Introduction

This plenary speech delivered at the EAN 18th Annual International Conference captures a seminal stage in my journey conceptualising what we mean by ‘widening participation’ or, as I came to call it, ‘widening engagement’.

Delegates at EAN annual conferences work or study in a wide variety of contexts, but what they have in common is a deep and abiding commitment to expanding and diversifying the populations which enter university or college for higher education study. This commitment is underpinned by a wide knowledge of widening participation policies, practices and debates. I set out to challenge their thinking about widening participation.

As the chapter explains, the launch pad for my ‘conceptual journey’ was an earlier EAN Annual Conference in Thessaloniki, Greece. My presentation there focussed mainly on the need for change in three main areas:

• Embedding or mainstreaming widening participation right across the institution

• Establishing a non-deficit discourse especially when discussing students who are under-represented in the university or college

• Developing partnerships for widening participation both across the university and externally

The current speech then moves on to describe substantial and significant changes initiated and implemented by the author at York St John University, designed to try and achieve the above goals. But what did all this mean? In essence, it meant re-casting ‘widening participation’ as ‘widening engagement’.

At this stage in my thinking – Summer 2009 – I saw this concept as being capable of describing ‘all the various ways in which a student, potential student, and our graduates “touch” the University’. It has the potential to capture ‘the way we “engage” other organisations to work with us’, and ‘the way we open-up our processes for designing and deciding not only what we offer, but where and when we offer it’.

There is, right at the end of the chapter, an interesting footnote which has the potential to move these ideas further forward. These themes are explored in other chapters in the present volume. Essentially, they have become a leitmotif of my work from 2009 to the present day and had been – unbeknown to me – informing my work for some years before.