Access for all: Widening Participation

Claudia Zink interviews Christina Hughes about University Widening Participation

Claudia Hughes photo: via www.warwick.ac.uk

Access for everybody or degrees as an elite qualification? As has been reported by the Boar recently, Russell group universities have been accused of being too exclusive and not doing enough to attract students from low-income backgrounds. At the same time fears of qualification inflation and rising tuition fees threaten to make going to university less attractive.
I have talked to Christina Hughes, Pro-Vice Chancellor for Teaching and Learning and a professor of Women and Gender, about the University’s efforts in the field of Widening Participation, specific programmes, the gender gap in university applications and larger political issues with regard to access to university.
Being asked about the biggest success in the field of Widening Participation, Hughes had to think for some time because she said there were so many successful programmes being pursued, it was rather difficult to pick one.
Among other examples, she mentioned the Assistive Technology Project, which has been developed by the Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG) and the Department of Computer Science in cooperation with Hereward College.
The aim of the programme is to use the expertise of disabled students from the college with regard to assistive technologies and the potential of 3D design and printing for developing new devices. Moreover, the students are encouraged to access higher education by working at university and discovering new talents.
Hughes pointed to the specific importance of the project: “We want to engage those students in understanding that science and technology informs and supports their lives because all of the mobility aids that they use come from those areas. So to encourage them to think about that as possible career routes, we have been working with them on 3D technologies. They are doing adaptations to their assistive aids, and in this area small things make huge differences.”
Giving the example of the Warwick RSA partnership, Hughes emphasised the need to have a long-term orientation to the projects: “We will be working with young people from year seven. From that age they will be exposed to university all the way through their school career and every faculty is engaged in this. And by the time these young people get to 16, 17 or 18, the idea is that university will be a normal part of their lives.”

But Widening Participation is not only a success story, there are also lots of problems. Hughes stressed that because the issues of low participation were complex and multiple, it was better for universities to work collaboratively: “It is very hard for one institution to be able to be able to make the societal change that relies on sustained, in-depth work, but we aspire to do it.”
But she also highlighted problems in both the school sector and education policy-making. She said that due to the disaggregation of the school sector and the plurality of types of school, it was a difficult terrain to negotiate with the aim of reaching more universal solutions.
Moreover, she criticised the government’s unreliability: “The way the government changes policy overnight does not help. The national scholarship funding was changed overnight, and so it is very hard for us to plan. We responded quickly, we have done everything to support our students. But the problem is not only policy change but also policy vacuum. We have been promised a national strategy for Widening Participation since October. We have not seen it yet.”
Hughes also pointed to the dilemma of Warwick being one of the UK’s most renowned universities and trying to secure this status while at the same time attempting to improve the diversity of the student body.
“We want to maintain the high standards that we have at Warwick. So one of the ways in which we are attempting to meet our aspirations for diversity but at the same time recognising the levels at which we require students to be at to thrive at Warwick is that our strategy is actually focused towards raising achievements.”
As an example she mentioned the programme Transformations in English which aims at preparing pupils for university by having university students teach them additional skills after school. Improved skills and also grades in English will qualify the students not only for a wide range of different subjects but also for different universities across the country.
With regards to figures suggesting a relatively poor performance of Warwick in attracting students from manual occupational backgrounds, Hughes highlighted the new WMG programme with apprentices in Jaguar Land Rover. This is enabling students, all of whom are the first in their families to go to University, to both work and take a degree.
She also noted, however, that much of the outreach work that Warwick does benefits the sector as a whole. As she maintained: “Our programmes, such as Realising Opportunities or Pathways to Law, results in many of these pupils going to other universities. And of course these don’t contribute to our own figures.”
“In that kind of way what we are doing is raising achievements for society. Of course we want students to come to Warwick, but that is not why we are doing it fundamentally. We are doing it because of our civic responsibility.”
With regard to the widening gender gap in university application which lead to widespread fears of young men being left behind, Hughes was rather more reflective: “I think it is a great success story for young women.” She stressed that the University had a general responsibility to have a diverse student community – with regard to socioeconomic factors, ethnicity, disability and also gender.
But in addition to this, she also emphasised: “There are pipeline arguments about getting women and also men into specific disciplines. But what is actually still happening, when you look beyond university, is that you still have that pyramid where men are at the top.”
Are the rising tuition fees and the phenomenon of qualification inflation factors discouraging young people from low-income backgrounds from going to university? The statistics do not suggest that this is the case and Hughes stressed that not only people from low-income backgrounds decided that it was not worth going to university from a purely economic perspective.
She said that the increased tuition fees had affected the considerations of people from all social groups and that it had challenged the automatic presumption that young people had to go to university.
Hughes also proposed an increased role of the state in the financing of higher education: “All of these things cost an awful lot of money, they have to be paid for somehow. Personally I prefer to pay more tax and fund higher education through a collective societal effort. If you vote for paying less taxes, you get what you get.”
In this regard she stressed that both taxation and education policy were very much about ideology and that there was still a huge battle to be fought.
With regard to the problem of qualification inflation, she stressed the importance of supporting students in their attempts to enter university: “Our concerns are to actually think about the life course of the student and to ensure that they are supported all the way through. So we help to get students in, make sure they are supported while they are here and then ensure that after the graduation they are further supported.”

This support can include specific programmes for postgraduate students including financial support but also bursary support for low-income students doing internships.
In addition to efforts of universities, she also stressed implications about our society gained from the qualification inflation debate: “You have to question what kind of society we are living in which requires you to be doing more and more.
“I think we overweight the economic argument for education. I think we should rebalance it in some way, so that we recognise the social and the cultural contributions that we make when we are educated. Only thinking about getting a good job is such a transactional mode, while what we really want is our students to be transformational.”