1: How Do We Know What We Think We Know – And Are We Right? Five New Questions about Research, Practice and Policy on Widening Access to Higher Education

One of the challenges that has dogged widening access work in England since its inception has been how we determine what approaches and activities are successful in encouraging people towards higher education – and why. Twenty years on and there is still no consensus about how access work should best be configured, nor how its success can be rigorously evaluated. In this chapter, I will argue that there is an epistemological deficit in the field and that practitioners and policymakers have too often fallen back on simplistic conceptualisations of human behavioural change and how it is evidenced. Evidencing the direct effects of widening access work is, of course, vital for those pursing a theory of change approach.