Widening Participation, Student Identity and Agentic Capital in Coastal, Rural and Isolated Communities in South-West England

This contribution arises from a qualitative case study of mainly part-time mature women students on a Foundation degree in Teaching and Learning developed through a partnership between a not-for-profit college and a university. The educational provision was designed to address under-participation in higher education (HE) in one of the most isolated regions of the country. The focus of this study is firmly upon the lived experience of the students, as revealed in qualitative semi-structured interviews carried out over a fifteen-month period. The data reveal an array of ways in which the students' experience of HE participation is pivotal in their lives. The paper draws upon Bourdieu's idea of human capital to help to clarify the interaction between the fields of higher education, the home and the workplace in the lives of the students, as well as the contribution of their particular personal human and social resources as agentic capital, as revealed in the participants' own accounts; a perspective which recognises that people are producers as well as products of social systems, where the subject brings elements of their growing knowledge, experience and confidence to their work and wider life.