Research Workshop Grant Scheme: Access Insight Knowledge Exchange
The power of the right training to help Welsh communities still struggling to recover from post-industrial poverty and deprivation cannot be underestimated. However, letting people know about suitable courses, and then retaining them as students, is an enduring challenge.
The expertise of teaching staff working in the tertiary sector hold answers to these problems – often in unpublished research and innovative practice work. If only it were possible to tap into that community of practice and find an outlet for their insights and solutions. Happily, and thanks to a recent Learned Society of Wales’ research workshop grant, a series of seminars and subsequent journal special edition provided just such an outlet.
Anita Pilgrim, the project lead, takes up the story:
In 2023, the Open University in Wales supported a collaborative project with fourteen Welsh Higher and Further Education institutions (funded by Higher Education Funding Council for Wales), looking at access to higher learning. I was the Lead Researcher on the project, which found a mixed picture with many successes in provision, however also gaps in suitable courses across Wales. We found many challenges in recruitment and retention onto available courses, including family responsibilities, mental health issues and a lack of financial security for students. In the full report of the project, published in January 2024, we called for more flexible and part-time provision, as well as better centralised support for learners to find courses and funding.
We made five recommendations, of which one was to “support ongoing collaboration among providers of education for post-16 transition and adult learners”. We had found little published discussion of Access, Foundation and other learning routes into higher learning in Wales. However during the research we came across several teaching staff members with unpublished Masters and PhD theses, and examples of undocumented innovative practice. We realised we had a nascent community of practice, which with a little support could share good practice and innovative thinking about providing better access into further and higher learning for disadvantaged learners.
In 2024/5 we were awarded grant funding by the Learned Society of Wales, to support two hybrid seminars showcasing presentations out of this work. One was held at Coleg Cambria in Wrexham, in the North, and one at Bridgend College, in the South. The then Minister for Further and Higher Education attended the Bridgend seminar, encouraging us with a keynote speech. Having her and her staff at the event meant participants could share our innovative practice case studies and academic analysis with national policy-makers, as well as engage in discussion with other practitioners. Up til then, we didn’t know about each others’ research – sometimes even when conducted in the same institutions.
Presentations included one on an innovative and popular programme of hybrid learning supporting Access students via new online teaching technology; insights from a study working with women students in Further Education; the ‘value’ of Foundation studies to students beyond their final grades and job/salary prospects; and an analysis of how HE studies in an FE institution support the needs of non-traditional students.
Still, I felt there was more we could do to disseminate the knowledge and insights being uncovered, to Welsh Government – and even beyond. We began sounding out journals to ask about putting together a Special Issue on Wales. I knew, from undertaking a literature search for the project, that there has not been much published recently about widening participation in higher learning in Wales – or even Further Education as a whole. With the tertiary education sector being brought together through the Tertiary Education and Research (Wales) Act (2022), an overview of ways in which disadvantaged students can access higher learning through both Further and Higher Education institutions is very timely.
Not only one, but two journals expressed an interest in a Wales Special Issue. We chose the Widening Participation and Lifelong Learning journal, as its remit exactly fits the work of our nascent community of practice. The journal has international reach. Also highly important to us, WPLL is an open access journal. Many of the institutions in our community of practice do not have funds for academic journal subscriptions, however everyone will easily be able to access the articles in our upcoming Special Issue.
Editing the Special Issue has offered many opportunities to support thinking in the field of widening participation in Wales. We used the two seminars we were able to put on as springboards to persuade those who gave presentations to write those up for further dissemination as journal articles. In this field, not many are accustomed to publishing their work in academic journals, and there are not ‘trade’ journals as such. Many of the authors in our special issue, particularly those from FE colleges rather than universities, are inexperienced in academic writing. This was a chance to support them writing up sometimes groundbreaking innovative practice. I made sure to take on a colleague to co-edit, building capacity in the field for the future.
We were also offered a student placement by the university. She said she had imagined she might be “bringing the coffees around”, however I suggested she work with me on an article on ‘learner voice’ – which our steering group had been particularly keen to ensure was embedded in the project. We benefited from her insights as a student, and she got great experience researching and writing up for publication a discussion of a critically important academic concept. She found this “interesting, engaging – a valuable experience”.
The policy shift in Wales to a single tertiary sector is being watched closely around the world to see what benefits this might bring, in a small nation still marked by post-industrial poverty and deprivation. Supporting the participants in our two funded seminars to publish their ideas provides opportunities for those whose daily work involves giving a second educational chance to populations from areas identified by the Welsh Index of Multiple Deprivation as lacking in prospects. This will provide insights beyond Wales into how we might better undertake widening participation in higher learning.
By building on the small pair of seminars funded by the Learned Society of Wales with this upcoming Special Issue, we have kept knowledge exchange and our nascent community of practice going. Our next challenge is how to support learners to find and explore the rich diversity of courses available to them. We envisage an online portal or map – all we need is the social geographer with a background in online mapping to help us design it; if you know of such a person, please get in touch!
