Challenging assumptions about widening participation in Higher Education

Good evening everybody and thank you for joining us for another of our Inaugural Lecture series. I’m Liz Marr, Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Students) at The Open University and I’m very proud and privileged to be hosting one of our Inaugural Lectures, and particularly one which features my very good friend who I will be talking about in a moment. I am really proud to be hosting this because it showcases some of our research, teaching and knowledge exchange portfolios.

Before we begin the formalities, on behalf of The Open University I’d like to pay tribute to Her Majesty The Queen. The Open University is very saddened to learn of the passing of Her Majesty The Queen and joins people across the world in expressing our condolences to The Royal Family. Her Majesty granted the University it’s Royal Charter in 1969 and visited it’s Milton Keynes campus for our 10th anniversary in 1979 with the Duke of Edinburgh. Her Majesty was a passionate advocate for the power of education as can be seen through her support for schemes such as the Queens Anniversary Prize and various endeavours over the years and when she did visit our campus on our 10th anniversary it played a significant part in the development of the University helping us to gain further credibility for what was then still an educational experiment. We join the Royal Family, the nation and the world in mourning the loss of an extraordinary monarch. Let us just pause for a moment before turning back to the business of this evening.

So now moving back to this evening’s Inaugural Lecture and some background about the series. Each year the Vice-Chancellor invites newly appointed and promoted Professors to give an Inaugural Lecture. Over the course of a year our Inaugural Lecture series provides an opportunity to celebrate academic excellence, with each lecture representing a significant milestone in an academic's career. This evening we’ll hear from John Butcher, Professor of Inclusive Teaching in Higher Education, explore his research and practice in relation to widening participation in higher education and how his focus on the voices of ‘unheard learners’ has challenged simplistic sector assumptions that ‘students’ are merely a homogeneous conveyor belt of school leavers with good A-levels. I’m just wondering what’s changed.

But before we begin, some housekeeping. The lecture will be followed by a Q&A session and then we invite you to celebrate with us downstairs for those of us who are with us in person. For those of us who are watching at home I hope you will find your own way to celebrate after the lecture and the Q&A. For anyone in the audience who is using Twitter, please feel free to tweet using the hashtag that we’ve got displayed here and tagging @OpenUniversity and let the world join us this evening. For members of our audience joining us via YouTube, please use the email address provided and keep your comments and questions brief so that we can address them during the Q&A session, and now about Professor John Butcher.

John, as I’ve said is Professor of Inclusive Teaching in Higher Education at the OU. He was born in 1956. I know not many Inaugural Lectures start with the year of birth of the person giving it, but in his lifetime higher education in the UK has changed beyond recognition. From what might now be viewed as a narrowly elite system, so for example in 1956 only 3.5% of school leavers attended university and they went there to ‘read’ for a degree. I think we hear only hear that a phrase now when we are occasionally watching University Challenge and some universities still read for degrees. But the numbers of institutions since then offering higher education has expanded. It has expanded to include us of course, The Open University, and a considerable number of polytechnics which then became new universities and latterly the expansion of alternative providers. Despite Tony Blair’s subsequently recanted assertion that 50% of young people should attend university, currently 40% of school leavers attend. I think it’s quite interesting that we mentioned Tony Blair there because his son Euan has just been given university status for his apprentice university, Multiverse. So some of those school leavers will be going on to a more practical direct route through higher education.

In his lecture John will explore the phrase most persistently associated with UK higher education over the last 25 years, ‘widening participation’. Popularised first in the 1997 Dearing Review of higher education, John will argue ‘widening’ does not carry the same meaning as merely increasing numbers. A trap that many institutions have fallen into. ‘Widening’ signifies breadth, inclusivity, opportunities for those potential students previously unable to access higher education due to aspects of disadvantage. He will be drawing on a conceptualisation of three barriers to participation identified in Stephen Gorard and colleagues work as dispositional, institutional and situational and although that was in 2006 not that much has changed since.

John will first identify key aspects of his own ‘first in family’ transformative journey to make the case for widening participation as an active process. He will then draw out ‘unheard’ voices from his research with disadvantaged students to illustrate the need for institutional change, without which universities will remain stuck in a spiral of inflexible and narrowing participation, ignoring adults who may only be able to study part-time, and I don’t include The Open University in that by the way.

It now gives me great pleasure to introduce Professor John Butcher.

Welcome everybody and thanks for making the effort to attend here whether in person or online. My lecture is going to be structured into 5 related parts and I’ll try and develop an argument about widening participation in higher education alongside my own educational journey and key moments in my career and there will be some Bowie quotes as well. I’d like to dedicate this lecture to my brother seen here in the photograph with my dad. My dad knew about my Chair just before he died a couple of years ago aged 96 and I kept the note his carer gave him when I rang with the news. So this really means a lot to me. I’m honoured to be giving this lecture.

My own professional journey has been a non-linear slow burn. A tortoise as opposed to the hare of a more conventional research-led trajectory. I gave my professional doctorate at 45 and having trained as a teacher I am proud my Chair was awarded for teaching rather than research, although ironically my lecture will now draw upon the findings from my research, hopefully applied to teaching. I also at this point want to signal huge thanks to my research collaborators and co-authors and indeed team members over the last 25 years.

So let’s set the scene. Widening participation starts from the premise that talent is spread evenly but educational opportunities are not. To ensure fair access to higher education the verb ‘to widen’ suggests activities not merely about increasing numbers but rather increasing the breadth of opportunities. This is a worldwide issue. The United Nations sustainability goals identify affordable higher education as bringing immense individual and societal benefits and although university participation has grown substantially in many countries this has not necessarily widened the diversity of learners. Barriers to fair access still impact profoundly on the lives of a diverse range of citizens. Equity issues are identified in the literature from Australia, South Africa and the US and there is developing awareness in Europe of the need for more inclusive to approaches to higher education to address disadvantage.

But I am going to concentrate on the United Kingdom and start with the Office for Students, England’s regulator for Higher Education. There are 7 backgrounds associated with disadvantage here and as you can see these are backgrounds which will impact on many students’ access to higher education. Even if they get in their ability to achieve in higher education and even if they achieve in higher education what they go on to do afterwards. So we are talking here about students from specific black and minority ethnic backgrounds, from white working class communities, from low participation neighbourhoods. The lowest quintile of economic status which is a euphemism for poor, students with disabilities or ongoing health problems and first in family. I think I would argue that this is all exacerbated if you happen to be an older learner as well.

So if we just reflect on the efforts to widen participation following that Dearing Review in 1997. There have been over 20 years and millions spent on widening participation. But there remains a considerable inequity in access with working class and ethnic minority students spread very differentially around institutions and achieving and progressing significantly worse than students from disadvantaged backgrounds. As I say I think age amplifies some of these barriers, particularly for those only able to study part-time. Widening participation undoubtedly began with a drive for greater social justice but I think policies have since morphed into assertions about the need for advanced skills to benefit the economy and indeed can now be viewed against a backdrop of worsening inequality in society.

Now there are significant widening participation policy differences between England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and no government consensus as to its purpose. So let’s think. Is it a tool for speeding the journey towards a more equitable society, requiring interventions to mitigate adversities faced by individuals? There is certainly evidence of financial support policies in Wales or regional partnerships in Scotland to suggest this can be so. Or is it driven by the imposition of neo-liberal values of market in which an empty mantra of choice imbeds adversity into the system. Tripling tuition fees in England in 2012 may well have resourced university expansion, but too often the most left behind students have been ignored. Or thirdly is it a panacea for addressing skills shortages in an increasingly digital world. The recent White Paper in England suggests this direction of travel that simultaneously risks constraining inclusive access to higher education.

Policymakers in England seem ambivalent about the role of widening participation defaulting to somewhat confused and confusing messages around social mobility or levelling up and I worry that clarity can then be lost. I wonder if widening participation itself is an increasingly problematic phrase diluted while competing with euphemistic related policies. Clearly I am not arguing there’s anything wrong with social justice or closing awarding gaps or student success or inclusion or diversity or social mobility, but these are all competing in a very, very cacophonous space and I think sometimes the impact of widening participation can be a bit lost.

What are the obstacles preventing fairer access to higher education? Gorard’s 3 barriers. First of all situational, those kind of invisible adversities for individuals already struggling with unequal access to resources. We think of learners who might need to work to support the cost of higher education and as a result they are often time poor, stressed by commuting and debt conscious. Or there are those dispositional barriers, essentially psychological. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds who may carry a negative prior experience of poor learning and be easily knocked back by a disappointing grade. We heard today about an access student who didn’t think 70 was a very good mark and worried about it. They need to believe the institution wants them there and to build trust with the tutor. Finally I think the really interesting one are those institutional barriers which reflect the inflexibilities inherent in systems which remain largely premised on young students attending university campuses full-time. I think institutions need to get much better at recognising the diversity of potential students and support them with flexible and inclusive teaching. The latter in particular I think affects the student lifecycle. Having got in can the Rita’s of the world thrive and succeed in their own terms.

I think its worth saying participation gaps remain and they tend to be based on the lottery of birth circumstances. Don’t be fooled by the annual announcement of a rise in 18 year old students entering higher education from POLAR1, the lowest quintile for young people's participation in higher education by local area. We have to deal with this gobbledygook all the time. I apologise for that. It's a partial truth, but it masks the persistent gap between the most advantaged and the most disadvantaged. If adult part-time students are included 17% fewer students from disadvantaged backgrounds now access higher education, but it's important the numbers here. So there are roughly 193,000 undergraduate students in England studying part-time, it's not small numbers. Around 18% of first year undergraduates are studying part-time. So not all students are 18 year old school leavers.

So, you might be thinking, where does the story commence? It’s 1956. Soviet troops have just rolled into Budapest, Elvis Presley just released Heartbreak Hotel, and 20,000 full-time students graduated in UK higher education. That’s a pretty good crowd at MK Dons actually. I was born into the 96.5% with virtually no opportunity of higher education.

Now the much quoted Robbins Report from 1963 foresaw a continuing modest expansion in higher education. So when I was 7 what did my parents, there's my parents before they got married, a nice photo I think. What did my parents aspire or expect from me? I think it's worth thinking about the difference between aspiration and expectation. As we go through my lecture maybe we can think about that and draw that out at the end. The notion of first in family I think has been crucial in efforts to widen participation. It encourages aspiration in potential learners with little awareness of higher education to draw on. My East End mum left school at the age of 12, my dad at 14, with no qualifications between them. Did my parents have aspirations for me? Of course. Did these include university? Of course not. An unimaginable leap of imagination would have been required to overcome the expectation that university was unattainable from their backgrounds. Their aspiration for me was a secure job in an office, rather than a factory like my dad, so they took out an insurance policy to buy me my first suit on leaving school.

To school, I was extraordinarily nervous on my first day at school which I think gave me some empathy with how adult learners can feel. By junior school I aspired to be a footballer for West Ham of course, and realising my limited ability, a Speedway rider, but absolutely no aspiration to go to university.

The school's aspiration for me was to pass the 11 plus, and I'm steered, and I have to say blissfully unaware, to grammar school. I recall a very tangible herding into the Arts rather than the Sciences. So you could argue my life was shaped by premature specialisation. The school's aspiration was for the status of the sixth form and note there the alignment between proportions attending grammar schools in those days and how many got into university. My aspiration as a gauche 17 year old was to be in a band. I hadn't applied to university. I was utterly sanguine about my 3 grade Es at A-level and didn't feel a failure. Now looking back my parents’ realistic concern was an economic one, giving up salary and security for the unknown investment of 3 years studying. To show them I could work I got a job in a London office, the suit came in handy and I was reading poetry from Upminster library on my commute. I started to crave the transformative experiences I hoped higher education might bring. A full, listen to this, a full local authority grant to cover fees and maintenance partially mitigated parental concerns, but still today I argue poorer families understandably mistrust the economic benefit that HE is sold on.

So let's move on. Fortunately polytechnics had been invented 5 years earlier and after a year I joined the only institution to offer me an opportunity, Wolverhampton. I threw myself into studying, met folks from all parts of the country, watched bands and danced and met my future wife. That's my finishing school.

Lecturer expectations encouraged me, particularly challenges from my curmudgeonly tutor and future Booker Prize winner Howard Jacobson whose novel is an excellent exposé of Polytechnic politics if you've not read it. I was delighted to achieve a 2:1 where not a single 1st was awarded. I experienced the kind of added value that would simply be unavailable if the Office for Students current proposals for minimum entry requirements are introduced.

Universities are regrettably now judged on simplistic clickbait metrics. Are graduates in a well-paid job, or further study or more debt after six months? On the former I failed dismally. I followed my future wife to Aberystwyth just as Thatcherism destroyed jobs. My first pay packet 5 months after graduating was as a part-time life model and I was a cleaner in schools and hospitals. My soon to be wife then started her teaching career in the potteries and I found an affordable part-time Masters at Keele, an Interdisciplinary MA in Victorian Studies, guaranteed to lead to lucrative employment, but I could read obscure books juggling our first child Felicity on my knee. Then I applied to do a Post-Graduate Certificate in Education at Oxford, not Crewe and Alsager College as my tutor advised, know your place. As it happened I loved my PGCE. I loved the Sociology and History and Policy. All areas of teacher preparation long gone, we spontaneously applauded David Hargreaves lecture on comprehensives and when teaching practice clicked I flew. But I never loved the constraints of the school environment. I remember telling my tutor, I do not make this up, literally over a glass of sherry, I would prefer teaching post-16 and he rang the local college which subsequently led to a part-time job and then a summer job teaching on a Youth Training Scheme. This really was widening participation.

Now prepare yourselves. After a term teaching English in a comprehensive and second daughter Imogen appearing, I was delighted to get a further education post back in Essex teaching English to mature students on the new Access programmes, and General Studies to engineers and I still bear the scars of Motor Vehicle 2, as anyone who's ever had a similar role will know. This too was widening preparation, and 2 more children, Oriel and Dominic, arrived.

Then a 1/3rd of a century ago the move to Milton Keynes leading new vocational curricula in 6th form at Stantonbury campus, then a bastion of progressive values and innovation. It was a delight initiating the first BTec National in Performing Arts in a school, introducing Communication Studies and publishing my first article for which I was paid £10 and I had to cash the cheque. Stantonbury in the ’80s and ‘90s was an exciting place to be and some of my youthful colleagues, and they are here today, were there as pupils. I enjoyed mentoring trainee teachers, which led to an M Ed with the OU and I was energetically writing to the educational media about the potential to integrate academic and vocational education post-16 as a way to widen participation, and I played with the Teachers Band and a fifth child, Samuel, arrived.

Now astonishingly my MA in Victorian Studies eventually proved useful. I applied to The Open University in Oxford to tutor Introduction to the Humanities with its 19th century interdisciplinary theme. I'd found my home. Fortnightly evening classes on the OU campus. Mature students lacking in confidence but keen to learn. My students ranged from the severely disabled to the missed out after leaving school at 16, right through to the hospital doctor forced to study sciences when he'd always wanted to study Art History. A truly comprehensive University. I tutored for 20 years learning a lot from my students about what was needed to actually widen participation. So this is one for the Office for Students. Flexibility, affordability, accessibility, inclusivity, engaging teaching, exciting materials and a balance between challenge and support. There we are.

Insights from my tutoring role and my Masters in Education helped me get a full-time job, albeit gambling on a Fixed Term Contract, as a staff tutor in education at The Open University training mature students who had been waiting for a part-time route into teaching, and a sixth child, Verity, appeared 16 years after the first.

A crucial career moment for me, thanks to a staff fee waiver, was my Doctorate in Education. I researched my own practice with mentors and trainee teachers in partner schools supervised by my colleague Hilary Burgess. I adopted that research for publication, Conceptualising effective mentoring relationships into dimensions of support and challenge. As we can see there it's quite an important element to learning I think. Being over supported with little challenge will confirm existing learning but not encourage next steps and leave a learner unprepared to progress to the next level. Too much challenge with little support will scare the student off. Low support and low challenge is a real barrier likely to lead to withdrawal. So that balance of challenge and support is very, very important.

I was fortunate to get some generous study leave and managed to publish a book which synthesised practical ideas and learning from the academic literature and as the original Open University PGCE in Education morphed into a flexible PGCE, I developed interest in the professional development of mentors, co-authoring a Masters module, publishing on school partnerships. My colleague Indra Sinka and I researched and supervised a PhD on the policy gap in teacher education practice and bilingualism, identifying the positives of multiple literacies.

Then my interest in professional development prompted a move to be Director of Learning and Teaching at University College Falmouth, a really rare blank piece of paper role to professionalise teaching in an Art College environment. I developed a Research Centre to stimulate scholarship into teaching across the Arts and learnt much about creative approaches to assessment. Widening participation in the Arts offered really innovative opportunities for learners with disabilities, particularly dyslexia and I got a chance to work across the county’s schools. But widening participation had that strategic shift into an institutional recruitment function, a real tension with widening participation strategies, and Falmouth is a very long way from Milton Keynes. So I took my ideas to a similar role in Northampton investigating teacher education projects, and a new journal to galvanise scholarship. I began to research institutional approaches to widening participation with John Rose-Adams, a former colleague at the OU. I made the mistake of moving to what looked like a better job but I'm afraid Morrissey never said a truer word than ‘I wanted a job and then I got a job, and heaven knows I'm miserable now.’

Fortunately Liz Marr suggested I might like to re-join or apply to re-join I should say, The Open University and this led to my greatest professional opportunity, leading the Open University's Access programme. I should say I was widowed around this time and I remain hugely grateful for the kindness and flexibility of Open University colleagues at the time. But the shift to Access modules was a really important one for The Open University. It was prompted by the risk following that tripling of tuition fees in England that the number of students from disadvantaged backgrounds would be decimated. So at speed 3 interdisciplinary preparatory modules were woven together, Arts and Languages, People, Work and Society, Science, Technology and Maths. Each at the minimum intensity that students could get a tuition fee loan.

After a midlife review a few years later and the introduction more recently of Fast Track versions, the Access programme has just been commended as ‘Institutionally central and nationally important’ and I'm inordinately proud that the programme has given 10s of 1000s of students from backgrounds associated with widening participation the first taste, often for free, of higher education. I'm delighted to have sustained a research base around widening participation, leading 5 biannual international conferences and a programme of seminars annually covering the kinds of topics that the Office for Students will be very interested in around closing the black awarding gap, around first in family, around carers and care leavers, around disabilities and mental health and most recently that impact of digital learning on widening participation which was very, very interesting during COVID.

I just want to shift direction slightly now and reflect upon some findings from my scholarship so we can actually get to hear some part-time adult learner voices. Based on a big study with 1200 Welsh learners, part-time study emerged as merely a Hobson's choice. Now I thought everybody knew what Hobson's Choice meant but I’ve been told they don't. So it's a chimera. Just testing out the audience there. So this is about the chimera of choice and this is really that it's no choice at all, because if you are disabled or poor or remote from a university, you can't really study full- time. So you can only study part-time. So that notion of choice is a very problematic one and needs to be thought about quite carefully. There are also lots of assertions about flexibility around the higher education sector and I think when you actually talk to part-time students who need that flexibility, clearly institutions could do much more in that space.

Finally, a little thing I get a bit fixated on. Policymakers talking about employability is the great mantra and I think they need to recognise that most part-time learners are already working. So it's a kind of rather more nuanced understanding of what employability might actually mean.

Then what we have is a really interesting, I enjoyed doing this, a big follow-up study with part-time students in England and Scotland which was funded by the Higher Education Academy. I think what emerged from this big study was, I think these 5 things summarise it quite nicely, a real challenge for part-time learners with competing demands on their time, so people are time poor. I think this is particularly true for those with caring responsibilities and some members of the audience might predict that that would involve women. So women are, you know, not fairly represented in terms of access to higher education in this particular area. I think the other one is around geographical isolation. Many of our participants who replied, particularly from Scotland and Wales, were geographically isolated. They wanted to engage with some form of part-time higher education, but even if they did they found those kind of progressive employment opportunities they were seeking we're simply not there for them. So a real challenge there. I think we're very aware about the challenge of disability in higher education and thinking about widening participation. There are many kinds of approaches to that. I think what came through for me on this bit of the study was the impact of long-term health impairment. So this would be really those students, for example, who are dependent on medication, or they’re housebound, or they are managing hospital appointments, these are real barriers to gaining access to higher education.

Cost came up as an issue, particularly in England, and I think particularly because unlike perhaps 10, 15, 20 years ago, fewer and fewer employers are offering their part-time learner employees financial help with their studies. So students talked about using their personal savings, borrowing from family, or credit card debt. Many lacked that disposable income to be able to afford to do that and didn't want, even if they could, to take out tuition fee loans. I think the issue of student identity is a really important one as well. So talk to an 18 year old and they will self-identify as a student if they are a student. Talk to an adult part-time learner and being a student comes way down the rank of the 9 other things they have to wear hats for, and indeed many, a bit like Rita I guess, will even hide it from their peers. Interesting, the only students who don't do that are students with a disability. So there's a kind of pride there and a recognition that they are students in a way that sometimes other part-time students might hide from.

I then led a collaboration with the universities of Bristol, Leeds and Birkbeck, which was funded by the Office for Fair Access. This was very much looking at what universities could do to increase the number of adult learners. I think the quotations from Les Ebdon, then the Head of the Office for Fair Access is quite important I think. He says that age should never be a barrier to learning new skills or improving your job prospects. That sounds eminently reasonable to me. Adult learners enrich university communities, but there are still too few of them. So they will actually make the teaching dynamic much livelier and also there must be, and this is a really important one and Wendy and myself are trying to grapple with this one, there must be a broad definition of success when adults do enter higher education. For some adult learners even a taste of higher education can make a huge difference, raising confidence and aspiration for individuals, families, and communities. We haven't yet I think got that appropriate metric there.

I think what I will just say briefly is we looked at 3 forms of intervention. The first one was around preparatory programmes, so a bit like our own University’s Access programme and it became clear that when we look at the impact of that, we looked particularly at our STEM Access module, it was of course about confidence building, it was of course about skills in working with number, but much more crucially, these were students who were afraid of maths. Doing an Access module like this actually reduced that fear of maths and then they were able to succeed in their subsequent studies. At Birkbeck we discovered many part-time learners, there was almost a London effect here, who had fled from conflict zones and needed English as an additional language support as well as the support that the programme provided. But those numbers have dropped I'm afraid since the fees rose.

We also looked at Bristol and Leeds who were trying to take university learning to where the learners were. I think this is quite important. Bristol co-designed taster sessions with organisations working with disadvantaged adults, those lacking conventional qualifications, such as former offenders or people with a history of substance abuse and those learners progressed to a full-time foundation year in Arts and Humanities. But, interestingly or depressingly, the psychological and financial barriers re-emerged as obstacles if any of those adults progressed to Bristol's conventional degree programmes.

Leeds did something very interesting. They targeted outreach activities in the poorer areas of the city. They took peers, so people who sounded like us as it were in Leeds and had some real success with the kind of advice and guidance to really counter the randomness of some adult learner journeys. We also looked at The Open University, some of their virtual offers to get students going as tasters of higher education.

Now simultaneous with all this work I had a dream. I did honestly, there's a sector challenge. Even in institutions like The Open University people can take for granted that we are doing widening participation. There’s a danger that we pay lip service. I was aware of many reports that had been published that had very little impact in relation to understanding barriers that get in the way of widening participation. So I had a dream and my colleague Jay interpreted my dream visually for me. Jay very kindly helped me with the slides tonight. So thank you Jay. I think this is an interesting thing about how do you publish outcomes from research which people might actually engage with? This was shared with Chris Millward, then Head of the Office for Students when he visited The Open University. We did it as a mouse mat didn’t we Jay, and the mouse mat has got more comments than any of the papers I've ever written frankly. So what do I know? Obviously it's a depiction of some of those barriers that disadvantaged students might have to cross, they might need help crossing in order to get to that lighthouse of learning there. It worked at the time in my dream, believe me. Okay. So we're nearly there.

Since 2017 I've been very privileged to be the Managing Editor of the international journal, Widening Participation and Lifelong Learning. I wanted to celebrate its 20th anniversary and initiated a commemorative edition. Some of you are walking around with one, I'm very grateful. So I read, or we read I should say, 450 articles from 69 editions, and it really brought home how little had changed in efforts to widen participation, and how often we fail to learn from initiatives both in the UK and internationally. We grouped them into 3 really. So first of all, perhaps it's an obvious one, that recognition of the need to widen participation for groups who are often facing multiple disadvantage due to situational barriers. They're underrepresented in higher education. So if you go back 20 years there were articles about Muslim mothers with English as their second language who were struggling to engage with higher education, with care leavers, with students with mental health issues. So all of these barriers are very familiar today. I think the second one would be around the need to really think about policy and institutional barriers, things perhaps we in the sector can do something about. The early editorials bemoaned the impact of top up fees on students from disadvantaged backgrounds. The skewed recruitment of private school pupils to elite universities. An unequal access to work experience in relation to the elite professions. So absolutely nothing new there. Then we think about some of the teaching approaches, and in more recent editions of the journal, observations that inclusive teaching approaches are often missing from access agreements. So that pedagogy perhaps is an element that we could think more about. Recent special editions have, again alongside our seminar programme, indicated some of the issues that have been bubbling up. I've mentioned digital learning, the barriers around race and ethnicity, and particularly being a refugee or an asylum seeker.

Now then, this picture clearly represents what assessment feels like to a student from a disadvantaged background. I'm glad you spotted that. Now I was very proud of the approach we took on the Access programme to support new students to succeed in their first steps in higher education. But one of our external examiners suggested, very politely, that a couple of our modules didn't really use very clear language when we were talking about assessment. The guidance was a bit unhelpful as well. So I was very concerned that this would affect the retention of our less confident students and so initiated a scholarship project. A year-long project discovered that our language of assessment was ‘Unfit for Purpose’. What was I thinking? Our introduction was about kind of policing, a bureaucratic process, rather than assessment for learning. We offered with the best will in the world 51 pages of guidance on how to complete 4 assignments. So as one student memorably said, ‘The sentences just go on and on in long paragraphs.’ Significant changes did result.

So I was keen to understand how our Access modules prepared learners to succeed in areas of the curriculum and this bit of work was around the STEM Access module, our Science, Technology and Maths. Partly we started with this one because there was a political infatuation with STEM careers and partly an awareness in the sector that students from disadvantaged backgrounds regard STEM subjects as difficult, and that that in itself is a barrier. So we identified 4 particular impacts, particularly I think looking at students who were lacking in confidence, as I've said, in the use of number, lacking in confidence in their generic study skills and we certainly found that our Access modules improved their confidence in handling mathematics. I think some of these quotations really bring this to mind. So this was a student saying ’I even feel confident in helping my son to do maths homework now. Before this course I would have struggled with this and would not have been competent in assisting him as it would have ended up making him more confused’. But because of the impact of the Access module that was no longer true. We did a follow up study looking at whether the impact was a kind of longitudinal one and we found that students who went on to study Undergraduate sciences who had started with an Access module scored better, did better, persisted better, were more likely to submit assignments, so they’d really learned to be successful students.

Conversely, the government has been attacking the uselessness economically of the Arts. So we looked at our Arts Access module and I think really interestingly found that students were fearful at the start, so a bit like fearing maths on the STEM one, were fearful of what they perceived as high culture. They carried with them really bad teaching of poetry from their schooling and we found that the integration of interdisciplinary skills in the Arts and a real awareness of what careers there might be in the Arts were very helpful to students.

So I just want to finish with a couple of student voices from some larger studies and I think this is quite important in terms of thinking about just these first one's about situational barriers. So students said to us ‘Paying rent or mortgage impacts on people's ability and their decision to invest in part-time education. In my late 30s is it something that's going to be worth the time and the financial investment? It's people like us who've taken the impact of fees.’ I just want to read that bottom one because I think it's a very powerful one. ‘I'm 50 years of age now, a recovering addict, 10 years sober. I work full-time and study in the library on my days off, I'm pretty kind of raw and new to learning. It's hard but my confidence and my outlook has changed in life as well.’ and I think let's just hold that idea for what universities can do. ‘The teacher that actually taught us on our community course is the only person who ever suggested that any of us could even think about university and we didn't believe her for ages either. She just mentioned it and then we went to a study day and it just seemed possible in a way it never had before.’ So as I've said, there certainly are more young students from the most disadvantaged backgrounds entering higher education but they continue to lag behind advantaged students and surely what we want is some of these life-transforming opportunities. Just let me read this bottom one and then I will stop. ‘I hit my teens and my academic life collapsed really so my confidence dipped massively and my brain has been stagnating. I signed up and it reinvigorated the love of learning that I hadn't had for about 10 years. It built on things I may have missed at school. I really want to get back on track with my life really.’ So can we just all remember not all students from disadvantaged backgrounds are 18 years old. Thank you very much.

Thank you John. Now it's time to hear from you in the Lecture Theatre and online with any questions and comments that this talk has raised for you. So John would you like to join me in the seating area?

Nothing would give me greater pleasure.

I just realised that with this microphone thing on my back I haven't been able to lean back right the way through that so that's why I look so attentive.

You were really looking attentive Liz, I was quite flattered.

So we're going to take questions now. Could you hold on for the roving mic to reach you and then say who you are and where you're from and try to keep the questions short so we can get as many in as possible. We would like our online audience also to comment using the email provided on the slide that's showing there. Okay, so we've got a question over here.

Geeta Nicola, retired member of 6 universities including the OU, most recently UCL. I mention that because one of the things that I think the OU does really well in terms of widening participation is the access to its courses for free to its staff. There is, however, a major anomaly which concerns me which is how it ignores its most disadvantaged staff, the outsourced workers who tick so many of the boxes, the diversity, the inclusivity, the low pay, and they aren't allowed the same access and there's an inherent unfairness in that and I'd like to know what you think.

Well I will simply comment about my own experience. I could not have done my Masters degree without my Open University fee waiver when I was a teacher in a school. I couldn't have afforded the fees for my Open University doctorate, which I happened to have a fee waiver for when I was a member of the School of Education. If only there was a Pro-Vice-Chancellor sitting next to me on a chair who might be able to get into the minutiae of that particular question. I agree with you and I don't know the answer. I'm sorry.

I think it's just something that you needed to know because a lot of the staff aren't aware of it.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you. I'm picking up the questions from online. This is from Sarah Andrews. As a 2022 OU graduate, smiley face, working in the sector to support mature students I'd like to know apart from increasing part-time courses what one thing do you think brick HE staff can change to make their courses and campuses more welcoming places for mature students for the greatest impact?

I’d struggle with one, but I'll do my best. I think Vice-Chancellors downwards need to really think about the extent to which the culture of their university is supportive of adult part-time learners. I think you could go right across from is there a creche? Does the canteen open in the evening if students are studying for evening classes? Is there sufficient flexibility in terms of assessment deadlines and teaching practice? I think it's about a culture that is very welcoming to the needs of all students. So I think they need to start with finding out what the needs of their part-time learners are.

Thank you very much. Darren Gray, Access, Participation and Success Team at the OU, pleased and privileged to work alongside you for a few years now John. I was just wondering about the connection, you're feeling the connection between tutor and student and the difficulty in a distant learning environment and the difference that makes particularly for students from the Access, Participation and Success category of students?

That's a really interesting one because I think there's lots of evidence in the sector that not all face-to-face institutions get that one right. So let's think of the challenge in relation to distance learning. I think that the problem we have is that I see a model that works really well but it's expensive. So the model that works really well is on our Access programme where students have a one-to-one relationship with their tutor and the tutoring takes place by telephone. That enables students, particularly from disadvantaged backgrounds, to build up trust with their tutor, which I think when you've had a negative prior experience of education is really, really important. But obviously that is expensive and I think what we see is the experience of some Access students is they thrive in their environment of one-to-one tutoring, and it's a little bit like falling off a cliff when they then go to Level One and maybe it's groups or maybe they don't feel they can speak to their tutor. So I think a bit more of a kind of smooth transition from a very supported experience on Access perhaps through to the end of Level One would be much healthier I think.

Kevin Shakesheff, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation and thanks very much for a really enjoyable lecture. I was wondering looking across higher education across the world, are there other countries that do really good things? Could you pull out any examples of things that we could copy from around the world on widening participation?

I think frankly all countries struggle with this and I think what you have is pockets of particular interest. So, for example, there's some very powerful literature from the States on supporting students from different ethnic backgrounds. Obviously you've got in the States some of the black colleges, but it's also they seem to use mentors and they seem to use kind of student buddies much more effectively than we do most of the time. I think it's really interesting that having done a few things in Europe over the last few years, there's a recognition that they hadn't quite got their heads around issues of inclusivity. So they were still in quite a closed mindset. I think that is changing now, possibly as a result of COVID and the different teaching approaches they've had to take. I think where I've seen really impressive work, although obviously there are anomalies, would be I think in somewhere like New Zealand which has taken a very healthy approach to its students from Maori and Island backgrounds as well and I think that's about very much respectful of a cultural tradition, and then working with them to work that through into specific universities, but I don't think anyone's got the silver bullet for this.

Hi, I’m Lynne O'Neill. I'm a Personal Learning Advisor or a Coach at The Open University. I loved your inclusion of the student voice and I wondered how we can make that more important moving forward?

Thank you for that. I think it's very important that universities, not just The Open University, listen to the student voice. I think we were talking about some examples in my team earlier today where we'd done some kind of qualitative scholarship, we'd interviewed, probably relatively few students, but we'd managed to elicit information from them about things that we could actually do something about in the institution. So we were hearing of things that weren't really working as well as I think we felt they were and as a result we've made those changes. I think the real challenge, and in my first draft I brought this out more, but it was about 3 hours long, is the challenge around a lot of widening participation in research is quantitative. So it's looking at the numbers of students from certain backgrounds and the impact certain interventions will have on them. I'm a qualitative researcher. I think the students’ individual stories are much more telling. I'm not sure we’ve quite got the system yet for translating those stories into changes in practice but I think that's definitely the way to go.

We’ve got another question online. This is a question from Rod Earle. Many thanks for an illuminating and entertaining lecture. It was heart-warming and inspiring and funny. My question is about students in prison because I think they're a very important part of the OU’s record of widening participation in HE, symbolically if not necessarily in big numbers. How do you think this can be maintained as learning goes digital and online and students in prisons risk being left behind in the material world that the other ‘80s icon Madonna sang about?

It's a great question and I think our experience on the Access programme is precisely that, that the shift to digital is making entry level higher education if I can talk about that, more and more challenging. I think there are lots of innovations that the Department for Justice and prison educators are engaging in. Our experience is despite spending a huge amount of time on some of these innovations, they haven't quite landed yet. That's because of obvious concerns about what offender learners can see and can't see online and that kind of thing. But I really would expect that to be solved in the next few years and that students have an appropriate access to higher education. I mean the thing, I'm sure Rod knows this, and we would all argue, is some of that United Nations stuff I was quoting at the start, you educate someone, they're much less likely to reoffend. So there's a real positive about investing in this, but I don't make light of the challenges around the technology.

Thank you.

Another one. This is from Mary Larkin. The success of interventions depend on potential students self-identifying. Some groups are far less likely to identify than other groups, for example, carers. Does John have any ideas about addressing the issue of self-identification in relation to widening participation?

I don't like it. I don't like self-identification because of precisely the reasons Mary suggests. The challenge I think around self-identification is that clearly some students are very happy to self-identify. Some students are not very happy to self-identify and often there's confusion about what you're self-identifying as, the categories themselves aren't very clear. The simple answer and I don't say this flippantly, is a properly inclusive approach to higher education that would encompass the needs of all and then we wouldn't have to widen participation for those underrepresented groups. But there's a flying pig.

Wendy Fowle, Oxford Brookes University, but obviously very closely affiliated with the OU having left the post in April this year. Anyway. So my question and as I was driving in today, I was thinking about inclusivity and equity and how do we ensure inclusivity that enables that equitable experience in the context of widening participation. We talk about widening participation as something that's sits here and people do widening participation, and then once we've done that those students are integrated into this inclusive teaching environment. But I'm not sure that really works. So how can we be inclusive but ensuring that every student from every background needs are met?

By the way I've supervised Wendy’s doctorate. I think what a great question. Again, I think there are challenges because I think the real thing you want to avoid with widening participation is slipping into a deficit mode of thinking and thinking that somehow these students are a bit special and need a different approach and, you know, delicate handling and whatever it is. I think that's not the answer. I think there are ways of us changing our approaches to teaching I think to be much more inclusive. I think that would come in into the nature of what we teach, the nature of how we assess students, the kind of access to support. I think again, the real thing that I think we've done very well on The Open University's Access programme, is we don't send students off elsewhere for support, we embed the support in the teaching materials. So everybody benefits, it seems very equitably to me. I think obviously other bits of the sector, other bits even of the University, probably don't achieve that. But I think the answer would be a kind of revolutionary one really, which is kind of smashing down the system and starting again, or at the very least, a much better recognition that there's nothing undeserving about students engaging with higher education. We want more students engaging with higher education. Perhaps we want more older learners having access to education because they missed out the first time. I understand the challenges Wendy and I think we have to do everything we can to avoid them. But often they can be designed in I think, we often inherit HE systems which are not very well designed.

Hi, I’m nothing to do with higher education. I'm Head of IT at Amnesty International. One of the things that came up several times during your lecture was people working full-time while they're accessing higher education and I just wondered in your opinion is there anything workplaces can do to support people doing that when they're spending, you know, 40 hours a week at work?

That's a really great suggestion and I think it goes back to my point that not just do some part-time learners not tell their peers they're studying, they don't tell their workplace either because somehow it's like maybe you're not really committed to your job or whatever. Wouldn't it be great if all workplaces encouraged their workers to do higher education, as well as training, as well as professional development, provided appropriate facilities for them to do that, maybe in their job time, but maybe after that, that's okay. Also had a system of coaches and study mentors and buddies that some Open University students have benefited from actually, so wouldn't that be great.

I was just going to comment on how disappointing it was that loan funding was cut because there was such a lot of brilliant learning being done in workplaces. I think we had one last question somewhere.

My name is Tariq. I'm a new Lecturer in Engineering and Innovation. Thank you very much for this lecture John. This was really fascinating and I was thinking a lot about a documentary I've watched recently, College Behind Bars, I don't know if anyone else has seen it. But it was about the benefits of giving higher education, delivering good, high quality education to inmates. This has been touched on but I wonder John about your perspective in the kind of higher education that it seems like can make a big impact to inmates could be very scalable to inmates globally. I'm wondering if the key challenge is disseminating that. I could imagine a similar kind of strategy being used for inmates all around the world which I think could have a huge impact. Maybe the OU is the right place for that kind of thing to start. I'm just wondering what you think about that.

Well that’s really interesting. I think the challenge certainly in the UK is that as I understand it, the Department for Justice are politically infatuated with low skills. So in other words they will offer provision in basic entry level skills which they prioritise more than access to higher education. We have to recognise some limited educational qualifications that some offender learners have. So I think it's entirely appropriate that some of that is done. But it feels a bit imbalanced to me and I think the idea of a much clearer progression from some of that provision through to more advanced learning would give inmates a kind of, well I'll use the word, an aspiration as well. So I think there's something that could be done there. But, you know, there are stakeholders I believe is the phrase isn't it? There are stakeholders that would need wrestling into submission first I think.

So thank you very much John for an excellent lecture. There'll be an opportunity for those of you here to talk to John downstairs in a moment, but shall we just thank him in the traditional way.