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JAPP: Abstracts

Volume 1, Number 2, Spring 2004

Articulation and credit transfer in Scotland: taking the academic highroad or a sideways step in a ghetto?
John Field, University of Stirling

Abstract

Scotland’s higher education system is characterised by a high level of participation in courses offered through further education colleges. Current Scottish Executive policy is based on the assumption that there is at least 50 per cent participation in higher education, which is seen as a consequence of the growth of HE in further education. Closer investigation suggests that while the initial entry rate may be around 50 per cent, those who enter HE in further education are disproportionately likely to leave without achieving a qualification; few who achieve an HE qualification in further education subsequently progress to degree level study; those who do progress to a degree course mainly enter lower-status institutions. Current Scottish policy, therefore, makes only a limited contribution to increased social mobility for students from less advantaged backgrounds. While some progress is being made on articulation between FE and HE, little has been done to reduce attrition and improve achievement within FE, and as a result the claim for a 50 per cent participation rate disguises deep and entrenched educational inequalities.

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Women accessing education: subjectivity, policy and participation
Penny Jane Burke, Institute of Education, University of London

Abstract

This article draws on ethnographic research conducted from 1997 to 2001, focusing on the critiques and accounts of a group of mature students participating in access programmes (‘Access to Higher Education’, ‘Return to Study’ and ‘Women’s Studies’) at a case-study English suburban further education college. The article focuses in particular on the white, working-class women who participated in the study, to consider the connections between their gendered and classed subjectivities and the contemporary discourses in play within the policy of access education. It considers the meanings that the women bring to their courses, including their desire for self-discovery through education. The women found their way to education owing partly to a longing for ‘a space of their own’. Their longing challenges the discourses of widening participation found in contemporary policy documents, which construct access education as primarily a functional and utilitarian bridge into work. However, the women’s narratives also reinforce meritocratic discourses that construct access students as individuals, outside gendered and classed relations, with natural qualities and abilities, obscuring complex social processes of identifications, exclusions and inclusions that operate within (and outside) educational sites.

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‘Failure dances to the tune of insecurity’; affective issues in the assessment and evaluation of access learning
Judith George, John Cowan, Lindsay Hewitt, Open University
Pete Cannell, Queen Margaret University College, Edinburgh

Abstract

This paper reports on the curriculum design of an Access programme in Dumfries and Galloway which has taken 23 per cent of its intake of disadvantaged adults successfully into FE and/or HE, and many others into employment. The nature of the assessment, summative and formative, which was incorporated in the integrated curriculum design, was critical to creating confidence, a positive attitude to education, and thence to successful engagement with cognitive demands. Data from the programme demonstrates the importance of addressing such students’ affective agendas, and how facilitated self-assessment in particular is a vehicle for ‘mainstreaming’ students from the isolation of disadvantage into successful educational progress.

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Solid bedrock or shifting sands? The risky business of laying foundations
Kevin Brain, Geoff Layer and Ivan Reid, University of Bradford

Abstract

This paper examines the risks Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) run in attempting to develop and deliver Foundation Degrees (FDs). It draws on case study findings from two HEIs’ attempts to negotiate the risky business of: initial development and steering a course between partnership, collaboration and competition; securing employer involvement and moving towards vocational provision; and using FDs to promote access and participation. It is argued that the risks are generated by the ways in which FDs create processes of detraditionalisation and individualisation to meet differing, if not contradictory, aims - e.g. widening participation and addressing skills gaps. The paper concludes by arguing that the extent to which FDs become embedded in the HE landscape will depend on how well these processes can be negotiated. This will require central government to reduce and redistribute the risks of developing and delivering FDs. At the very least this will necessitate addressing the tensions between the vocational and widening participation/inclusion drivers of FD policy.

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Debate and Discussion: @ccess denied? ICT as widening participation
Neil Selwyn, Cardiff School of Social Science

Abstract

Information and communication technology (ICT) is at the heart of current multibillion dollar policy drives to establish inclusive learning societies - primarily on the basis of the power of new technologies to widen access and participation. This is despite strong criticism over the last forty years of the inequable nature of ICTs in education as well as a recently emerging research literature which suggests that ICTs are having little impact on overall patterns of (non)participation in education. Given the evidence of the past four decades years the received wisdom of ICT as a ‘technical fix’ for inequalities in educational access could - and should - be strongly challenged on a number of points. In order to frame a more realistic discussion of what roles ICT can and cannot play in adult education this paper briefly discusses four popularly held misconceptions of ICT-based education which urgently need to be addressed if the equitable potential of ICT is to be even partially realised.

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Debate and Discussion: Access to higher education among lower socio-economic groups: a historical perspective
Sarah McNicol, University of Central England

Abstract

A commitment to greater participation in higher education by those from lower socio-economic groups has existed for more than a century. However, many of the barriers that were present at the beginning of the twentieth century, including under-attainment, a lack of aspiration and admissions criteria, still featured in policy documents almost a hundred years later. This may suggest that little real progress has been made. By analysing and comparing policy documents from the early twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, this article considers the extent to which the ways of thinking about the question of access to higher education for those from lower socio-economic groups has changed during the twentieth century.

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