In January I attended an event alongside colleagues from over 50 universities spanning the breadth of the country.
Collectively we held a significant chunk of the sector’s strategic responsibility for developing, writing and delivering activity linked to the Office for Students’ vision for fair access and participation.
We came from different regions and geographic contexts, working in a range of providers of different sizes, histories, and specialisms.
What brought us together, however, was a passion and commitment to a set of underlying principles which form the foundation of our collective endeavours.
The Forum for Access and Continuing Education (FACE), a charity committed to enabling opportunities across the educational landscape, held their annual summit at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
With speakers such as Public First and John Blake, Director for Fair Access at the Office for Students, the event examined how work which promoted fair access and participation could help us navigate a period of significant turbulence within the HE sector, and society as a whole.
Challenges and threats
It’s fair to say that doing so won’t be easy. The opening plenary from Public First brought home the gravity of the challenge ahead. Whilst many of us thought that a change in government, and an end to the relentless attacks on the sector linked to culture wars narratives, would make life easier for the sector, we may have been overly optimistic.
Providers may not be bracing themselves for a barrage of criticism from policymakers, but we are far from the top of the list of governmental priorities for support.
Polling of voters demonstrated that education, let alone higher education, just wasn’t at the top of issues that they cared about. When this is combined with the fact that, compared to schools with leaky roofs and a Further Education sector whose funding has been decimated, universities seem pretty awash with cash – and it makes it difficult to gain the buy-in necessary to bring about much-needed reform in the sector.
Without reform, it is highly likely that those who will be hardest hit by challenges linked to a financial crisis will be students who already navigate multiple barriers linked to experiences of inequality.
Whether it be cuts to university access funding, the hours that they will have to work alongside their studies, or a lack of subject breadth available to study locally due to course closures, we would be naive to assume that these challenges wouldn’t be compounded for students who have fewer cultural, social and economic opportunities afforded to them to begin with.
It leaves us facing the possibility that, without these students being robustly advocated for in conversations linked to policy and practice, any progress made in greater equity of opportunity to date could unravel quickly and significantly.
Opportunities
But where there are threats and challenges, there are also opportunities – for a bold, innovative approach to the ways in which we meet them.
It would be fair to say that, at times, the sector may have rested on laurels with regard to fair access and participation. Generally speaking, the Blairite goal of “getting more bright poor kids” to university has succeeded. We’ve seen a massive expansion of student numbers, and a significant increase in the diversity of the sector in terms of types and sizes of institution.
However, it has also become painfully obvious that this isn’t enough. For our sector to truly fulfil its potential, we need to demonstrate how it can be achieved through enabling opportunity. The conversation about this to some degree has already begun. In December John Blake, announced his vision for the future of collaborative outreach. Within this was greater focus on regional partnerships as cornerstones in our national efforts to tackle inequity of opportunity.
Within the ocean of policy decisions facing the new government, this is just a ripple. DfE has consultations on on the school curriculum and school inspections, there’s a delay in the rollout of the Lifelong Learning Entitlement, and serious thought is being given toward a National Youth Strategy.
For those of us who work as professionals in university access and participation, the capacity for our work to contribute to the generation of civic, social and economic opportunities are readily apparent.
But when it comes to the articulation of higher education’s value, our significant efforts are often overlooked or untapped. As a community, we convened at the FACE Summit to mobilise and become larger than the sum of our parts – to, as a collective, begin to proactively engage in policy issues which directly impact upon on the lives of people, young and old, who we have made it our vocation to support.
That means creatively and innovatively engaging with the role of universities in meeting the challenges presented in wider society, and to be bold in our articulation of a fairer, more equitable future.
If the sector wishes to robustly demonstrate how it breaks down barriers to opportunity, talking to us would be a very good place to start.
