Tag widening participation

Satisfied? Student Surveys, Social Position, and the Limits of Experience Data

Editorial illustration in muted blue-grey tones of a large ticked survey form, with one confident student at a desk and another uncertain student standing apart, set against a university building.

The National Student Survey ranks institutions, shapes league tables, and features in marketing materials as evidence of teaching excellence. But satisfaction is not the same as learning, and the social position of the student completing the survey shapes what they report in ways the instrument cannot detect. This article applies a Bourdieusian lens to the NSS — and finds that the data is telling us something rather different from what it is used to claim.

Who Gets Accused? AI Detection Bias, Academic Integrity, and the Uneven Field in Higher Education

AI meets academia: a robot faces a gatekeeping professor holding keys.

When universities reach for AI detection tools to police academic integrity, they reach for instruments that are neither accurate nor neutral. Research shows that non-native English speakers, neurodivergent students, and those whose natural writing style resembles AI output face disproportionate false accusations. This article applies a moral panic framework to ask what the response to AI in higher education actually reveals — and who it disadvantages.

From Access to Belonging: Rethinking Widening Participation Metrics in UK Higher Education

Students on campus sit and talk while, beside them, a large dashboard of widening participation data highlights targets and inequalities.

Widening participation policy is often judged through dashboards of access, continuation and attainment. Yet focusing on who gets in – and who stays – can mask how universities continue to privilege particular histories, dispositions and futures. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, capital and institutional habitus, this article argues that belonging should sit at the centre of how we interpret student data, and explores what a more “belonging-sensitive” approach to WP metrics might look like in UK higher education.