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Lookup NU author(s): Cheryl Conway, Emeritus Professor Mike Coombes, Dr Simon Raybould
The National Committee of Enquiry into Higher Education (1997) concluded that "increasing participation in higher education is a necessary and desirable objective of national policy over the next 20 years" and a number of initiatives have been put in place to drive this agenda forward. However higher education policy is increasingly viewed as part of a broader strategy for increasing young people’s participation in education. From this perspective, a key aim is that as many young people as possible continue their education in some form or other beyond the years of compulsory schooling. This paper brings together information on higher education (from the Universities and Colleges Admission Service) with data on other forms of participation (from the Open University and the Learning and Skills Council) to investigate participation in several types of full- and part-time education by the North East’s post-school-age adults. We develop a measure of overall participation by area, and also by categories such as gender and level of study. This approach also allows new questions to be asked, such as "do areas which send few young adults to university have a higher take-up of courses in local colleges?" It is hoped that analyses of this kind will help further and higher education institutions to target their strategies for widening participation more effectively. In the medium term, integrating information from many sources could help to track and monitor the effectiveness of widening participation policies which are now being put in place.
Author(s): Conway CD, Coombes MG, Raybould SR
Publication type: Conference Proceedings (inc. Abstract)
Publication status: Published
Conference Name: British Education Research Association Conference
Year of Conference: 2002
Pages: 14
Publisher: British Education Research Association
URL: http://www.ncl.ac.uk/curds/publications/pdf/5112bera_conference_paper.pdf
