1: Access to Success and Social Mobility Through Higher Education: A Curate’s Egg?

Increasing and widening access to lifelong learning, post-secondary and tertiary education has been, in one guise or another, a political issue for a very long time. In the UK, it stretches back as far as the immediate post-First World War concern with social and economic reconstruction (Burke & Jackson, 2007). Since then, there have been a very large number of government and other reports and initiatives about widening participation (WP).

Globally, efforts by many authorities have produced significant change. For example, a recent report by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) (2017) notes that ‘Worldwide there are DOUBLE the amount of students in higher education now than there were in 2000’.¹ Despite such apparent successes, these matters were included as one of the key Sustainable Development Goals agreed by all 193 members of the United Nations in September 2015.² As UNESCO (2017) puts it,