Practice (Phase 2). This project sought to create a step-change in robustness of evidence used and evaluation practices. Our 2017 – 19 project explored evaluation practices among nine partner organisations drawn from higher education providers (HEPs) and third-sector partners. The initial aim was to pilot test the Standards of Evidence of Evaluation developed during Phase 1 research; share practices that work and highlight examples of best practice. As the project developed, a further outcome was envisaged through ongoing discussions between the OfS, academics, HEPs and third-sector parties: a self-assessment tool for evaluation practitioners. This tool provides a framework and guidance which allow practitioners to map their own evaluation approaches. Through using prompts, the five dimensions of the tool highlight strengths and weaknesses of evaluation within five domains (strategic context, programme design, evaluation design, evaluation implementation and learning). This new tool is, in effect, a five-point framework setting guidance about good evaluation practice. It was rolled out to all HEPs in spring 2019, when providers were invited to return the completed tool and their reflection as part of their access and participation planning.

Professionalising outreach and evaluation work would enhance the quality and rigour of provision, benefit widening participation students and achieve regulatory requirements (Bowes et al. [2019]. The National Collaborative Outreach Programme End of Phase 1 report for the national formative and impact evaluations. Office for Students; Rainford [2020]. “Working with/in institutions: how policy enactment in widening participation is shaped through practitioners’ experience.” British Journal of Sociology of Education 42 (2): 287–303). This article presents practitioners’ experiences of how social justice can often feel unaligned to the technical expertise required in rigorous project design and evaluation. Professionalising outreach would achieve both improved practice and meet practitioners’ needs for development and a united professional voice. A professional body sharing standard methods of practice, offering CPD and skills would elevate outreach practitioners to a ‘professional’ standing (Eraut [1994]. Developing professional knowledge and competence. Falmer Press).

Higher Education Institutions in England are an integral part of the government’s social mobility strategy. Contextualisation of undergraduate admissions decisions has emerged as a key tool towards...

This project investigated the postsecondary education aspirations of 27 secondary school-aged students living in greater London, England and greater Boston, Massachusetts, USA. An innovative resear...

This chapter critically engages with ways that teaching excellence has been operationalised in practice. Specific focus is on developing individual teaching excellence, rewarding of success and recognition of teaching excellence and the building of evidence around what works in teaching for the benefits of students. We consider the daily interactions with students that form the basis of frameworks of teaching excellence before arguing that operationalisations of teaching excellence are highly context specific and operate at the level of institutions and the whole higher education sector. We discuss the criteria that underpin teaching excellence awards. This includes governance as well as development frameworks. After considering the complex links between research and teaching and the importance of the disciplinary dimension of teaching excellence, the chapter finally looks at the skills and attributes commonly associated with individual teacher excellence and argues that these are exceptionally difficult to pin down let alone measure. It concludes with some reflections on some of the challenges faced by institutions as they seek to develop the quality of teaching whilst meeting the requirements of the TEF.

This chapter provides an introduction to the problematic notion of teaching excellence in higher education, which is a focus of this collection. It draws on an extensive review of relevant literature to explore how teaching excellence is defined and conceptualised and what factors underpin different conceptions. It notes that definitions are disparate, often context-specific and are influenced by a range of different ‘players’. It then examines how different conceptualisations play out at the macro, meso and micro levels and highlights the tensions between performative and transformative notions of teaching excellence. It notes the move from ‘surface’ to ‘deep’ excellence and efforts to articulate a more holistic conception of teaching excellence that emphasises the relational, emotional and moral dimensions of teaching. It suggests that, rather than seeking singular definitions and conceptions, it may be more useful to talk of ‘teaching excellences’, to reflect a stratified and plural sector, a diverse student body and different disciplinary families. Equally, it argues for further investigation of the intersections of teaching excellence with other key drivers of institutional change, such as student engagement and well-being, inclusion and diversity, widening participation and retention and success.

Access to and participation in higher education (HE) remains unequal, with social background continuing to influence decisions and experiences. In this paper, we undertake a proof-of-concept design to apply the theory of &lsquo, possible selves&rsquo, as adapted by Harrison and published in Social Sciences (2018), to university students from different socioeconomic backgrounds. In 2019, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 12 first-year students, from different socioeconomic backgrounds, currently studying at a selective English university. We applied a deductive analysis based on Harrison&rsquo, s adaptation of the &lsquo, model originally put forward by Markus and Nurius in the 1980s. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds had a clear drive to &lsquo, avoid&rsquo, future selves that would emerge without HE. Across all socioeconomic groups, we found a strong sense of agency, and a strong personal belief in success. Overall, our study shows that the model of possible selves is useful for understanding personalised and individualised student experiences, and the interrelation between social structure (socioeconomic condition) and agency. The model also offers a new way for practitioners to plan interventions for enhancing equity in HE access and participation.

Pro-Vice-Chancellors (PVCs) form the second-tier leadership of UK higher education institutions. However, their role and position remain under-theorised and under-researched. The present article explores the extent to which a PVC Education role requires core expertise in education or generic managerial skills. Using a mixed-methods approach, we first establish the disciplinary backgrounds of PVCs Education in Russell Group (RG) and post-1992 institutions. Fewer than one in five PVCs Education have a disciplinary background or additional formal training in education. Second, we conducted 24 semi-structured interviews with PVCs Education, Heads of Education Departments and Heads of Learning and Teaching units. These interviews suggest the PVC Education role requires managerial skills, usually acquired in previous headships, as well as academic credibility and knowledge of institutional processes rather than particular expertise in education. In sum, generic managerial skills rather than educational ...

We present the experience of 10 British low-socio-economic status students who were supported by a charitable scheme to be internationally mobile and who are currently studying at a range of highly...

Purpose The purpose of this study is twofold: to make explicit academics’ tacit knowledge of academic employment and to develop the educational research and employability skills of 12 postgraduate researchers. Design/methodology/approach Twelve postgraduate researchers from ten different disciplines conducted 24 semi-structured interviews (12 with early career academics, 12 with senior academics). Respondents shared the skills, experiences and attributes sought when hiring and their lived experience of being academics. Findings The importance given to both explicitly stated (publications, teaching experience) and implicit (values, behaviour) factors varies greatly among individual academics. There is a mismatch between stated job requirements and the realities of academic life. A students-as-partners project fosters critical engagement with these questions and offers other benefits to participants. Research limitations/implications Most respondents work at one research-intensive English institution, potentially limiting generalisability to teaching-led and international institutions. Practical/implications Researcher development programmes should make explicit the range of factors considered in hiring while also encouraging critical engagement with the realities of academic work. Through students-as-partners projects, postgraduate research students can uncover first-hand what academic life is like and what hiring committees are looking for. Originality/value Through involving students-as-partners, the research question changed to reflect the actual concerns of those contemplating an academic career. Students gained invaluable awareness of academic hiring and insights into academic life, as well as transferable skills.

This article reviews the idea of contextualizing applicants to higher education in order to widen access. First, the meaning of contextualized admissions is discussed before laying out the rationale for contextualizing applicants and the beneficiaries of the policy. The final sections discuss key critiques of contextualized admission and conclude by arguing that contextualized admission does go some way to addressing the access challenge. To fully realise its potential as a policy intervention though, it is most helpfully part of integrated support for students throughout university and is mindful of the role of universities in wider society to create more equal progression trajectories for young people from a range of backgrounds.

This is a book about college (university) admission in the United States. It is specifically about predictors of ‘who is admitted’ based on a range of factors. At the heart of the book is the quest...

This article focuses on questions and attitudes towards higher education in the British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey series. First, we analyse the changing BSA questions (1983–2010) in the context of key policy reports. Our results show that changes in the framing of higher education questions correspond with changes in the macro-discourse of higher education policies. Second, we focus on the 2010 BSA survey responses to investigate how attitudes towards higher education are related to respondents’ characteristics. Respondents’ socio-economic position predicts attitudes towards higher education. Graduates and professionals are most likely to support a reduction in higher education opportunities, but those who have so far benefitted least from higher education are supportive of expansion. One interpretation – with potential implications for social mobility – is that those who have already benefited from higher education are most inclined to pull the ladder up behind them.

What does “fairness” mean with respect to the distribution of access to higher education? We conceived this special issue as part of a broad conversation to address this and related questions across disciplines and across nations. Within that conversation philosophers have asked what criteria should be used to allocate funding and offers of admission at selective institutions (Fullinwider and Lichtenberg 2004). Assuming the notion of “merit” comes into play when answering these first questions, others have focused on how merit should be conceived and assessed (Daniels 1978; Selmi 1995; Guinier and Sturm 2001). Moving from a normative to a descriptive standpoint, sociologists such as A. H. Halsey (2011) have examined the criteria that countries actually do use—or did use in the past—to decide who will be admitted whenever some selection needs to be made. Given these criteria, to what extent and through which mechanisms do existing inequalities of class, race/ ethnicity, and gender impact university entrance? Such questions motivate many contemporary analysts (Shavit et al. 2007; Charles et al. 2009; Espenshade and Walton Radford 2009). Scholars have also looked into the initiatives now taking place with a view to alleviating these inequalities (Grodsky 2007; van Zanten 2009). Finally, we sought to connect this concern for “widening participation”—to use a ubiquitous British phrase—to the research on the consequences of the marketization of higher education (Callender 2006; Douglass 2007; Kirby 2011). Those are some of the general questions that

What does “fairness” mean internationally in terms of access to higher education? Increased competition for places in elite universities has prompted a worldwide discussion regarding the fairness of student admission policies. Despite budget cuts from governments—and increasing costs for students—competition is fierce at the most prestigious institutions. Universities, already under stress, face a challenge in balancing institutional research goals, meeting individual aspirations for upward social mobility, and promoting the democratic ideal of equal opportunity. Fair Access to Higher Education addresses this challenge from a broad, transnational perspective. The chapters in this volume contribute to our thinking and reflection on policy developments and also offer new empirical findings about patterns of advantage and disadvantage in higher education access. Bringing together insights drawn from a variety of fields, including philosophy, linguistics, social psychology, sociology, and public policy, the book sheds light on how “fairness” in university admissions has been articulated worldwide.

This article reviews the findings from a UK nationwide project on the causes of differences in student outcomes in higher education. The project was commissioned by the Higher Education Funding Council for England and reported in July 2015. We found that universities with an embedded, institution-wide approach that engaged senior managers, academic staff, professional service staff and students as stakeholders and agents in the differential outcomes agenda were most promising in decreasing progression gaps. Universities use targeted and universal interventions to affect change. Initiatives that tackle assessment and the content and meaning of curricula are a promising stream of interventions. Overall, more evaluations on what works and sharing of practice will further enable the sector to support all higher education students in reaching their academic potential.

This paper explores the relationship between legal practice and type of university attended and degree course studied for English and German lawyers. For England, some of the analysis is only based on data for barristers. We find that university attended matters a great deal for English barristers if they tend to have graduated from elite universities within the stratified British higher education system. In contrast, the flat German higher education system is also mirrored in the profile of lawyers who were graduates in the top jobs come from a wide range of institutions. For Germany, attainment at university and graduating in law are keys to unlocking elite positions whereas the status of university seems second to none in the British system, trumping having studied law as a first degree. The paper thus empirically confirms anecdotal insights that knowledge and skills directly related to law matter more for early career entry in Germany and generic skills and socialization at elite universities matter more for transitioning into elite legal employment in England. It is unclear from the available data whether the different structures mean that the social make-up of the legal professions differs, but it is clear that different ways of accessing this key profession operate in the two contexts.

Rising tuition fees in England have been accompanied by a policy mandate for universities to widen participation by attracting students from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds. This article focuses on one such group of high achieving students and their responses to rising tuition fees within the context of their participation in an outreach scheme at a research-intensive university in the UK. Our findings suggest that rather than being deterred from attending university as a result of fee increases, these young people demonstrated a detailed and fairly sophisticated understanding of higher education provision as a stratified and marketised system and justified fees within a discourse of ‘private good.’ Our analysis situates their ‘risk’ responses within the discursive tensions of the fees/widening participation mandate. We suggest that this tension highlights an intensified commodification of the relationship between higher education institutions and potential students from disadvantaged backgrounds in which widening participation agendas have shifted towards recruitment exercises. We argue that an ongoing effect of this shift has resulted in increased instrumentalism and a narrowing of choices for young people faced with the task of seeking out ‘value for money’ in their degrees whilst concurrently engaging in a number of personalised strategies aimed at compensating for social disadvantage in a system beset by structural inequalities.

The author describes how there has been some system convergence in the structure of higher education in the US and England having diversified or stratified higher education systems. When wishing to undertake systemic comparisons of admissions in education systems, it is indeed possible to undertake one of four possible comparisons. The first two possible comparisons would be intra-country comparisons and not internationally comparative: First, one could compare how highly selective universities in England admit students compared with how less selective universities in England manage their admissions. Second, one could undertake the same study in the US. How do highly selective universities admit students as opposed to open access or non-selective universities? In terms of international comparisons, there is scope to compare how the most selective universities in the two countries admit their students, or to compare cross-country differences in how less selective and open access universities manage their admissions. Keywords: cross-country differences; England; highly selective universities; stratified higher education systems; US

The present article revisits Turner’s (1960) suggestion that English education reflects an ideal-typical sponsored mobility folk norm by looking at entry to one elite higher education institution, the University of Oxford. The article concludes that undergraduate admissions to Oxford closely resembles a contest‑mobility system. However, just as there is an element of sponsorship in the US higher education system with regards to race (Grodsky 2007), there is also some sponsorship in Oxford admissions. The present article terms this ‘adjustment sponsorship’ and argues that adjustments are made by type of secondary school attended. Whereas compensatory sponsorship addresses a previous wrong – racial disadvantages in the US context – adjustment sponsorship is a way of adjusting for different academic potential to achieve highly at university. In the English case, adjustment sponsorship occurs by type of school where evidence shows that the same secondary school grades achieved by those educated in private as compared with state schools mask different potential to achieve first-class degrees at selective universities. In both, the US and England, the element of sponsorship – compensatory and adjustment sponsorship respectively – enhance the legitimacy of the contest norm and resulting inequalities.