Understanding working-class student transitions to postgraduate taught education

For nearly two decades, Widening Participation (WP) has been championed by Higher Education Institutions, policy makers and advocacy organisations. This phenomenon refers to activities and interventions which hope to increase the number of young people from disadvantaged or underrepresented backgrounds entering Higher Education (HE). Such efforts are of critical importance, because of the many persistent structural and systematic barriers that many applicants face. This includes disabled students, those from certain Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds and those from less socio-economically advantaged groups. Socioeconomic background, understood through the frame of social class, has a particularly persistent effect on HE entry and attainment, as well as labour market outcomes.
However, the WP conversation has overwhelmingly focused on undergraduate study. Our understanding about postgraduate education, in particular postgraduate taught (PGT) courses (e.g. MSc, MA, PGCE) has suffered as a result. Given that PGT can have a staunchly positive effect on wider career progression, technical expertise and personal competencies which resonate far beyond academia, this knowledge vacuum is concerning. Some limited research has been conducted, although it tends to be quantitative, macro-level - so ignoring the student perspective 'on the ground' - or explore a homogenous setting. There is therefore a particularly pressing need for high-quality qualitative insight to explore the wider
decision-making of working-class candidates as they chose to move towards and through PGT. This will not only contribute new and original academic insight into how inequality operates in an under-researched field, but also support evidence-based policy making in future to enhance educational equality and improve life chances.
Research questions:
1. How and why do working-class students decide whether or not to enter PGT?
2. What are working-class students' experiences of the transition?
3. What do students feel affects their longer-term PGT persistence/success?
Approach:
Educational inequality is frequently theorised from a Bourdiesian perspective (1977, 1986; Reay 2002; Wakeling 2005). This work uses theories of capitals as part of a wider theoretical framework to innovate understanding of educational access. The logic of the 'dominant discourse' (Baumann 1996) - the state and policy architecture - will be unpicked using Foucault's 'docile bodies' to understand how the it hopes to inscribe self-governing, economically rational, productive decisions on student bodies (Foucault 1976; 1979). However, Foucault is rightly critiqued for reifying power and obscuring resistances 'on the ground', what Baumann (1996) terms 'demotic discourses'. Working-class students cannot fully resist the state, but they can outwit it. De Certeau's (1984) 'strategy' and 'tactics' will be applied to primary evidence from PGT students/applicants to look at how 'survival skills' and agency are performed in ways which do not fully overturn the State's dominant power yet undermine its overarching logic.