Chapter 2: Policy Context: The Political Economy of Access and Success in the English Market

This chapter sets out the policy context for work to deliver and evaluate students’ participation after access trajectories. It begins with a historical overview of how and why this context has changed and what this tells us about why this agenda has become more important in a marketised higher education (HE) system. This chapter focuses on arguments used by policymakers to rationalise and justify policy shifts. In this case, from an emphasis on widening participation (WP) by widening access to the English HE system (which can be traced back to the Robbins Report of 1963) to a situation when government ministers state that it doesn’t matter how many people from disadvantaged backgrounds get into the system, what matters is that students achieve good graduate outcomes (DfE, 2022a; Donelan, 2020). Hence, our focus in this volume is on participation after access.