Global: Fears of widening participation

In his keynote address to the OECD's Institutional Management of Higher Education conference in Paris, Chris Brink, vice-chancellor of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, looked at doubts and fears expressed about widening participation. Drawing on his experiences of working in South Africa, Australia and the UK, Brink said the idea was not mainly about changing numbers but ratios: increasing the participation of certain groups considered to be under-represented in higher education.

These groups varied from place to place. In Australia emphasis is placed on people of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent; in South Africa after 1994, black people compared with white. In the UK, he found the debate around widening representation was "firmly anchored in the discourse of class, with unblinking use of terminology such as 'the lower socio-economic classes'".

There were three main arguments in favour of widening participation, Brink said. The first concerned rights, obligations and social justice: the idea that all young people had a right to education, so society had a moral obligation to overcome disadvantage. The second was about redress. In South Africa after the end of apartheid there was a drive to increase the ratio of black students to rectify the inequalities of the past. The third referred not to rights, but utility: the idea of optimising potential from across the broad base of the population.

"Our language of discourse on widening participation will differ from place to place according to circumstances, culture and history."

Brink thought this language was important as it could put "conceptual blinkers" on ideas: "If you emphasise deprivation, you will be led to a discourse of victim-hood, entitlement and obligation, rather than to the more neutral topic of optimising talent and tapping potential.

"Our use of language is also important in the discourse (sometimes sotto voce) about why we should not engage in widening participation - or at least why widening participation does not quite get the kind of support its advocates think it should be getting. These mostly have to do with fears that by engaging in widening participation something valuable will be lost, such as educational standards, institutional prestige, strategic focus, or a slice of the budget."

Brink turned to the fear that "standards will drop". He thought it necessary to distinguish entry standards from exit standards. His experience at the University of Cape Town in the mid-1990s, when Dr Mamphela Ramphele was South Africa's first black woman vice-chancellor, showed that success depended on whether value-added measures were instituted for students entering under a special admissions programme and how effective these were.

Flexible access was coupled with an academic support programme offering extra tutorials, better staff-student ratios and extended degree courses. With this extra help, students were of equal standard on graduation to those on the standard programme.

"I realised at that time that the reward of teaching is not just in turning straight-A school-leavers into straight-A graduates, but also in turning weak starters into strong finishers."

He said there was now solid evidence for the claim that sufficient value-added measures could result in students with lower entry standards attaining perfectly acceptable results, even for the demanding medical degree. At Newcastle University, students had been admitted into medical school on a Partners Programme which accepted those from poorer backgrounds and grades. Despite this, their pass rates were comparable to those of conventional students.

Another fear was "our reputation will suffer" - one which could not be dismissed lightly in the light of notice taken of newspaper league tables. But he thought sometimes it was best to meet this argument head on. When he was vice-chancellor from 2002 to 2007 of Stellenbosch University, which had strong ties with the apartheid movement, he argued for a change of ethos. Diversity would be good for the university, he told his colleagues.

"The claim I made was that quality needs diversity. This idea was not an immediate hit... What eventually became understood is that I believed Stellenbosch could not attain true educational quality without breaking away from homogeneity."

Brink concluded by saying he believed the comparison of different manifestations of underlying fears told us something about what was essential and what was accidental.

"Essentially, I believe, the fears about widening participation are variations on one theme, which is the fear of the haves for the intrusion of the have-nots. This is not an uncommon phenomenon, and if we are honest about it perhaps we can deal with it.

"But doing so can be confused by accidental factors. In particular, it seems to me that an overlay of class discourse confuses the issue. And when 'lower classes' further acquires the connotation of lesser classes, then the extent of conceptual confusion should become cause for societal concern."

diane.spencer@uw-news.com