An Economy of Aspiration: putting a value on access to higher education
Paul Warmington, School of Education, University of Nottingham
Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, University
of Leeds, 13-15 September
Abstract:
This paper examines the ways in which students embarked upon an Access to Higher Education
programme at an inner-city college constructed a value for their educational projects that was
sufficient to sustain them in taking the fraught step of returning to education. Drawn from
recently completed research, the paper emphasises the critical potential of students’ voices,
using an ethnographic framework in order to problematise both “governmental” and
“grassroots” constructions of access, social inclusion and disaffection.
In the course of individual and group interviews, the case students initially appeared to cleave to
a meritocratic vision of education and society, in order to legitimise their educational
aspirations. However, as they mined their biographies, they offered complex constructions of the
relationships between education, qualifications and social status, utilising an eschatology
constructed out of their experiences as disaffected workers, precariously negotiating the sites of
education, family, employment and state welfare.
Inverting the retention study approach, the paper emphasises how students mapped out the
socio-economic value of Access and degree qualifications. In making sense of their own
educational aspirations, the case students engaged in a lived critique of the iconic notions of
widening participation and lifelong learning in which contemporary post-compulsory education
policy is embedded.
1. Introduction:
This paper draws upon doctoral research into issues of aspiration and identity among mature
learners studying on an Access to Higher Education Programme at North Gordy College (NGC),
a further education (FE) college in a large West Midlands city. It departs from the retention study
concerns that have often informed research into mature students experiences in further education
(e.g. Martinez 1995; Medway and Penney 1994) and develops insights not into why mature
students drop out of programmes such as Access but instead into the root question of why mature
students - negotiating financial insecurities, ambivalent peer responses and academic
vulnerabilities - venture back into formal education at all. A previous BERA paper (Warmington
2000) examined methodological issues encountered during the research. These related
principally to my position as an “insider researcher” (having taught at North Gordy College for a
number of years) and to the evolution of the research into a piece of critical ethnography. The
latter shift was driven by the conviction that the interviews conducted with student participants
yielded the richest seam of data.
This second paper summarises research findings generated by those interviews. While Access
practitioners and academics alike have repeatedly defined mature returners as emerging from the
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ranks of the ‘educationally disaffected’ (e.g. Munns and McFadden 2001; McFadden 1995; Benn
and Burton 1995), this paper is rooted in the case students’ depiction of themselves principally as
disaffected workers. It was this self-definition that provided the underpinning logic of the
students’ Access projects - a commitment to four or five years in further and higher education and which mediated the tensions and ambivalences inhabiting their perception of educational
qualifications as what Riseborough (1993: p. 57) terms “cultural-capital passports”. The analysis
offered here addresses four recurrent themes developed by the North Gordy College (NGC)
students during in-depth individual and group interviews:

the emphasis that the case students placed upon their experiences of the peripheral labour
market as the principal force impacting upon their decisions to return to formal education via
Access

the student interviewees’ depiction of their experiences of state welfare dependency,
principally as Income Support claimants

the interviewees’ perceptions of the potential of educational qualifications to safeguard
against social marginalisation by enabling them to permeate an ostensibly more secure socioeconomic core - that is to enable a shift from undesired to preferred forms of dependency

their simultaneous recognition of the possibility that their Access projects might fail to
deliver increased security; their consequent efforts to insure their identities against the
vagaries of the labour market.
In exploring these four issues, the paper unfolds an analysis of the narratives of ‘disaffection’
and ‘aspiration’, which in symbiosis informed the interviewees’ accounts. In doing so, it depicts a
lived critique of the rhetoric of social ex/inclusion and accreditation-as-cultural capital in which
contemporary post-compulsory education and training (PCET) is embedded. In short, the
research veers away from ‘objective’ study of labour market entry; the focus is instead upon the
means via which the students afforded biographical legitimacy to educational projects that were
bound up with subjective definitions of risk and vulnerability.
2. Problematising Access
Research into the experiences of students on Access programmes has often been informed by the
retention study concerns ubiquitous in further education settings. The inversion of the retention
question that afforded the North Gordy College (NGC) Access case study its initial momentum
was wrought by initial dialogue with and observation of the case students (as well as experience
of other Access student groups during several years as a practitioner). My long-standing
involvement in Access revealed the world of mature students as self-evidently pitted with
financial insecurities, pressing family responsibilities, potentially fraught educational
relationships and the conflicting demands of coupling study with paid employment. Such
tensions have been explored in both autobiographical and theoretical modes by e.g. Betts
(1999),Wallace (1998), Cunningham-Blake (1995), Shah (1994), Wakefield (1994) and Edwards
(1993). Under such circumstances, why did adults on North Gordy’s Access Programme commit
themselves not to one, but to four or five years’ study in further and then higher education?
In taking on the learning role of ethnographic researcher, reflection upon the group’s aspirations
and identities necessitated a problematisation of the commonsense definitions that, as an Access
practitioner, I had constructed of Access students’ motives and experiences. There were two
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assumptions that by the mid-1990’s had assumed ideological prominence within the Access
course movement. First of all, it is a truism that Access courses have, since the inception of their
1970’s grassroots prototypes, drawn their intake from the ranks of “those who in the past counted
themselves among the educationally disaffected” (McFadden 1995: p.40). Secondly, the Access
course movement has, since the 1990’s, taken on an upwardly mobile aspect, trumpeting its QAA
endorsed “mainstream” credentials (OCNWM 1999) and locating itself, as firmly as say GNVQ
or Modern Apprenticeships, within the broader centrally-instigated drive to widen participation
in PCET. The latter trend has been identified by e.g. Williams (1997), Rikowski (1995), Ainley
(1994), Eggar (1991), Brennan (1989). In the social cohesion rhetoric of the overarching PCET
design, adult participation/ certification is portrayed as “the way out of dependency and low
expectation” (DfEE 1998), “a weapon against poverty ...the route to participation and active
citizenship” (Kennedy 1997). Educational and labour market aspirations are embedded in a
discourse in which participation in further and higher education is “constructed as offering the
individual greater determination over the use of their labour power thus providing increased
possibilities for self-realisation” (Avis 1998: p.5).
Yet how accurate was it, for instance, to describe North Gordy’s Access students as (formerly)
educationally disaffected? McFadden (1995: pp. 54-55), for instance, usefully emphasises that,
among his own Access case groups, schools were seen as “part of the process of their
marginalisation rather than as part of the answer to their problems”. However, he skirts away
from the issue of why, given such experiences, his students subsequently decided to resume
formal education, instead depicting their actions in terms of a “search for identity”, “a creative,
cultural response to oppressive life circumstances.” What might such a “search for identity”
entail and what might be the nature of the “oppressive life circumstances” negotiated? By what
means did the case students redefine their relationships to the educational site upon joining the
Access Programme?
In examining the case students’ decisions to resume formal education analysis of their labour
market narratives became imperative, since, for the majority of the group, (low) paid work and/or
state welfare dependency formed the immediate setting in which they took the decision to join
Access. In addition, one or both of these continued to provide most students’ source of income
while on Access. Interviews with the group began to suggest how their labour market
experiences worked to develop or transmute the meanings that they had attached to education
whilst at school and, without resorting to a simplistic linear model of experience, pointed to
labour market experiences as forming a bridge - a pivotal mediation - between the disjunctures of
their schooling and the perceived viability of Access. In short, the case students might be more
accurately characterised as disaffected workers than disaffected learners.
3. The North Gordy College Case Group
The North Gordy College (NGC) case group comprised fifty-one mature students embarked on
NGC’s Access Programme during the academic year 1996/97. NGC’s programme is one of a
national spread of Access courses that have emerged in the UK since the mid-1970’s, catering
for adult learners with few or no existing educational qualifications who wish to enter higher
education. Priority target groups are sections of the population traditionally under-represented in
British higher education. The NGC programme can be taken over one or two years and focuses
upon the development of study skills, as well as of relevant academic (and, in some cases,
vocational) understanding. Certificates gained via Access study enable students to apply via
bodies such as the Universities and Colleges Admissions System (UCAS) to degree or H.E.
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diploma programmes. NGC Access is a single, modular programme preparing students for a
diverse range of higher education programmes: teacher training, midwifery, nursing, social work,
English and Psychology being among the most popular destinations.
The material that forms the basis of this article was yielded via 36 in-depth individual and group
interviews with students, which were supplemented by interviews with staff, interviews
conducted during students’ initial years in HE plus documentary analysis of students’ application
materials. The case group was predominantly female (39/ n51). Seventeen of the group were (in
NGC’s monitoring categories) African-Caribbean, Asian or Black mixed race; 18 were aged
thirty or over. On entry the majority (41/ n51) possessed qualifications at (NCVQ equivalent)
Level 2. In the two years prior to joining Access only 22 of the group had been in jobs of two
years duration or more. On entry 20 of the group described themselves as unemployed and
parenting; 11 as unemployed; 6 were in voluntary work; 5 were sales assistants; 3 were care
workers. In their applications to join the programme 43 of the group had specified an intended
degree course; 45 specified a particular career aim as informing their decision to apply; 11
identified interest in a specific academic subject as motivating their application. Career aims
most commonly identified were in nursing, midwifery, teaching and social work.
4. Valuing qualifications: the difference between a ‘job’ and a ‘career’
The most immediate theme to emerge from the NGC students’ discussion of their labour market
experiences was their widespread conviction in the dominance of the qualification system. The
belief that educational qualifications generate their own opportunities within the labour market
(or, perhaps more accurately, that lack of qualifications is a certain barrier to desired forms of
employment) was expressed so often as to assume orthodoxy among the Access group.
The distinction between the marginal prospect (having a “job”) - and the elevated prospect
(pursuing a graduate “career”) was repeatedly voiced by interviewees, who equated the
peripheries of the labour market with social marginalisation and personal frustration. Idealised
and aspirational biographical projections sat alongside interviewees’ harsh ‘objective’ valuations
of their market worth in relation to pay and hours. Sandra (African-Caribbean, aged 31, children,
Access to Health Careers) was adamant as regards direct correlation between qualifications and
employment opportunities.
PW:
Okay, so how important (is) gaining qualifications to you...?
Sandra:
That’s very important ...simply because of the wage aspect and what you can
expect. I mean without any qualifications you bring home peanuts really: £3.50
an hour and what can you do with that? But once you’re qualified, the
wages, like, treble.
Jill (white, aged 35, children, Access to Teacher Training) began by stating that she returned to
education to “make something of myself” and to work towards becoming a teacher. Her
description of her time as a hairdresser is a sobering assessment of ‘flexible’ working within the
low-paid service industries.
Jill:
Well the hours were very long and the attitude towards hairdressing has changed, in that
they want - because it’s unsocial work - they wanted from 9 ‘til 9, twelve hour shifts.
And with two young children in school, it was very difficult. And they were young 4
because they were only 7 and 8, and it was difficult to get time with them as well as
working and the money was just absolutely lousy: about £2.50 an hour or something like
that.
Out of the students’ discussion of their labour market experiences emerged two key rhetorical
constructions. These recalled the perceptions of the relationship between education, certification
and the labour market held among the student groups described by Blackman (1995) and
Riseborough (1993), in their analyses of “conformist” student action. Like e.g. Bates (1993) and
Brown (1987), Blackman’s (1995) notion of “instrumental subordination” and Riseborough’s
(1993) “strategic compliance” counter the reliance upon subcultural theory that pervaded postwar British youth studies (e.g. Cohen 1987; Hebdige 1979; Willis 1977).
What subcultural theorists have arguably overlooked is that “deferentiality” and “respectability”
are as important within working-class cultures as expressions of rebellion and subversion
(Riseborough 1993: p.35; Brown 1987: p.25). Riseborough (1993: pp. 33-34) suggests that
apparent conformism in the cause of “getting on” in a society still deeply furrowed by divisions
of class, race and gender may not be so much an indication of internal adjustment to social
inequalities as a performance that masks social contradictions and antagonism. Above all, in this
sense “conformism” or “compliance” (the terms strain at their own inadequacy) indicate neither
passivity nor hegemonic agreement (although they may indicate hegemonic consent, cf. Smith
1994: p.37); they imply active constructions willed by students as a means of maximising
coherence between their personal requirements and those of the educational institution.
As regards the case students’ ‘conformist’ utilisation of NGC’s Access Programme: firstly,
interviewees had begun to characterise formal qualifications as “cultural-capital passports into
education and work” (Riseborough 1993: p.57); secondly, the recurring distinction between
‘jobs’ and ‘careers’ presented itself as a discursive opposition, in which social inclusion was
dependent upon employment status. In the job/ career dichotomy lay a social perception in
which part-time, short-term jobs implied social exclusion, as opposed to the social inclusion
represented by a graduate career. The oppositions asserted by the students echoed the social
vision described by Ainley (1994: p.23), in which:
“The lack of certification is a virtual condemnation to the dependency of the ‘underclass’
and exclusion from the new, respectable working-middle class.”
5. Making qualifications count: a responsive social hierarchy
Blackman (1995) and Riseborough (1993) both characterise the “conformism” or “compliance”
of their case groups as being dependent on a faith in a correlative relationship between the
education system and the labour market. Blackman (1995: p.129) describes his “boffins” as
imagining a ‘personal’ relationship with the labour market. Unsurprisingly, they did not read its
vagaries as the shifts of egoless forces but as ‘proof’ of the market’s potential to respond to and
to favour skills and abilities of the kind that they have worked hard to develop. His “boffin girls”
act upon the belief that “their disciplined approach to school subjects will create parallel results
and opportunities when they enter the labour market” (Blackman 1995: p.129). Riseborough
(1993: p.38) goes further in his critique, describing his BTEC students’ belief in the power of
qualifications to generate “their own employment opportunities” as an alignment with the
“dominant ideological fantasy” of post-industrial education and training (PCET). Again the
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“strategic” or “instrumental” emphasis made by Riseborough (1993) and Blackman (1995)
should be acknowledged; certainly the behaviour of NGC’s Access students should be regarded
neither as abject self-subordination nor as an act of irrational faith.
PW: What about generally ...in society these days: how important are qualifications in
getting jobs?
Jill: Much more so than they used to be. But then there’s no guarantee if you get
all of these wonderful qualifications that you’re guaranteed a job (murmurs of
agreement). It’s a bit of a catch 22: on one hand, yes go for qualifications up to
A-level and maybe up to degree standard, if you’re going to go into work that
needs that. If you’re going into general office work then I think a college
education is becoming more important to get your NVQ or BTECs or whatever,
NNEBs, they’re becoming more important…
The group's strategic acceptance of the dominance of the qualification system is thrown into
relief by Jill's comment on the insecurity that exists even in the middle sector of the job market to
which the interviewees apparently aspired. These and similar remarks sit readily in the context
suggested by e.g. Reeves (1995), Ainley (1994) and Riseborough (1993), in which the ‘new’ F.E.
sector promotes or, more accurately, inflates formal qualifications as currency within a labour
market increasingly polarised between a working-middle core and a periphery dependent on
short-term employment and state welfare. Note, for instance, Judith’s (African-Caribbean, aged
22, one child, Access to Teacher Training) interception of Iona’s (white, aged 23, one child,
Access to Health Careers) comment in the following discussion.
PW:
How important are qualifications to getting a job, do you think?
Iona:
Depends on what type of job you want. Obviously if it’s just an office job, you
don’t...
Judith: You need a qualification for everything these days, don’t you?
Mona: ...a job that’s going to lead to a career anyway. It’s crucial (indistinct).
PW:
So what is the difference, for you, between a job and a career?
Iona:
A job’s something you do to just earn a bit of money whereas a career’s
something you can build on, something that stretches far into the future not just
the short term.
Jill’s remark that qualifications are “much more (important) than they used to be” and Judith’s
assertion that “you need a qualification for everything these days” indicate a belief that the value
of qualifications within the labour market has intensified. Moreover, it would seem that the
Access students' faith in their own agency - that is, in a labour market that would be responsive to
their disciplined, industrious and accredited selves - worked to diminish their fears about
professional insecurity.
In the following exchange Iona, in particular, displays faith in the personalised bargaining power
of the accredited self. She distinguishes between the qualified individual who is “an asset to
(his/her) employer” and the “dispensable” under-qualified labourer, of whom there are
“thousands” on the peripheries of the labour market.
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PW:
In what ways might you regard a career as being more secure than an ordinary job?
Myra: It’s status, isn’t it?
Mona: You’ve gone through that formal education process. Nobody can take that away
from you.
Iona:
You’re considered valuable, a valuable asset to your employer, whereas with a
normal job you’re just dispensable: there’s thousands of you. I know there’s lots
of people with degrees as well without jobs but they might hang on to you.
PW:
Do you think it's likely that you’re going to go straight from a degree into a job? Is that
how you would see it?
Perminder: No...
Mona: Not necessarily. There’s no guarantee but it puts you up there with the rest of
the competition.
6. Choice, dependence and income support
As with Blackman’s (1995) “boffins”, the NGC Access students’ attempts to utilise educational
qualifications for their potential to offer socio-economic mobility would only achieve internal
logic if embedded in an acceptance of a responsive social hierarchy thesis. This involved the
adoption by the case students of a strategic paradox. In their discussion of relative chances
within the education system the case students were adamant that their meritocratic claims did not
imply a belief in the existence of an equal society. They perceived opportunities for educational
participation (accompanied by perceived long-term socio-economic benefits) as being reasonably
open – this made joining Access a credible project - but society also had to be seen as essentially
stratified, so as to raise the value of their (degree) certification. Principal among the case group’s
requirements was that further and higher education should function as ‘neutral’ sites, offering the
resources to compete within a labour market assumed to be responsive to educational
certification, and within a society hierarchical enough to ensure the exchange value of their
degrees. The syllogistic outcome would be graduate status in a society permeable enough to
enable penetration of the emergent working-middle class core described by Ainley (1994).
Yet what distinguishes the Access students' perception of the value of accreditation from that of
Blackman's (1995) “Boffin girls” is the presence of the poltergeist in the basement – state
welfare (principally in the form of Income Support). For while the “Boffin girls” argued that, by
arming themselves with qualifications, they had defined themselves in opposition to those whom
they dismissed as "walking into the state", dependence on state benefits remained, for them, a
largely abstract concept. This contrasts starkly with the very real state welfare experiences of
NGC's Access students, as expressed by Nabila (Asian, aged 27, children, Access to Teacher
Training).
Nabila: It gives you some kind of stake in society that ...if you do get this degree that you
actually are somebody. I do actually believe that without – like I said ...if you are on
Income Support, you are a nobody... if you have a degree, even though you’ve got no job,
you are a somebody: you’ve got an identity all of a sudden...”
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Elsewhere students explained the benefits of having a “career” in similar terms.
Iona:
I think I'll have more choices in life; I think we all will. You can't be dictated
to by anyone. You have more choice to decide where you want to move or
where you want to go, what type of things you want in your house. I suppose
that's material things but it does mean more choice.
Myra: Coming off the Social as well. You don't have to depend on them; depend on
yourself.
Such exchanges underlined that the students’ references to “choice”, to “security”, to being
“valuable” were more than idealistic absolutes. Instead the students had identified a form of
subordination against which the value of gaining entry to a responsive social hierarchy could be
understood. Reliance upon state welfare was represented as a power relationship whose nature
was to deny choice, to remove autonomy – a relationship which, by making the recipient a
dependant, generated an insecurity that was the consequence of being vulnerable to state welfare
authority and official whim.
Judith’s definition of the state welfare relationship (“I don’t want my daughter growing up
thinking that being on Income Support is
the right thing to do”) was expressed in ‘moral’
terms not dissimilar to those expressed by Blackman’s (1995: pp. 127-129) securely middle class
“boffin girls”; this begged examination.
PW:
Going back to what Judith just said a moment ago, why isn't it the right thing to be
on Income Support?
Myra: Not for too long - because people look down on you, don't they?
Iona: (indistinct) ...it's a subculture now. Some children don't know that people
actually
go out to work and I don't think that's a good way to grow up really. But also it's not their fault
and it's not the people's families' faults: the system's designed so that it's not worth your
while to work, obviously unless you've got a very good job (indistinct)...
Judith: They try and control your life while you're on Income Support, as well.
You've got no control over your own life, being on Income Support. It's as
though you haven't got any choices; you've got choices but...
Myra: ... you haven't.
Judith: ...you haven't. Do you know what I mean?
Iona:
...and it's also your own self-respect. Not actually doing anything for yourself
apart from (getting) handouts. You know, being given everything you have: all
the money for food and everything. I don't find that very - it's not a very nice
way of life really.
Both Judith and Iona equated dependence upon state benefits with a relinquishing of autonomy.
This symbiosis was characterised by the Access students as inherent to the benefit system,
echoing Nabila's claim that “there’s a kind of collaboration where they don’t want you to go any
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higher”. That the students perceived state welfare dependency as a subordinating power was a
point underlined by Iona’s unpacking of Judith’s earlier expression of the fear that her daughter
might grow up believing that living on Income Support “is the right thing to do”. Iona’s comment
on the “subculture” of welfare dependency is noteworthy because, despite her articulate voicing,
it does not represent a coherent viewpoint but rather becomes an expression of the discursive
ambivalence contained in the notion of the ‘underclass’, which has been highlighted by
MacDonald (1997) and by Dean and Taylor-Gooby (1992).
Initially, Iona’s usage of the term “subculture” and her reference to a world in which children
“don’t know that people actually go out to work” implies a lay version of Murray’s (1990)
socio-psychological deficit thesis (cf. MacDonald 1997: pp. 8-10). As she continues, however,
she weaves her way towards a substantially different position, in which the welfare system is not
to be criticised for a ‘soft option’ failure to discourage dependency but, rather, resented for
deliberately imposing dependency by isolating and excluding claimants from the socio-economic
core (“it’s not the people’s families faults ...it’s not worth your while to work ...unless you’ve got
a good job”). This implies the formation of a dependent class comprising formerly disparate
individuals now bound together in poverty and social exclusion. Dean and Taylor-Gooby (1992:
pp. 146-147) emphasise that these two positions are actually opposed but are often conflated, not
least by claimants themselves.
The students’ discussions of the resources that they perceived in further and higher education
indicated the presence of the kind of underclass fear that Roberts (1993: pp. 244-245) identified
amongst those most vulnerable to downward descent. Neither was fear of downward social
descent simply the result of immediately precarious circumstances; students, such as Judith,
Sheila and Iona, stressed that peripherality had its own transmission value, impacting upon the
life chances of their children. The oppositions between choice and dependency, between job and
career, underclass “subculture” and “something better” took on an eschatological character,
marking the boundaries of their socio-economic options.
Cathy: Don’t want to be on Income Support.
Jill:
Down the Social.
PW:
Why not?
Jill:
I’ve had enough of it. I’ve had eight years, nine years of it and don’t want to go back to
that any more.
PW:
What is it about all that time? What is it about Income Support?
Cathy: It’s wasting your life.
Jill:
It is.
Fiona: Yeah.
Cathy: And it’s your kids’ sake.
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Judith: Like (my daughter) says to me the other day, “Where do you get your money from,
mum?” Do you know what I mean? I couldn’t turn around and say, “Oh, I’ve got
a good job, blah, blah, blah.” You know. Like (I felt) really stupid and I thought...
Jill:
You feel ashamed.
Cathy: Yeah.
Judith: You know I don’t want my daughter growing up saying that, you know, my mum
goes to the Post Office to get her money.
Fiona: Ooh no.
Judith: Ooh no.
Jill:
Just don’t want them doing the same.
Here the most acute portrayal of welfare dependency as a site of contention was given by Judith.
Her conversation with her daughter was loaded with the ‘shame’ to which Cathy (white, 23, one
child, Access to Teacher Training) and Jill referred because her daughter’s question focused
directly upon the nature of dependency. Judith’s reply highlighted the students’ tendency to
perceive an opposition between the ‘agency’ of working and the denial of agency represented by
welfare dependency. The image that Judith offered of her daughter was made to symbolise the
frustration of denied agency and, once again, the fear that her daughter would grow up believing,
as she had commented three months earlier, “that being on Income Support is the right thing to
do.”
7. Insuring identity against the labour market
A particular motif that emerged across a series of separate interviews was the Access students’
tendency to express the value of degree qualifications via the insistence that, once gained, they
could not be ‘taken away’. Variations of this valuation were expressed throughout the year. Here
Mona (white, aged 34, Access to Higher Education) reflects on how she might feel if, upon
graduating from university, she were unable to obtain a job straight away.
Mona: Um. I’d feel a little bit disappointed that I’d been through all that for nothing, maybe.
No, I wouldn’t feel that ...It’s still a very worthwhile and I’m not just doing it for a
job at the end anyway, I’m doing it for myself - to prove I can do it - to, I don’t know,
enrich myself in some way, I suppose ...the skills that I would’ve gained on the course
still stand me in good stead. You can’t take away all that knowledge and experience that
I’ve gained. And I’d just know that a job would come sooner or later; I wouldn’t feel too
despondent.
For Mona, the ‘inalienable’ gains of education could not be measured purely in terms of the
transferable skills that would stand her “in good stead” over successive job applications; like,
other interviewees, she expressed a belief in the potential of education to “enrich” the self - and
suggested that a degree would contribute to a sense of self not confined by labour market
identity.
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The insistence that returning to education, in general, and the gaining of degree qualifications, in
particular, would effect a personal transformation that could not be reversed became a motif in
both group and individual interviews. It can be detected in Obi’s (African, 23, Access to HE)
insistence that a degree “will last forever”, in Yvonne’s (African-Caribbean, 35, Access to HE)
belief that “the personal achievement is going to be worth so much - until the day I die...” and in
Sally’s (white, 25, one child, Access to Health Careers) claim.
Sally: ...And once you’ve got that degree, no-one can take that away; it’s something that
you’ve gained and you’ve worked hard for that.
Most telling, perhaps, were the kind of explicit assertions of heightened self-worth expressed by,
for example, Nabila (“if you have a degree, even though you’ve got no job, you are a somebody:
you’ve got an identity all of a sudden”). Such statements indicated the potential of an educated,
certificated self to withstand the vagaries of a labour market whose unforgiving peripheries were
familiar to most of the case group. They began to suggest one important reason why the students
perceived in education personal benefits ‘beyond’ those material outcomes relating directly to
family, employment or skills acquisition. In several group interviews, the students were
encouraged to contemplate a graduate unemployment scenario. It was here that ‘personal’
outcomes became a way of asserting that returning to education remained a viable project, even
given the employment insecurities of the working-middle class ‘core’.
PW:
If when you leave university, you don’t get the job that you’d wanted or you’d
envisaged immediately, will ...it still have been worth it, do you think?
Group:
Yeah.
PW:
In what way?
Brenda:
Well for me, it’s not about a career at the end, it’s about myself and what I can
achieve. And, if I get my degree and never work, I’ll still be really happy.
Perminder: Yeah, it’s the same for me. It’s more - the degree I’m doing is more, um, to
expand my knowledge and learn about other things rather than acquire a job
at the end. Obviously, it’s going to help but it’s basically an interest, more
than anything.
Mona:
It’s that and self-fulfilment - to prove to yourself that you can do it and you can
stick at it.
Here the interviewees united in asserting that the ‘personal’ outcomes of further/ higher
education would be robust enough to withstand future disappointments in the job market. Did
the distinction between employment outcomes and ‘personal’ outcomes indicate that graduate
status, in itself, constituted evasion of the socio-economic peripheries, even in the absence of the
desired correlation between educational achievement and labour market opportunities?
Mark offered a remarkable comment that goes beyond the notion of educational qualifications as
an asset generating labour market opportunities, instead echoing Nabila’s insistence that a degree
can insure identity in the face of unemployment, enabling the individual remain “somebody”,
even in the absence of an immediate workplace role.
Mark: Because of all the criticism I suppose teachers come under (indistinct). They
give you temporary contracts. They're not necessarily going to keep you on so I
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suppose it doesn't guarantee you a job but ...whatever, you stand a better chance
of getting a job with a degree than you do without a degree. So I'd rather be an
unemployed teacher than an unemployed I-don't-know.
The key to Mark’s position seems to lie in his claim that it is possible to be “an unemployed
teacher”, a claim that is, in fact, a multi-layered paradox, although one that it is possible to
untangle, in order to shed light on the ‘personal’ value of educational qualifications.
Mark’s pointed distinction between being “an unemployed teacher” and being “an unemployed Idon’t-know” is a reminder of why commentators such as Casey (1995: pp. 7-8) regard as
premature the post-modern tendency to reject analysis of production as a site of identity
formation. The very notion that it is possible (and, under conditions of unemployment,
preferable) to be an “unemployed teacher” can be regarded as an expression of what Casey
(1995: p.25) defines as the continuing centrality of productionism (“the logic and project of
modern industrialism”) as the “basis of social life and citizenship across the western world”,
dominating identity whether “in or out of employment, preparing for it or seeking it”. Yet the
post-industrial critiques of Casey (1995), Ainley (1993, 1994), Brown and Scase (1991) and Avis
(1998) concur that the key disjuncture created by the diminution of traditional industrial forms is
a structural insecurity in the labour market likely to increase the proportion of working lives
spent out of, preparing for or seeking work (a pattern acknowledged even within the lifelong
learning lobby’s evangelistic take on ‘flexible’ working). What effect would experience of such
vertiginous conditions appear to have had upon the Access students’ perceptions of the potential
outcomes of returning to education, as regards choice, security and identity?
The interviews with the Access group showed that their confidence in the power of educational
qualifications to maximise the possibility of achieving desired career ends was paralleled by a
nascent awareness of the insecurity existing in the graduate labour market. Their perception of
post-compulsory education as the ‘best option’ for enabling flight from the peripheral labour
sector and from dependency on state welfare recalls the terms adopted by Mann (1992), whose
critique of the “underclass” thesis emphasises the role of “working-class agency” in the
determination of class divisions.
It is essential, Mann (1992) argues, to view consumption not merely as an imperative of capitalist
systems of production but also as “a question of choice albeit under certain restraints” (Mann,
1992: p.142). One form of working-class agency that he identifies is action taken by “the bestplaced sections of the working-class to escape the most stigmatising aspects of public welfare”
(Mann 1992: p.144). Mann's (1992) essential proposition is that working-class consumption
patterns constitute a form of political agency but that the limitation of this form of agency is that
it can only enable a shift from undesirable to preferred forms of dependency upon capitalist
systems of production.
Taking cue from this argument, it can be suggested that, in returning to education - that is, in
becoming consumers of further education - EBC’s Access students were exhibiting two forms of
agency. Firstly, there was the desire to evade dependency upon the state benefit system and to
achieve the relative choice and security offered by dependence on the shifting patterns of the
graduate labour market (Myra refers to "Coming off the social ...You don't have to depend on
them, depend on yourself”). Secondly, there was the determination to insure their identities by
developing a concept of the self capable of surviving job market insecurity - that is, by
developing aspects of identity which create the illusion of being independent from the
12
fluctuations of the job market. Thus even the most apparently “personal” outcomes of returning
to education are “beyond” the sites of employment and family provision only in the sense that the
students’ investment in lifelong learning, certification and the ‘responsive’ social hierarchy
necessitates such a discursive location (or transfer), in order to establish at least one form of
certain return from the Access/ H.E. project.
8. Conclusion
Within the rhetoric of DES (1991), DfEE (1995, 1996, 1999), Kennedy (1997), Fryer (1997) etc.
lies the assertion that the cultural capital accumulated through PCET will convert directly into
economic capital in the form of comparatively secure, reasonably paid employment and, thereby,
into social capital by elevating certificated learners beyond the threat of underclass slippage. In
this sense, PCET regulates educational qualifications as “cultural-capital passports into higher
education and work ” (Riseborough 1993: p.57), except that the passport metaphor can now be
fully triangulated. Government, in its ‘learning society’ manifestation, is the validator of
individuals’ labour power potential; certificated individuals gain validated entry not merely into
H.E. or work but into the socially included core in which such preferred dependencies are
feasible options.
However, the EBC case students problematised this ‘inevitable’ interconvertibility between
educational certification and economic capital. The case students’ biographies, made vulnerable
by the decision to re-enter education, stimulated a subtextual question. What would be the impact
upon their identities and their socio-educational perception should PCET’s promise of
educational-economic interconversion remain unrealised at the end of Access plus three years’
degree study?
This hovering question, prompted by the students’ first-hand knowledge of uncertificated,
undercapitalised marginalisation necessitated the production by the students of an additional
conviction: that gaining a degree qualification would itself constitute a form of personal capital
accumulation that did not require (immediate) confirmation via the graduate employment market.
That degree-generated personal capital, therefore, became the ‘inalienable’ quality that the case
group repeatedly identified as existing within their Access projects. The degree and the nexus of
personal capital that it configured (i.e. validated labour power potential, academic capability,
participation in a prized form of activity, a ‘self-evident’ social includedness) could not be ‘taken
away’. At this stage of their endeavours, at least - and natural disappointment notwithstanding educational certification could not be tarnished; it would insure aspects of identity in such a way
as to enable the graduate to withstand and to transcend the vagaries of the labour market. As
such, the students imbued their Access/ degree projects with a value that existed both ‘beyond’
and ‘against’ the interconversion value posited by the contemporary PCET project.
In insisting that their Access/ degree projects must be predicated upon this form of personal
insurance, the case students had constructed a means of incorporating Access and H.E. into
biographies that might not cohere with the existential models proffered by PCET and its ‘lifelong
learning’ notions. They had worked out how to account for and to withstand potential future
disjunctures and, in doing so, reconfirmed Access and, indeed, the anticipated degree
qualification as conduit elements geared towards realising their sense of vocation. That is, even if
career specifics could not be insured, their ‘core’ social status would be secured, with or without
the immediate response of the labour market.
13
To adapt Jackson’s (1997: p.54) terms, the case students’ Access activities were undertaken “as
people, as citizens, as members of society” as well as “commodities in the labour market.” The
case students were acutely aware of the exchange value of commodified education (or
certification) and of the exchange value of their own labour power but seemed to insist on a
sphere of separateness, present in the knowledge that their personal requirements might not
cohere absolutely with those of government and the market. Thus the insured identities that they
sought could not truly be said to be independent of the market, since they were related to its
insecurities but the students attached a use-value to graduate status ‘beyond’ the PCET project’s
interconversion value, whilst in the most public sphere still conforming to the PCET project’s
structures.
The dual value yielded from the Access/ degree project by the case group reinforces too
Postone’s (1986: p.312; 1993: pp. 57-58) insistence on the antinominal split (as opposed to an
essential distinction) between state and civil society. In a capitalist society characterised by a
division into state and civil society, that split is, argues Postone (1986: p. 58), expressed for the
individual “as that between the individual as citizen and as person.” As a person existing in civil
society, the individual is “concrete”; as a citizen, the individual is “abstract”, a configuration of
state-defined rights and responsibilities. Within these terms, the case students’ dual valuation of
Access/ H.E. and their perception of qualifications as “cultural capital passports into higher
education and work “ (Riseborough 1993) can be regarded as an expression of tensions between
abstract and concrete identities. Their fear of slippage into social exclusion and their belief in the
permeability of the responsive social hierarchy (that is in the potential for social inclusion),
imply the abstract concept of citizenship. As with all commodities, certification - the ‘best
option’ for entry into included citizenship (and flight from the subsistence citizenship of
peripheralisation) exists in “doubled form”, having both exchange value - in this case, converting
into economic capital within the graduate labour market - as well as use value, residing in the
affirmation of the insured self ‘transcending’ the instabilities of the labour market.
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