School of Education

Professor Vikki Boliver, Durham University, UK

Young adults from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds have long been starkly under-represented among entrants to England’s most academically selective and prestigious universities. Until recently, efforts to widen access to these institutions focused on “raising aspirations” among working-class school leavers, leaving untouched the principal barrier to access, namely large socioeconomic disparities in pre-university academic attainment. Influenced by sociological thinking and research evidence, the higher education regulator for England has begun to challenge highly selective universities to rethink how “merit” is judged in admissions. More specifically, highly selective institutions have been encouraged to move away from the traditional meritocratic equality of opportunity model of fair access, which holds that university places should go to the most highly qualified candidates irrespective of social background, and towards a meritocratic equity of opportunity model, which holds that prospective students’ qualifications should be judged relative to the socioeconomic circumstances in which they were obtained. This workshop contribution sets out the theoretical case for this shift in emphasis from procedural to distributive fairness as the guiding principle of elite university admissions, and presents empirical evidence in support of its necessity and effectiveness in reducing social class inequality in access to an elite university education.

Related published work

Boliver, V. and Powell, M. (2023) Rethinking merit? The development of more progressive approaches to university admissions in England. Widening Participation and Lifelong Learning. 24(3): 33-55.

Boliver, V. and Powell, M. (2023) Competing conceptions of fair admission and their implications for supporting students to fulfil their potential at university. Perspectives: Policy and Practice in Higher Education, 27(1): 8-15.

Boliver, V., Banerjee, P., Gorard, S. and Powell, M. (2022) Reconceptualising fair access to highly academically selective universities. Higher Education, 84: 85-100.

Boliver, V., Gorard, S. & Siddiqui, N. (2022). Who counts as socioeconomically disadvantaged for the purposes of widening access to higher education? British Journal of Sociology of Education 43(3): 349-374.

Professor Qing Gu, University College London, UK

This presentation considers the ways in which recent English education policy has positioned autonomy as a concomitant of accountability. Following a critical examination of the conceptual relations between accountability, autonomy and leadership, the presentation investigates, from the perspective of senior and middle leaders, how secondary principals lead their schools to achieve sustainable performance despite policy shifts. Drawing upon the case study evidence from an ESRC funded research in England, I will discuss how successful secondary schools—in different socioeconomic contexts—incorporate and use externally generated policies to support their own educational agendas, as they assert their right to apply their own educational values in practice for the improvement of teaching and learning. The research suggests that what the principals were perceived to be doing successfully was to use policies as opportunities—purposefully, progressively, and strategically—to regenerate coherent cultures and conditions which support the staff to learn to renew their practice. Key in this regard is how principals broaden and deepen their organisational, social, and intellectual capacities for the improvement of quality and standards in teaching and learning, despite rather than because of externally generated reforms.