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Access and participation (in higher education?) as a field of study
Gareth Parry, City University
Like other areas in the study of continuing education, access and participation is a field with open, overlapping and all-embracing boundaries. At its broadest, what is encompassed is the totality of opportunities and resources for adults to engage in learning activities of all kinds, whether provided by agencies or developed by individuals and groups themselves. Given this range and diversity, studies of participation have tended to focus on involvement in particular or related forms of education and learning. Here as elsewhere the distinction drawn between formal, non-formal and informal education has supplied convenient categories for designating and dividing the nascent research field. While these categories offer a means of locating and surveying disparate studies in different national settings, the development of access and participation as a systematically defined and internationally accepted field of study has yet to be realised.
The balance of research activity between these three domains has remained markedly uneven. Despite the greater appreciation of self-directed learning and the new regard for corporate classrooms and learning organisations in the non-formal sector, the majority of studies have continued to be conducted in relation to the formal education system. And within this system it has been higher education which has tended to receive most attention from researchers and commentators.
The reasons for this asymmetry are not solely to do with conceptual and methodological difficulties in defining the nature and extent of participation: critical as they are in describing self-planned learning; and problematic as well in respect of more visible forms of organised learning promoted by non-educational bodies. More practical and political issues are also involved. Higher education is part of the provided system and commonly identified with what is most formal, prescribed and sustained in the education of adults. In some contexts higher education will account for much if not most of post-secondary education. Even where this is not the case its influence on teaching and learning in other sectors can be significant. This stamp and reach together with its strategic importance and accountability to the state is sufficient to ensure that those who participate in higher education will be subject to public scrutiny; not least by those who fund or administer the system and by those employed to study that system.
What is a submerged or ‘more or less’ form of activity in the context of informal education is rendered less of a problem in the formal system where participation is treated more ‘as a dichotomous event which does or does not take place’[1]. Again, this is most manifest in respect of higher education where study is coterminous with designated institutions, planned courses, advanced learning, intensive teaching, and formal assessments leading to credits and qualifications. In these circumstances, there is always the danger that the phenomenon of participation will be reduced to an administrative category or statistical measure imposed ‘from above’; and equally that quantitative approaches to the study of participation will be adopted in preference to more qualitative designs and interpretive procedures.
The purpose in what follows is not to argue for any one construction of the field. Rather the aim will be to comment on the distinctiveness of research activity in the British context where the emphasis on access and participation in relation to higher education has been particularly conspicuous.
From being a marginal presence in higher education in numerical and policy terms at the beginning of the 1980s, those described as mature entrants have come to outnumber young entrants for the first time[2]; and access to higher education for adults has been incorporated, again for the first time, in major White Papers on higher education[3] and further education[4]. Given this change in the policy climate and the underdevelopment of the existing research base in adult and continuing education, one is able is to understand how the interests of higher education - and to an increasing extent of further education - have shaped the research agenda in this area. Furthermore, underneath these changes at national and international level have been important, and sometimes competing, access ‘movements’ promoting increased and wider entry for different groups of adult learners: part-time students, non-degree students, non-traditional entrants, and disadvantaged groups. At the same time, many of the practitioner-based concerns expressed through these movements have been able to be translated into research and development projects in some number
The various research-based literatures relevant to participation and non-participation in British higher education have grown rapidly since the mid-1970s and these may be traced at three levels: scholarly reviews and statistical summaries which form part of national, international and comparative studies of post-compulsory education; assorted surveys of access and provision at different points in adult, further and higher education; and more local investigations which commonly describe and evaluate the introduction of specific practices, initiatives or innovations.
One feature of this growth is the degree of separation and stratification expressed in the production and dissemination of these literatures, reflecting differences of sponsorship and audience as well as purpose and approach.
Those works commissioned by intergovernmental organisations such as OECD and UNESCO have as their primary aim the collation and comparison of national trends, patterns and developments. Typically, these take the form of general and national studies in one or more sectors of post-secondary education, including higher education. These volumes have the merit of generating both descriptive and more discursive accounts of developments in Britain[5] as well as more theoretical contributions which serve to guide future work. Most significant for analysis in Britain has been the frameworks and insights between elite, mass and universal higher education[6] and latterly in his observations on access and expansion in the British system[7]. This opportunity to examine participation for adults in a general and comparative context has been in some contrast to the more particular and singular approaches to be found at other levels.
Some of the country studies produced for an international audience have in turn informed the agenda for subsequent research and scholarship in Britain, especially under the auspices of the Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE). The Leverhulme studies in the early 1980s[8] and commissioned work for later conferences and colloquia[9], have established the SRHE as the major academic forum for research-related inquiry into participation in higher education, including access and accessibility for adults[10]. The other major arena for research has been the Open University, both in terms of the comprehensiveness of its data on students - which is in marked contrast to that collected elsewhere in higher education - and in terms of its central concern with open access and open learning for adults.
Studies which fall into the intermediate category of empirical surveys of student profiles and access arrangements display considerable variation in scale and scope. At one end lie major surveys of adult characteristics and experiences covering a wide range of educational courses in the formal system[11] and, more exceptionally, accounts embracing an even wider range of formal and informal learning activities. Here higher education is just one source of education and learning and the key issue is not simply the identification of barriers and incentives: it must also involve, according to McGivney, ‘Getting people to the point where they will cross the threshold from participation to non-participation’. As already indicated, comprehensive surveys and analyses of this order figure rarely, if prominently, in the catalogue of research. Because of their breadth and their direct engagement with academic debates and literatures, the sources of funding for such ventures may be more difficult; interestingly, the NIACE study conducted by McGivney was unusual in attracting ESRC support for work in this area.
At the other end of this category - and much more common - lie sundry studies of specific dimensions of the path into and out of higher education. Although concerned in the main with questions of demand rather than supply, the focus of these investigations has begun to shift in the direction advocated by Slowey[12]: away from access ‘to’ higher education and toward outcomes ‘from’ higher education. Some of the early work on routes, admissions and performance in relation to mature and non-traditional students was generated at a time when the case for expanded access was not widely accepted[13]. Much this literature is well-known and well-worn; and is well-represented in contributions to the Journal of Access Studies[14]. More recent work on prospects and outcomes from higher education has begun to appear[15] but that relating to the experience ‘of’ higher education - the third element identified by Slowey has yet to be seriously addressed.
The funding bodies responsible for supporting much of this work - CNAA, Training Agency/TEED, FEU, UDACE, DES - are also responsible for funding a third level of activity: that aimed at development or evaluation rather than extending the knowledge base as such. Many such projects are conducted by practitioners for practitioners; and the preferred means of dissemination is more the local or regional network and less the publication of a final report. Where reports are published, case studies followed by guides to best practice and recommendations for future action constitute the typical format[16].
In this brief review, several gaps in the empirical coverage have been highlighted and some reluctance to consider conceptual, theoretical and methodological questions has been suggested. Despite the focus on higher education, there are some categories of adult students which have largely escaped the attention of researchers -in the field: liberal adult education students, associate and occasional students, postgraduate students, and post-experience students of various kinds. And within the main student body, adults with vocational qualifications and those admitted as direct entrants have hardly been studied at all.
Although much access policy and provision is targeted at those who are underrepresented in all or parts of higher education, the critical examination of race, gender and class relations in terms of the contents, codes and conventions of learning in higher education has been generally neglected; and this is only marginally less so in relation to disability. Indeed, a deeper understanding of the process of participation, its meaning and experience for both older and younger learners, must be a priority in programmes of future research.
The approaches and methodologies appropriate to this task - qualitative as opposed to quantitative and interpretive as well as reflective - have been examined in some depth[17]; but few have followed Weil[18] in her use of grounded theory to explore the experience of non-traditional learners in traditional higher education.
Other examples of more theoretical and conceptual approaches to the study of participation have been made from more discipline based positions, especially sociology[19], history[20] and philosophy[21]. The omission of economics is serious here, even though some economic analyses of wider participation have been attempted[22].
In contrast to these minority efforts, most studies of access and participation have been empirical, cross-sectional and based on the application of diffuse (and somewhat diluted) social science perspectives. The addition of longitudinal studies to this collection would be of particular advantage: in tracking the participation and non-participation of adults across different sectors, levels and styles of education; and, most important of all, in providing another means of capturing the complexity and contingency of the phenomenon of participation.
[1] K. Rockhill (1982) Researching participation in adult education: the potential of the qualitative pe