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Success and Impact in Widening Participation Policy: What Works and How Do We Know?

Higher Education Policy volume 30, pages 141–160 (2017)Cite this article

Abstract

Efforts to widen the participation in higher education for disadvantaged and under-represented groups are common to many countries. In England, higher education institutions are required by government to invest in ‘outreach’ activities designed to encourage such groups. There is increasing policy and research interest around the effectiveness of these activities and how this might be evaluated. This paper reports the results of a project designed to explore concepts of ‘success’ and ‘impact’ with two generations of practitioner-managers working in this field, including extended telephone interviews with ten active in the mid-2000s, and online questionnaires from 57 engaged in the mid-2010s. The paper concludes that the drive to ‘measure the measurable’ may be undermining successful activities, while unhelpful inter-institution competition has replaced the co-operative ethos and wider social justice aims that dominated ten years ago.

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Figure 1

Source: BIS (2015); DFE (2016).

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the kind support of the Society for Research into Higher Education who funded the AIMS project through their annual research awards programme (December 2013).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Education, University of the West of England, Bristol, BS16 1QY, UK

    Neil Harrison & Richard Waller

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  1. Neil Harrison
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  2. Richard Waller
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Correspondence to Neil Harrison.

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Harrison, N., Waller, R. Success and Impact in Widening Participation Policy: What Works and How Do We Know?. High Educ Policy 30, 141–160 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41307-016-0020-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41307-016-0020-x

Keywords

  • participation
  • access
  • England
  • partnerships
  • aspirations
  • attainment
  • targeting