The Business of Widening Participation: Policy, Practice and Culture

Widening access to university has become a major component of education policy in the past few decades, particularly in the UK and Europe.The aim is to make a university education more accessible for people from traditionally under-represented backgrounds and to ensure student bodies reflect the diversity of wider society.This key volume presents, for the first time, a critical analysis of the 'business of widening participation’ in a marketised context, featuring contributions from some of the major academic and practitioner researchers in the field.Encompassing how WP policy (as a subset of HE policy) is made, enacted and implemented at various stages, also presented are multiple professional and cultural perspectives on how WP is experienced and understood by those enacting policy. Chapter authors explore how the two aspects of the ‘business of widening participation’ work together to shape how WP is understood and done, as well as the possibilities for doing otherwise by employing