Educational issues

Equity & Diversity
TLRP is concerned to understand and explain, using a variety of theoretical and methodological frameworks, the relationships and interactions between teaching and learning and socio-economic or cultural factors. The policy framework for these concerns has just been developed through legislation and the creation of the Commission for Equalities & Human Rights, bringing together a commitment to fairness for all regardless of diverse individual attributes such as age, disabilities, ethnicity or race, gender and sexuality. This new policy focus is upon issues of equality or what is often now referred to as equity and diversity. The concern has been to provide opportunities for all regardless of socio-economic or cultural background, with a commitment to social justice and fairness through policies and practices for inclusion rather than exclusion, social change and sustainability, labour or workforce and ‘citizenship’ development. These issues are covered by all of our principles, but most specifically 1, 7, and 10:

• Equips learners for life in the broadest sense
• Fosters both individual and social processes and outcomes
• Demands consistent policy frameworks with support for teaching and learning as their primary focus

TLRP thematic work has built upon the work begun in a thematic seminar series at the University of Wolverhampton on Social Diversity and Difference. This has now been extended to a broader seminar series on

• Social diversity & difference: researching educational inequalities which has begun to show how questions of diversity and socio-economic disadvantages thread through educational opportunities and outcomes across the life course.

It is also significant that HEFCE chose to fund a suite of projects  on notions of social diversity and difference in access to and participation in forms of education, under the heading of

• Widening Participation in Higher Education. All 7 projects are foregrounding perspectives on social disadvantage and difference, whilst using very diverse research frameworks, from individuals to institutions. All are demonstrating ‘persistent inequalities’ in forms of participation in diverse forms of HEI.

Publications related to this general theme are listed below: