Introduction

When re-reading the speeches and articles which I chose for this anthology of some of my work, I have been struck by how often they are described as reflecting a journey. Sometimes this has been grounded institutionally, and this is the case again with one example in the following chapter.

‘Learning Reconsidered’ (hereafter shortened to LR) was launched by the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA) in 2004 in the United States. Once I had discovered this work, it was clear it described an approach which would be central to the next stage of the journey I believed the concept and practice of widening participation should be on.

I set out to convince the University College's senior management team that we should develop our student support services by encouraging all sections of the institution – from cleaners and caretakers to every head of department – to engage in a debate about ‘LR’.

So, how does this work?

The argument goes as follows.

The original concern of the ‘access movement’ was about who gets into university. After this, attention shifted more to consider what were the experiences of those who ‘made it’? We enter the era of ‘widening participation’ not just access. But now, I was on a journey to find the next stage of policy and practice development.

My own research, reading and practice led me to conclude that we needed widening engagement strategies. For me this meant restructuring all aspects of how we delivered widening participation so that it didn't just focus on the target students but also on the relationship with the communities from which they came. ‘LR’ was an approach which offered this as one possibility, one starting point for building these new relationships.

The chapter explores key aspects of the background and context for building such an approach. It explores briefly some of the proposals I made at a conference in Thessaloniki, Greece, and it examines key strategic partnership approaches used already as shown in Aimhigher, in the Combined Universities Cornwall, University Campus Suffolk, the UHI Millennium Institute in Scotland and Lifelong Learning Networks (LLNs) in England.

The final part of the chapter explores a move away from a focus on participation to one of engagement – not just engagement of students with what is going on in the classroom but strategic engagement of the university with communities and populations from which they draw their students, wherever those communities might be and however they might be defined. The emphasis is on developing strategic relationships which are mutually beneficial and able to deliver sustainable change. The chapter ends with a succinct but, I believe, useful summary of the main point being made by the chapter,

The arguments presented in this chapter culminate in a simple strategic proposition. If there is to be sustainable change in historic patterns of participation in higher education then it is structured social relationships that must change, and especially relationships between higher education institutions and the communities and populations under-represented in them.