Higher education initiatives to support students from low socioeconomic backgrounds are widespread. However, there is pervasive concern within public discourse that such widening participation efforts have contributed to a 'dumbing down' of higher education. There are classed dimensions to evaluations of (dis)advantaged students' university…

Over the past two decades, as in many countries, the use of private tutoring ('shadow education') has increased substantially in the Netherlands. Educators and policy makers are raising questions regarding the role that shadow education may play in relation to the traditional configuration of the home and school being assigned the responsibility…

This paper examines attitudes to classism in Irish education using a thematic analysis of social media conversations about social class between 2018 and 2022. Previous research indicates that Irish education systems are designed by and favour the dominant and ruling classes. However, few studies use the voice of the lived experience to explore the…

This study constructs a logit model to examine the impact of family class differences on the higher education accessibility of offspring, and examines the moderating effect of the higher education expansion policy on the relationship between family class differences and higher education accessibility of offspring. The data was collected from 5181…

This article analyses the influence of family and friends on students' higher education plans. Using a Bourdieusian framework, it examines social class and contextual influences on both the structure of students' networks and the content of interactions within them. These are shown to be dependent on the dispositions and capitals of both the…

Private English education has been expanding rapidly across China during the past three decades. This study investigates the resignification of English through the linguistic landscape of a private English training centre in Datong, a small and less-developed city of China. The findings show that the centre draws from both neoliberal discourse and…

All aspects of our lives, including educational access and quality, are affected by our socio-economic position. This reflective note about the author's educational experiences describes the interlinkages of caste and education. It talks about how those experiences played an integral role in shaping the author's beliefs about caste, reservation…

This paper examines the history of the expansion of educational opportunities in the UK, to understand how different generations of ­working-class students managed to access HE. Based on 23 life-story interviews with working-class students, the study highlights how the changing dynamics of the structure of compulsory education and the labour…

Efforts to desegregate schools have consistently been undermined by privileged parents finding ways to avoid undesirable schools. In some contexts, a more complex picture is emerging, where 'progressive' privileged parents choose 'diverse' schools but still reproduce segregation. We demonstrate how the desegregation aims of an Indian education…

Literature on adult settlement and integration education in Canada documents the limits of public services supporting the settlement of female newcomers. This study provokes deeper understandings of these limitations by examining the gendered experiences of mature Tamil women who have resided in the province of Ontario, Canada for more than 10…

The New Education movement was a remarkable coalition of national reform movements that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century. As a heterogeneous movement that was united only in its opposition to the schooling system at the time, its structure and boundaries in the UK have remained a matter of academic debate. This article implements the…

This paper examines the predicament of the Dalit youth in their pursuit of higher education through a qualitative study in a low-income locality of Delhi. In absence of control over material resources historically, education offered promise in liberating socially excluded groups for its instrumental link with modern occupational structure. The…

In the study presented in this article, the aim is to further the understanding regarding the differences between pupils (aged 15-16) from schools with low or high socio-economic status (SES), regarding the amount and diversity of content knowledge in history that they have acquired by the end of compulsory schooling. Following a definition of…

This qualitative research is aimed at studying how Universidad Mayor and Universidad de Santiago address inclusion, equity, and diversity in the processes of access and continued studies of economically and socially disadvantaged students who benefited from the Free Tuition State Policy and how these processes are perceived by this type of…

With a General Election just weeks away -- what are the British public's views on equality of opportunity and social mobility? Do today's voters want to see greater action to level the playing field, and should we be investing to equalise opportunities? To answer those questions, the Sutton Trust has commissioned More in Common to conduct…