The Business of Widening Participation: the political economy of HE access in a neoliberal system
- Colin McCaig, Sheffield Hallam University
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This paper will discuss the political economy of widening participation (WP) policy in the English market context. It focuses on how WP policy – at a national and institutional level – has evolved in response to two major policy imperatives of the last 50 years: the human capital-driven expansion of the HE system; and the process of marketisation through differentiation begun with the 1987 White Paper. It draws on some my recent work, including McCaig, C, Rainford, J and Squire, R (Eds) (2022) The Business of Widening Participation: policy, practice and culture and my 2018 monograph McCaig, C (2018) The marketisation of English Higher Education: a policy analysis of a risk-based system. The paper uses a policy analysis approach (Fairclough and Fairclough 2013) to explore developments in WP policy in the English HE system since 1997, in the context of system marketisation. Situating WP as a natural corollary of system expansion (dating from the Robbins report of 1963) and a developing process of marketisation of the English system since 1986, this analysis traces the entanglement of dual social justice and economic ‘human capital’ imperatives in policy discourse. Alongside increasing concerns about the costs of a demand-led market, particularly after the removal of number caps in 2015/16, the HE system has been subject to growing regulatory oversight since the Higher Education and Research Act (2017) and the establishment of the Office for Students (OfS). And higher-level policy concerns have switched away from widening participation for all, bringing the choice-driven market back into question.
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Colin McCaig is Professor of Higher Education Policy at the Sheffield Institute of Education, Sheffield Hallam University. He has around twenty years’ experience of researching the field of widening access and participation policy and practice, often employing critical discourse analysis and policy discourse analyses to explore the relationship between the evolving marketisation of the English sector and how WP is reflected in differentiated practices at institutional level. Other related research has focused on admissions policy since the Schwartz Review of 2004, and the impact of student number controls – and their removal in 2015/16 – on the English HE market we see today. He has also led many large scale programme evaluations of WP practice, including Aimhigher, the National Collaborative Outreach Programme (NCOP) for HEFCE and most recently Uni Connect, for the OfS. He is currently a Principal Investigator on a OfS and Research England-funded project to widen access for black, Asian and minority ethnic students into postgraduate education, as part of the Yorkshire Consortium for Equity in Doctoral Education (YCEDE) between 2021 and 2025. This is a collaboration between five universities in Yorkshire, 12 UKRI funded Doctoral Training partnerships and Centres for Doctoral Training plus a number of external partners dedicated to equity at doctoral level.
