Increasing or Widening Participation in Higher Education? — a European overview

Working towards widening participation in nurse education.

The widening participation agenda has particular significance for worldwide nursing since it is a profession which is under increasing scrutiny in its recruitment and retention practices. Debate about this agenda within nurse education is strengthened by careful scrutiny of the research within the wider context of higher education, some of which challenges commonly held assumptions. This paper ...

Who is missing from higher education?

This paper discusses the difficulties of establishing a clear count of UK higher education students in terms of the categories used for widening participation, such as occupational background or ethnicity. Using some of best and most complete data available, such as the annual figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency, the paper then establishes that there is little evidence of a simp...

Partners in Participation: integrated approaches to widening access in higher education

Gender Differences in Education

Gender Differences in Education This paper surveys the trends in gender gaps in education, their causes and potential policy implications. I show that female educational attainment has surpassed, or is about to surpass, male educational attainment in most industrialized countries. These gaps reflect male overrepresentation among secondary school drop-outs and female overrepresentation among ter...

‘Widening Access’ to higher education: the reproduction of university hierarchies through policy enactment

Patterns of participation in higher education (HE) in the UK, as elsewhere, have been marked by social inequalities for decades. UK Governments have responded with a plethora of policies and agendas aimed at addressing this broad social issue. However, little is known about how higher education institutions (HEIs) interpret and ‘enact’ these policies in relation to institution-specific contexts...