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Higher education (HE) is often viewed as a conduit for social mobility through which working-class students can secure improved life-chances. However, the link between HE and social mobility is largely viewed as unproblematic. Little research has explored the possible impact of academic failure (in HE) on the trajectories of working-class students or the ways in which working-class students may re-construct their career aspirations as a result of such academic failure. This paper seeks to fill this apparent gap by focusing on a group of non-traditional students enrolled on a BA undergraduate programme in a post-1992 university. Utilising Bourdieu's notion of habitus, the paper identifies how academic failure contributes to possible trajectory interruptions and whether these are temporary or possibly permanent. It specifically focuses on how working-class students interpret and respond to their academic failure and the possible impact this has on their social mobility.

The role of the academic in interpreting the complex and confused concept of widening participation is central to the practice of widening participation within higher education. These interpretations are bound up within the context of what it means to be an academic, and external constraints on that role. Government policy has insufficiently challenged perceptions of that role to bring about a transformation to academic practice. This research, through the use of semi-structured interviews, illuminates the perspectives of academics, in a range of roles, to the widening participation agenda and outlines the alternative priorities of those academics. Ultimately, the impetus for transformation is not one which will occur internally to the university and it is argued that stakeholders, in the absence of realistic government pressure, must play a part in bringing about a university culture which places teaching and learning and not subject disciplines at the centre of its practice.