Socially just academia? An exploration of the experiences of student parents in English higher education

For some time now, widening participation policies have been a key feature of English higher education institutions. Such policies have aimed to diversify the student body and, in particular, to increase the access and retention of so called non traditional students. Yet, student parents, most of them women, have been widely ignored by policy-makers and researchers alike, despite representing an increasing proportion of the HE student population in the UK and elsewhere.

This paper draws on a research project investigating the role of higher education institution (HEI) policies in supporting student parents in England, funded by the Nuffield Foundation. A social constructivist and feminist theoretical framework was used and sixty semi-structured interviews with student parents and staff were conducted in ten universities. This paper focuses on the interviews conducted with student parents. We argue that student parents remain predominantly invisible in academia as the default construction of the university student as carefree and careless (as well as white, male, single and middle-class) persists. As a result, student parents often struggle to fit in academia, as evidenced in this paper. However, this paper also highlights the diversity of student parents’ experiences. In particular, it shows that, despite the domination of a neo-liberal rhetoric and of a discourse of individualization (Beck, 1992), student parents’ experiences continue to be shaped to a great extent by gender, social class, ethnicity and other identity markers. This in turn raises the issue of how policy intervention can effectively address the needs of a highly diverse group of students, particularly in relation to retention, attainment and to the overall quality of their student experience.