Access and participation

News today of another round of worries about who goes into Higher Education in the UK and how different kinds of students fare when they are there. There are two new HEFCE documents to plough through: the shorter one, How to think about widening participation in UK higher education, is a thought-provoking set of difficult questions asking us to come clean about what we mean by 'access' and the like and making the sensible point that this all needs a long-term approach.

The second, longer, document, Review of widening participation research: addressing the barriers to participation in higher education, is much harder work to read. I can't say I've gone over it all, but as I browsed the odd sentence caught my eye. For example:

"Those who drop out of HE tend to be less motivated to continue than those who stay on." (p. 58)

Well, who'd have thought it?