Introduction

Across many years of experience working to advance, and writing about, widening participation policy and practice, I have found it very rare to find anyone who refers to international students in this frame of reference. If we are focussing solely on the United Kingdom, then this is possibly hardly surprising given the history of the discourse of widening access and, later, participation.

However, when the discourse shifts to focus more broadly on equality, diversity and inclusion, as it has especially in the last decade or so, then the experience of international students can – though it is by no means guaranteed – enter the picture.

Written for the European Association for International Education (EAIE), this chapter has, unsurprisingly, the experience of students recruited to universities from around Europe and which are not their ‘home’ university, as its core focus. Unusually, perhaps, the discussion explores policies and practices relating to their experiences in the context of wider debates about equity, equality, diversity and inclusion.

The chapter tries to unpick the apparent paradox that ‘equity and equality seem to demand we treat all students the same and diversity suggests we treat each student differently’. To do this it focusses on three examples, often discussed specifically in relation to international students but, the chapter implies, also just as relevant to the experiences of other students who are from backgrounds under-represented in the university: (1) induction and cultural events; (2) academic language skills; (3) personal and organisational change. These examples help to illustrate the complexity of group and individual identities which lie at the heart of resolving the paradox referred to earlier.

A key message is that ‘it is impossible for our (university) policies and practices for supporting student success to be “just, impartial and fair” (the equity principle) if they do not recognise and embrace the fact that we are all, in many ways, so different from one another and are, in other ways, very similar to each other’.