Whose Target Group is it Anyway? The Messy Business of Enacting Widening Participation Policy
Policy tends to narrow the number of available routes to a destination without providing a detailed roadmap for how to get there. In widening participation to HE, institutions have been instructed to target activity at ‘under-represented’ and ‘disadvantaged’ groups - but ideas about who represents a ‘WP target group’ have shifted over time.
My research project set out to understand how staff working to deliver this agenda in university WP teams were translating national policy into their local settings. In particular, I wanted to explore how contextual factors, such as institutional positioning in the sector, the broader policy landscape, external partners, subject offering, student intake, and geography influence how targeting policy is enacted. Within this, the study was specifically concerned with understanding how contextual factors shape the understanding and application of socio-economic status, ethnicity and gender as targeting criteria.
Target groups - a moveable feast?
Conducting a review of policy documents produced by the government and HE sector regulator between 2004-2020 revealed that the groups that are positioned as the target of the widening participation agenda have shifted over time.
Consistent under changing governments and regulatory regimes has been a focus on socio-economic inequalities, whereas gender and ethnicity are more of a mixed bag. While a long-running HEFCE guidance document explicitly rejected ethnicity as a targeting criteria in its own right, at other points it has featured as a focus on general ‘BME’ (Black and Minority Ethnic) participation (later moving to attainment), as an ambiguous reference to targeting students from ‘some’ minority ethnic groups, and in a more recent focus on white students from socio-economically marginalised backgrounds.
On the other hand, gender inequality has been a less obvious policy priority, mentioned early in relation to female under-representation in STEM and resurfacing more recently as a factor that can be considered in combination with other characteristics. Perhaps most prominently, this has included a focus on boys from white, working-class families as a specific target group.
Putting policy into practice
There are different ways of conceptualising how policy gets ‘done’. While models of policy implementation have traditionally been top-down and linear, alternative theories of policy enactment understand policy as a heavily contextualised process. This approach recognises that policies don’t exist in a vacuum – they jostle for position alongside other (sometimes competing) priorities, shaped by a range of contextual factors, and interpreted by numerous policy actors.
In access and participation this includes WP practitioners, a group which has often been overlooked in research (with a few notable exceptions). These professionals have a unique ‘on the ground’ perspective from which to explore the processes of policy interpretation and translation taking place within university WP departments when it comes to targeting.
Repurposing a framework developed to explain policy enactment in schools, my study analysed data gathered through interviews with nineteen WP practitioners working in a diverse range of institutions across England. This staff were working at all levels, from heads of departments through to entry-level roles, and were able to provide a wealth of insight into the ways that contextual forces influence how targeting is put into practice in different local settings.
Key external contexts: sector positioning and regulatory requirements
WP departments in HEIs which occupy a recruiting position, primarily ‘post-92’ institutions with lower entry tariffs and more diverse student bodies, typically favoured schools-based targeting over targeting individual young people. For these HEIs, who enrol high proportions of ‘WP’ students, the external policy pressure of meeting Access and Participation Plan (APP) access targets is reduced.
At the same time, an approach which partially or totally transfers control of individual targeting to school or college partners can generate its own constraints on a WP team. School staff are subject to their own policy pressures, which can derail agreed targeting plans. This approach is also dependent on schools being willing and able to take part, with several practitioners noting that schools with the highest proportions of eligible students, facing the most challenges, were the most difficult to engage.
In contrast, those in high-tariff institutions were more likely to use an individual targeting approach over and above schools targeting, employing points-based systems to prioritise and shortlist applicants meeting the most targeting criteria in what were often competitive application processes. Although these WP teams are based in HEIs that are selective, WP serves an explicit recruitment function in the sense that increasing the proportion of under-represented groups that enter high-tariff institutions is an Office for Students (OfS) national objective.
In this context, targeting tended to include attainment-based eligibility criteria. Depending on other factors such as local population demographics, this could effectively preclude some groups from taking part; one highly selective university in London talked about it being a barrier to recruiting white pupils in receipt of free school meals.
Alongside this, pressure to meet the expectations set out by the OfS was an important force shaping targeting policy enactment. A number of practitioners bought up the shift in approach from the Office for Fair Access (OFFA) to the OfS and a sense that they were operating in a highly regulated environment with potential potentially serious penalties.
External policy pressures were perhaps most obvious in relation to the POLAR indicator. This was the case across all types of institutions but became particularly salient for WP teams in pre-92 institutions, especially those located in geographic regions with fewer target areas. In this context, turning away an applicant to an outreach programme who meets the POLAR indicator, regardless of other information about their socio-economic circumstances, could be challenging.
Key situated contexts: geography and subject-offering
Where an institution is situated geographically can apply a shaping force both because WP departments typically deliver most of their activity in their local region, and because many institutions recruit a significant proportion of their student intake locally. For example, the population around an institution steered one team to develop work for Gypsy Roma and Traveller (GRT) students as a specific target group, reflecting demographic shifts in the locale.
Similarly, an institution with a STEM-based subject offering in an ethnically diverse geographic setting recruited a high percentage of students from Black, Asian and minority ethnic groups, and as a result targeting on the basis of ethnicity was not part of the WP team’s approach. A schools-based targeting approach could allow for ethnicity targeting where local populations were diverse or make it a challenge where institutions were located in less diverse geographic area. One interviewee discussed the practical and ethical issues that working with schools with few BAME pupils raises, with concerns about the potential implications of ‘singling out’ these students for WP activity. On the other hand, approaches which required individual students to apply to WP schemes facilitated the targeting of specific under-represented ethnic groups.
The disciplinary context of an institution -that is the subjects that it offers or in some cases specialises in -was also a factor shaping WP targeting approaches. The prior training required for many courses in small, specialist performing arts institutions is highly skewed towards more socio-economically advantaged families and privately educated young people, creating a context in which the participation of state school students in general is a key criterion for measuring progress in WP.
More widely, subject-offering context can shape targeting approaches in relation to gender. Several interview participants discussed the conflicts that can arise when working with academic departments, for whom gender can take priority over socio-economic indicators in relation to recruiting girls into STEM. Previous research has identified this as an often-overlooked aspect of the policy process – that individual policies are not enacted in a vacuum but rather must be read alongside, and prioritised amongst, an array of other (possibly conflicting) policy demands.
What next for targeting in WP?
These interviews give some insight into the ways that contextual factors can shape the targeting approach adopted in an institution, making possible the inclusion of some target groups while locating others as redundant or impractical.
Translating a national policy of targeting ‘underrepresented groups’ requires WP practitioners to navigate a complex range of constraints and enablers, often involving a degree of struggle between coexisting policies and institutional priorities. Understanding these varied contexts helps to explain why approaches to WP targeting across HE share a family resemblance, yet differ in the details.
With the first tranche of new APPs recently submitted, it will be interesting to see how a risk-based approach to access and participation and the myriad student characteristics identified in the EORR will reshape understandings of targeting in the sector.
This blog post is based on the paper Whose target group is it anyway? The messy business of enacting widening participation policy in the Journal for Further and Higher Education. A future blog will look at how other contextual factors - the values, beliefs and experiences of WP practitioners, and the material resources available to WP teams to deliver their work - also play a role in shaping how targeting policy gets ‘done’.
About the author
Jessica Benson-Egglenton is an evaluator with a passion for understanding and tackling higher education inequalities. She is currently undertaking an ESRC-funded PhD at Sheffield Hallam University, researching journeys into HE for girls from white, working-class families. Alongside this she offers evaluation and research consultancy, drawing on over a decade of experience evaluating access and participation initiatives.
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