Chapter 3: Widening Participation, ‘Equity’ Cohorts and Refugee Students in Higher Education

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 has three broad aims. It starts by outlining the broader agenda of widening participation (WP) to higher education (HE) in countries of settlement, explaining how this contributes to the opening and constraining of possibilities for refugee students. Here, 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 also explore how the formal identification of ‘target groups’ in current equity policy in the UK and Australia result in the profiling of demographic/socio-economic cohorts – which inadvertently (or deliberately) obscures intersectional and compounding disadvantage and conceals 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.