Introduction

The concern of the following piece with discourses of access to higher education and the politics/policy within which they functioned in the 1990s is unsurprising for a number of reasons.

First, the piece is the text of a presentation at a conference in the Czech Republic entitled State and University in the New Europe: A Liberal Future? Looking back, just the title and the location should be enough to explain the preoccupation with discourses and ideologies.

Second, though, even as relatively early in my career as 1995, I had realised that practice to widen access to higher education by under-represented groups and enhance their chances of success through pedagogy once there, must necessarily consider the ideological frameworks and discourses within which that work takes place.

Third, I was working as a Senior Lecturer in the Racial Equality Unit (known as REQU) at the University of Central Lancashire: the only one of its kind then and since as far as I know, funded under Section 11 of the 1966 Local Government Act. As such, ideologies and their implications for individual and collective practice were never far from the surface – though to be fair, I don't recall the government interfering directly with what we did. So, what did we do? What were the ideological debates and contexts within which we worked?

First of all, and importantly, REQU was not a research unit. There were units or centres elsewhere in the United Kingdom focussed on research into ‘race’ and ethnic relations (e.g. at Warwick University) and in Europe, for example at the University of Amsterdam. ¹ In contrast, REQU focussed its attention on (1) working with local Black and Asian ethnic communities to promote access to higher education, especially in the University (or Polytechnic as it was before it gained university status) and (2) working with academic and other staff in the university to promote their understanding of issues of racism within their practices, and thereby to promote greater access to their courses by minority ethnic students. In order to assess progress with both these ‘arms’ of the unit's work, it was also tasked with developing, and implementing annually, a system for monitoring the ethnic profile of the University's student population. ² It produced a short ‘Ethnic Monitoring Report’ each year, the picture revealed informing the targeting of work by the unit.

Even a brief consideration of this portfolio of work soon reveals how ideologies of antiracism, multiculturalism and equal opportunities would be likely to form the core drivers of the unit's work. And they did.

These ideologies were not, however, comfortable in the same bed. Their different emphases and priorities for action; how one should act to promote greater and wider access to the university; and, of course, how one described that work, all featured routinely in the daily work and conversations – very often heated – within the unit.

The following very short extract from a critique of Troyna's (with Selman) research, ³ taken from the 1995 conference presentation which follows, might be worth reflecting upon even a quarter of a century after it was written. Although debates and discourses have, of course, changed and developed over that time (as will hopefully become clear in future chapters), practitioners working to promote wider access but especially greater successful participation in higher education by under-represented groups, might still find the following passage resonating with at least some aspects of their work:

…the relationship between antiracism (…), multiculturalism (…), and ideologies of equal opportunities is treated as unproblematic. This, it is suggested, results from these perspectives becoming disarticulated from ideologies of equality of opportunity during their development in the school sector. However, ideas about ethnic inequality in higher education in the 1980s have been constructed within, even subsumed by, dominant liberal definitions of equality of opportunity and social justice such that the discourses of multiculturalism and antiracism are seen as having little if any relevance to higher education except in so far as they reinforce the concern with access.