The widening participation agenda: the marginal place of care

Abstract

This paper is based upon two empirical studies, which identify care‐giving responsibilities as a key mediator of mature students’ – a target group within the widening participation strategy – experiences of higher education. Employing a feminist lens on care, we identify a disjuncture between how students experience the challenges of negotiating care and study, and the narrow and economistic way care is addressed within higher education policy. We point to the broader recognition of care emerging within New Labour’s policies on the reconciliation of paid work and family life and argue that in the context of increasing expectations that learning is for life, care needs to be recognised in a broader form at the interface of both education and employment. Drawing on the notion of a ‘political ethics of care’, we conclude by identifying elements that should be included in a higher‐education ‘care culture’.

Keywords:

• higher education
• widening participation
• care
• mature students
• gender

Notes

1. Since political devolution to Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland, various elements of HE policy differ across the UK. In this article, we focus on England only.

2. Though most students with caring responsibilities are mature, we do recognise that not all mature students are carers; and, by the same token, that non‐mature students may also have care commitments.

3. Unfortunately, data on students’ care‐giving status is not routinely collected by universities or relevant national bodies, and a government‐funded study of mature students (Ross et al. 2002) did not examine them along this dimension.

4. Excluded because the majority of them were doing courses that were subject to a different system of student finance.

5. The department in question was the Department of Humanities. The students interviewed were taking degrees in the following subject areas: American Studies, English, Gender Studies, Philosophy and Theology.

6. The sample differs from HEFCE’s definition of WP students because it included students from minority ethnic backgrounds and did not target students from disadvantaged socio‐economic areas. The latter were excluded for methodological reasons: these students are defined by HEFCE according to their postcode, but this is not always an indication of the socio‐economic background of the student; university systems could not yet provide the relevant data; and students are often unaware of their classification into this group and may not self‐identify as ‘non‐traditional students’ (Kilkey and Page 2001, 19). Minority ethnic students were included because of their relatively low level of participation at the University of Hull. Nationally, less than 20% of full‐time HE students aged 21–29 are from Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) backgrounds (Ross et al. 2002). Results from the Hull quantitative study suggest that the representation of BME students among the mature student body is just 6% of full‐timers and 0% cent of part‐timers; this reflects the lower‐than‐national‐average representation of BME groups in the undergraduate student body as a whole at the university. The qualitative study purposefully sought to recruit BME students to its sample, and it did so by checking the personal data of students held by the university, which includes information on ethnicity. On this basis, three BME students were interviewed. A fourth student had refused to give information about her ethnicity in her personal statement to the university, and in her interview she declared that she did not fit into any of the university’s predefined categories of ethnicity.

7. See Katharina Rowold (1996) for an illustration of some of these debates in our intellectual tradition.

8. Or, for that matter, any form of education or training related to improving labour‐market opportunities.