Transitions to higher education: the case of students with vocational background

ABSTRACT

The paper examines the ways transitions to Higher Education are experienced and narrated by students with Vocational qualifications. Drawing upon the mixed-method project that documented transitions to HE, we utilise interview data to illustrate the centrality of the epistemic and pedagogical struggles that students with vocational background experience. More specifically, a process of differential epistemic positioning is evident in the participants’ narratives. This manifests itself through a misrecognition of their worth in the field of HE. Further, pedagogical struggles were also narrated by the participants in relation to the teaching, learning and assessment regimes prevailing in HEIs. The paper concludes by arguing for the need to revisit the narrow and static policy framing that emphasises barriers to access. This requires addressing questions pertaining to pedagogy and knowledge, students’ completion and retention rates and their ongoing engagement with the epistemic and pedagogical processes once they are within HE.

KEYWORDS:

• Transitions to higher education
• VET
• knowledge
• pedagogy
• capitals

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Emeritus Prof. Diane Reay and Prof. Ann-Marrie Bathmaker for their insightful comments on a previous draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The body that mediates higher education admissions in the UK, UCAS, as evidenced by the development of the UCAS Tariff as a tool to help admissions staff at UK Higher Education Institutions compare the utility of different qualifications to support progression to higher education.

2 See author et al. for details of the data sets constructed for the project.

3 It is essential to highlight at this point that these participants’ stories were still ‘in the making’ and, although they represented successful cases of transition from Vocational to Higher Education, lack of evidence in regards to completion precludes us from making any inferences about their final study outcomes.

4 This revisiting is also in line with the increasing research focus on completion and progression to employment.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council.