The Engine of Widening Participation in the Drive for Social Mobility

In examining the policy and practice of widening participation (WP) within universities in England since the 1960s, this thesis considers the ways in which the purpose of higher education becomes politicised to reinforce the long-standing socio-economic inequalities of British society. Using policy and discourse analysis to detail the creation and growth of WP at a macro-level, it shows how ideas of individual success that correlate learning with labour become bound within narratives of social mobility that are underpinned by an ideology of 'neoliberal meritocracy'. Analysis of the Access and Participation Plans of two ‘elite’ universities and two universities situated within ‘social mobility coldspots’ offers a meso-level investigation which is then considered alongside a micro-level analysis which examines the work of university outreach activities. Together, these findings suggest that WP's dependence on ‘disadvantaged’ students results in the creation of systems of measurement that operate in uniform and ambiguous ways to act as a 'homogenising knowledge regime' that generates a ‘class’ of student that can be monitored and measured. Littler’s (2017) work on 'meritocracy' provides structure for discussion that consolidates findings from the macro, meso and micro-level analyses, to propose that the failure of WP to address the social and economic inequalities of British society results in a 'legitimation crisis' (Habermas, 1988 [1973]) for the narrative of social mobility. In turn, a 'political spectacle' (Edelman, 1988) becomes manifested through the Augar Review (2019), which directs blame towards higher education in a double-move that re-legitimises the political narrative of social mobility through the re-shaping of higher education, with this process working to distort the education of ‘disadvantaged’ students by redirecting their learning away from pedagogy that fosters democratic citizenship (Dewey,1963) [1916]).