Desarrollo Generalidades.

How national policies and practices on widening participation in England, introduced between 2004 and 2014, were interpreted by researchers and national policy actors.

The first specific research question focused on policy and its context. My review of literature combined several inter-related themes. First, debates about the nature of policy on widening participation considered different perspectives on the history of access and widening participation and then compared different interpretations of contemporary research on widening participation.

191 Maringe and Fuller, in their review of policy (2006), placed widening participation in its economic context and that of equity and social justice. I argued that this tension between the perceived economic benefits of widening participation, and the demands of equity and social justice, is also central to debates that Burke addresses (2012). In this discourse, from Burke‘s perspective, key policies are framed in economic terms emphasising individual advantage. Whilst this reflects one rationale, identified by Maringe and Fuller (2006), Burke also argues overlapping discourses of ‗expansion‘, ‗massification‘ and ‗access‘, combined with that of economic growth, act to obscure inequalities experienced by those who participate in HE- as well as others who do not.

Secondly, I argued that widening participation is framed in literature by notion of ‗barriers‘. A ‗solution‘ is the ‗removal‘ of situational, institutional and dispositional barriers (2006:5). However, Hinton-Smith (2012:9) critiques this notion by arguing that a consequence of emphasising ‗barriers‘ is that practices of categorisation become part of a process of ‗othering‘ and a ‗catch-all‘ of ‗WP‘ and ‗non-traditional‘ students. Burke (2012:141) extends this critiques of the notion of ‗barriers‘ by arguing that national policy texts (citing the examples of HEFCE, 2001;2009) construct a dominant ‗derogatory discourse‘ based on ‗the student lifecycle‘ of stages and milestones.

192 I compared OFFA/HEFCE‘s perspectives on the National strategy, published by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS, April 2014), and three ‗broad stages‘ of a life-cycle of ‗access‘, ‗student success‘ and ‗progression‘ (2014:3) with its origins in HEFCE (2001). By analyzing BIS (2014) I focused on how ‗outreach‘, ‗support‘ and ‗curriculum‘ were framed in the text and built on the narratives within previous texts. I noted that references to particular forms of outreach and collaboration were combined with further explicit references to the place of ‗marketing‘ within the National Strategy. I argued that this metaphor of ‗the student lifecycle‘ embodied a rational form of transition.

However, I then reviewed a range of work that critiqued the generative metaphor and organisational device of ‗the life-cycle‘. I argued that these contested concepts of widening participation and transition need to be understood within wider debates about institutional context, performativity and professionalism. Whilst these sections of the review considered ‗problems‘ and processes of ‗problematization‘, by building on the work of Bacchi (2000; 2012), the fourth section of the review considered how narratives of widening participation and transition could be re-imagined by suggesting why a more nuanced understanding of ‗voice‘ may relate to notions of ‗institutional amnesia‘ (Pollitt, 2000) and ‗policy memory‘ (Higham, 2005).

193 My conclusion was that this dynamic suggested a crowded policy domain. The notion of ‗political era‘ (Hodgson and Spours, 2006) provided a temporal context for my semi-structured interviews with national policy actors interviewed between March and July 2014 and the narratives they constructed. In my focus on the era, between 2004 and 2014, the themes that were identified suggested a juxtaposition and tension between a rational ‗restricted narrative‘ of policy and Ball‘s analysis of policy as ‗awkward, incomplete, incoherent and unstable‘ (Ball, 1997:265). Building on Biesta, Field and Tedder‘s work on ‗time‘ and narratives (2010), I then suggested the narratives I analysed and interpreted could be sensitised further by deploying notions of ‗chronological‘, ‗narrative‘ and ‗generational‘ time. This deepened my understanding of the juxtaposition of stability and flux in different representations of time within ‗restricted‘ and ‗reformist‘ narratives. How do institutional policy actors, structures and processes frame policies and practices on widening participation?

The second specific research question focused on policy actors and how they framed policy. The paradox or tension between the rational and linear and the flux and frenzy, evident in national narratives, was also reflected in contested debates within the institution. From the analysis of institutional policy texts, I concluded that particular ‗problems‘ and meanings of ‗outreach‘ and ‗support‘ were created (Bacchi, 2000; 2012). These framed the ‗disadvantaged‘ student and activities it assumed were ‗needed‘. For example, building on Smith‘s argument that texts within institutional ethnography ‗create a

194 crucial join‘ between the activities of individuals and the social relations that may co-ordinate these activities (2002:45), I analysed how institutional policy actors framed transition and, in particular, ‗outreach‘, ‗support‘ and the place of the curriculum in relation to widening participation. By combining an analysis of texts, interviews with policy actors, between May 2014 and January 2015, and critical events recorded in diary entries, between November 2013 and July 2015, I concluded that whilst dominant ‗restricted‘ narratives of widening participation emphasized compliance with the minimum requirements of OFFA, ‗reformist‘ narratives were framed in terms of working ‗around the edges of policy‘.

Who is included and excluded from policy making on widening participation and why does it matter for widening participation in the future?

The third specific research question focused on ‗voice‘ in policymaking and why it matters. Bacchi‘s analysis was also applied to this question and the construction of policy ‗problems‘, and processes of ‗problematization‘ (2000; 2012) in relation to transition and voice. I asked how these were conceptualized within policy texts. I firstly noted how notions of ‗support‘ were framed in terms of institutional strategies. Whilst a national text asserted that ‗We see a strategic, long-term ―whole institution‖ approach as crucial‘ (BIS, 2014:11) reference to curriculum was in terms of those ‗developing the teaching curriculum‘ and not lecturers who work with students each day. Secondly, in presenting data on the ‗problem‘ of students and transition, national

195 and institutional policy were framed in terms of differences in the rates of retention and achievement rather than in how diverse needs of students have been and are shaped by their experiences of the inter- relationships between social class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, disability and age (Quinn, 2010).

I argue that the third conception in Gale and Parker‘s typology of student transition, ‗transition as becoming‘ acknowledges not only flexible modes of study but also a ‗curriculum that reflects and affirms marginalised student histories and subjectivities‘ (2014:738). Whilst this dynamic was absent from the ‗restricted‘ narratives of institutional policy actors, I suggested ‗reformist‘ narratives were ‗pieced together‘, in different ways, by three other institutional policy actors who are heads of academic subjects and also by myself and others in my analysis and interpretation in the final section of chapter 4.

I concluded the chapter by outlining features of an ‗extended metanarrative‘ of what widening participation could be. The first feature of an ‗extended metanarrative‘ would reject ‗the student life-cycle‘. Instead it recognises that experiences and forms of studenthood are neither fixed nor linear (Field, Merrill and Morgan-Klein, 2010) but are complex and contested. I argued that Field and Kurantowicz (2014), Finnegan, Fleming and Thunborg (2014)and Gale and Parker (2014) extend this analysis further by tracing the value of ‗transition as becoming‘. I suggested this position has implications for both H.E.

196 institutions and reflections on questions about the design of the curriculum and forms of pedagogy.

I argued that recurring process of reflection, debate and planning that were the basis of the ‗students as partners‘ project, provided a starting point for asking how policies and practices are framed, by taking account of the ‗multiplicities of student lives‘ (Gale and Parker, 2014:745). I gave the example of how engaging with contested narratives of widening participation explicitly recognises that ‗the problem‘ is not ‗being‘ a ‗WP‘ student (as in the ‗restricted‘ narrative). Instead this work, and my earlier research with students (Jones, 2013), suggests that multiple identities are shaped by inter- sections of class, gender, ethnicity, age, disability and sexuality. It is these re-presentations and re-framings of ‗the problem‘ that have implications for contested ideas of transition within institutions.