Under-tapped potential: practitioner research as a vehicle for widening participation

Abstract

Practitioners working to widen participation to universities in England are an increasingly important and professionally diverse group but surprisingly absent from the academic literature and lacking in access to bespoke professional development pathways in HE. In England current approaches within policy and research also tend to position them as gatherers of evidence with a mission to inform change rather than developing their capacity to be(come) agents of change in their own right. Drawing on the perspectives of three widening participation practitioners who had recently completed a research-based MA, this paper explores the opportunity that this provided to illuminate the complexities encountered in routine practice, contributing to positive change. Rather than being methodologically inferior, practitioner research emerged as highly complementary and in the case of WP its transformative potential is currently hugely under-tapped.

Keywords:

• Widening participation
• practitioner research
• higher education

Notes

1. Being spread across schools, colleges, universities and third-sector organisations.

2. Generally conceptualised as spanning initial engagement in interventions at the pre-entry stage, subsequent recruitment, retention and culminating in progression to graduate-level employment.

3. A major focus being those characterised as socially disadvantaged but also including young people in the care system, specific ethnic groups and those with disabilities.

4. The ‘pracademic’ knowledge exchange programme that has matched academic mentors with practitioners: https://www.offa.org.uk/egp/writing-publication-widening-participation-practitioners.

5. Of the four who enrolled, three completed the dissertation and elected to contribute to this paper.

6. For example it appears in the National Strategy for Access and Student Success in Higher Education (BIS 2014) 12 times.

7. An area-based indicator based on local rates of progression to university (discussed by Harrison and McCaig 2015).

8. A measure of low-income, linked to benefit entitlement (discussed by Boliver, Gorard, and Siddiqui 2015).

9. It should be noted that the graduates interviewed for this research had all paid tuition fees of approximately £3000 a year, whilst the university staff interviewed are now working in a context where students are paying three times that amount. As the first cohort paying the higher fees had not yet graduated at the time the data were gathered it was too soon to explore whether higher fees have changed attitudes.