Chapter 3: Widening Participation to Higher Education Systems in Settlement Countries

The focus of this book – students from refugee backgrounds and HE – is set against the context of global efforts to open access to university study. This chapter seeks to examine how the broader agenda of widening participation (WP) to HE in countries of settlement contributes to the opening and constraining of possibilities for refugee students. At first, we offer an overview of the historical and contemporary context of WP in countries of settlement, before focusing the lens on the HE landscapes of England and Australia. We progress to examine how the formal identification of ‘target groups’ in current equity policy in the UK and Australia result in the profiling and separation of demographic/socio-economic features – which deliberately obscure intersectional disadvantage and the nuance of individual circumstances. We also discuss how the massification of HE is misrepresented in institutional marketese under the discourses of ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’, and yet which actually contribute to deficit framings of ‘non-traditional’ students. We go on to unpack how the problematic broad brush-stroking of students into the categories of ‘non-English speaking background’ (NESB) in Australia or ‘Black and Minority Ethnic’ (BAME) in the UK collapses the heterogeneity of such diverse groupings, thus denying the specific representation of students from refugee and asylum-seeking backgrounds in HE policy and practice.