Widening participation in higher education: recent trends in England and Scotland 
13 August 2012
12.30pm
Venue: Room N357, N block, Faculty of Education, Gate 4, 60 Epsom Ave, Epsom (View map)
Seminar with David Raffe and Linda Croxford, University of Edinburgh
This presentation will review the changing social and ethnic composition of higher education in England and Scotland. It will ask whether participation has ‘widened’ to include more students from working-class and ethnic-minority backgrounds. It examines how these students are distributed across institutions within each country, and asks if there is any evidence of change in the institutional stratification of UK higher education. The presentation draws on the research project on Changing Transitions to a Differentiated Higher Education System, supported by the Nuffield-Foundation, which is analysing data collected by the UK’s unified admissions service (UCAS) for selected years from 1996 to 2010. The presentation will set the research in the context of three current policy and research debates in UK higher education, respectively about political devolution within the UK, about widening participation, and about institutional differentiation and diversity.
David Raffe is Professor of Sociology of Education at Edinburgh University, where he has worked since 1975, and is currently Director of its Centre for Educational Sociology. His research covers all stages of education and training from secondary onwards, with particular interests in education-work transitions, educational inequalities and education and training policy, including several recent studies of qualifications frameworks and other curriculum and qualifications reforms. He has participated in several international networks and he has worked with international organisations including the European Commission, the OECD and the ILO. He helped to pioneer an emerging field of ‘home-international’ comparisons of the home countries of the UK. He has participated in several Scottish and UK policy committees and working groups, and he currently serves on the Access and Inclusion Committee of the Scottish Funding Council and the Qualifications Committee of the Scottish Qualifications Authority.
