What I Got Wrong About Widening Participation
21 Jul 2026
Reflections from my first year as Associate Director for Widening Participation in SEED, by Dr Loretta Anthony-Okeke, SEED Associate Director of Teaching and Learning - Widening Participation
A few months into this role, I was sitting in a conversation with a colleague who teaches on one of our largest undergraduate programmes. We were talking about a student, I won't say more than that, who had performed well enough in the first semester and then, quietly and without drama, disappeared. Not from the record system. From the room. From the seminar. From the group project. By the time anyone noticed, the damage was done.
My colleague was thoughtful and clearly troubled by it. What struck me was the question she asked: ‘Is that a widening participation issue, or is it just one of those things?’
It is, I think, the most honest question anyone has asked me since I took on this job. And the answer, unsatisfying as it is, is: both, and that is precisely the problem.
What I though the job was
When I took on the Associate Director for Widening Participation post in SEED, I arrived with a fairly clear picture of what the work would involve. Outreach. School partnerships. Data dashboards. A coherent School-wide strategy. Events. Visibility. I had a list, and I was ready to start working through it.
That picture was not wrong, exactly. Outreach matters; school partnerships matter; data matters enormously. But it was incomplete in a way that the first year has steadily and sometimes uncomfortably revealed to me.
Here is the assumption I had to unlearn: that widening participation is primarily something that happens before students arrive. It is not. Or rather, it should not be. Getting students through the door is the beginning of the obligation, not the fulfilment of it. What happens once they are here, whether they feel they belong, whether they can see themselves in the curriculum, whether the assessment design is making quiet assumptions about what constitutes a legitimate way of knowing, that is widening participation too. It is just less visible, and considerably harder to name.
Learning the terrain
The first thing the year taught me, and I say this as someone who knew it intellectually but had to learn it again in practice, was that before you can build anything sustainable in a complex institution, you have to understand the terrain. SEED is a large, disciplinarily diverse School. Manchester School of Architecture (jointly run with Manchester Metropolitan University), Geography, the Global Development Institute, the Manchester Institute of Education, and Planning, Property and Environmental Management: these are not just different subjects, they have different pedagogical cultures, different student profiles, different relationships with employment and postgraduate study. A WP strategy that treats them as interchangeable is not a strategy; it is a pamphlet.
So I spent a significant part of this year in conversations rather than in production. Conversations with colleagues across the School and Faculty who are quietly doing extraordinary things to promote access, belonging and success: a course unit director in one department who has redesigned assessment specifically to reduce the structural disadvantage faced by commuter students; a personal tutor in another who has spent three years building the kind of consistent, low-key
relationships with first-generation students that the research tells us are among the strongest predictors of continuation; a colleague who shared how securing Afro-Caribbean and Nigerian catering for a Black-heritage student event, despite institutional obstacles, helped create a sense of familiarity and belonging that encouraged students to attend and engage. None of it was visible to me until I sat down with people.
I also spent time with colleagues beyond SEED. A meeting with Melissa Jacobi, Head of Access, Student Development and Success, helped me to see how the University's existing infrastructure, which is genuinely impressive, creates space for School-level work, rather than crowding it out. The question is not how SEED can duplicate what central teams do well; it is how SEED can connect those institutional resources to what we do in our classrooms, our assessment feedback, our admissions conversations. That translation work is where I think a School-level WP role adds value. It is also, I will admit, harder than it sounds.The University's most recent Access and Student Success Impact Report 2025 confirms real progress: awarding gaps have narrowed, commuter student continuation has improved markedly, and programmes like Manchester Momentum, Manchester 10/10, Humanities Black Heritage Students Network are making a measurable difference for Black and South Asian students. That is genuinely good news. It also means that the work of a School-level WP lead is not to duplicate what Access and Student Success already does well. It is to connect it to what we do in our classrooms, our assessment design, our admissions conversations, and our day-to-day interactions with students.
Further afield, a conversation with Dr Josephine Gabi at Manchester Metropolitan University, whose work on The Collective, a cross-institutional initiative addressing racial inequality and awarding gaps, has been genuinely influential in the sector, gave me both affirmation and useful challenge. She was characteristically direct: the risk with school-level WP work, she said, is that it becomes so focused on demonstrating activity that it loses sight of what the activity is actually for. The awarding gap, she argued, is not a neutral metric. It is evidence of an institutional debt. I have been sitting with that framing for months, and I think it is right. And I think it changes what we should be asking ourselves when we look at SEED's data.
What the data says … and what it does not
Here is something I want to say plainly, because I think it is too often said in the language of institutional targets and strategic priorities, which makes it easier to receive and considerably harder to act on. SEED has a 13-percentage-point ethnicity attainment gap at School level. Ninety-two per cent of White students achieve a good degree; 79 per cent of non-White students do. When you disaggregate further, by gender, by department, by year of study, the pattern becomes both more complex and more troubling.
What the data cannot tell us is why. The literature on this is extensive and consistent: attainment gaps of this kind are rarely explained by a single factor. They reflect curriculum design, assessment formats, feedback practices, the cultural assumptions embedded in how we teach, the relationships students have with staff and with each other, and the material conditions of student life - timetabling, cost, commuting, caring. None of these are beyond our influence as a School. Some are within our direct control.
I want to be careful not to overstate what I know and understate what I do not. A significant part of this year has been precisely about developing the evidence base we would need to act with confidence. But I have seen enough, in the data, in the conversations, in my own experience (as an international student in the University of Manchester and as an academic staff who has spent years
thinking about what it means to belong in institutions that were not originally built for you), to know that the gap is not explained by deficits in our students. It is explained by conditions in our institution. That is both a harder truth and a more hopeful one, because conditions can be changed.
On belonging … which is not a soft word
I am aware that ‘belonging’ can sound like a pastoral concern; something for wellbeing teams and student support advisers, warm and important but not quite academic. I want to push back on that, because the evidence does not support it. A student's sense of belonging, whether they feel welcomed and valued and seen as a legitimate member of an academic community, is one of the strongest predictors of academic engagement and attainment we have. It is not separate from academic success; it is a condition of it.
This is particularly true for students from underrepresented groups, who are, as the research puts it, more sensitive to belonging cues. What that means in practice is that small things matter more than we might expect. Whether a seminar feels like a place where your perspective is genuinely sought. Whether the examples in a lecture reflect a world you recognise. Whether the feedback you receive assumes you are capable of growth, or treats your starting point as a ceiling. These are curriculum and pedagogy questions. They are also, as it turns out, widening participation questions.
A significant proportion of our students in SEED are commuter students, first-generation learners, students from Black, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi backgrounds, and students who carry caring responsibilities alongside their degrees. I want to say something directly about these students, because I think they are too often described in the language of challenge and risk: they are assets. They bring extraordinary intellectual and cultural resources with them. The question is whether our institution is designed to recognise and build on those resources, or whether it is structured around a different set of assumptions.
Why this cannot be one person's job
One of the things I have said repeatedly this year, to senior colleagues, to colleagues I have met for the first time, to anyone who has asked me what my role actually involves, is that widening participation cannot be the responsibility of a single postholder. It is not only that one person cannot do it all; it is that a model in which it is delegated to one person actively obscures the ways in which it is everyone's business.
The people who shape students' experience of belonging are not, primarily, WP leads. They are the personal tutors who notice when someone goes quiet. The course unit directors who decide what counts as a legitimate argument in an assessment. The programme admissions leads who deliver Open and Offer-holder days. The colleagues who design induction and decide whether commuter students can get to it. The programme teams who review their programme handbooks and offer-holder communications and ask themselves whether a prospective first-generation student would find them welcoming or alienating.
Earlier this year, as part of the landscape-mapping work, I began building what will become a cross-School network for access, belonging and student success; a space for colleagues from across SEED's disciplines and professional services teams to share practice, ask questions, and do the kind of honest, peer-supported reflection that tends not to happen in formal committee structures. It is not a committee; it is not a compliance exercise. It is a bet on the idea that the most effective way to shift practice at scale is to support colleagues who are curious and willing, and to make their good work visible to eachother.
What I have discovered in the conversations that have fed into that network is that there is more good practice in SEED than any of us realised. That is encouraging. It is also slightly sobering, because it means that the problem has not been a shortage of good intentions or individual effort; it has been a shortage of infrastructure for connecting, recognising, and building on them.
A framework that is, honestly, still in progress
Over the course of this year, I have been developing the SEED Framework for Access, Belonging and Student Success; a School-level strategic document that tries to set out, coherently and honestly, how SEED will contribute to the University's Access and Participation Plan commitments across the full student lifecycle: from outreach and pre-entry through to continuation, success and progression.
I want to be clear about what that framework is and is not. It is not a promise that everything will be different by next September. It is not a list of activities that will be ticked off and reported as evidence of progress. It is an attempt to articulate a shared direction; one that acknowledges where we are, names the gaps with some honesty, and commits to a set of principles that should govern how we work across access, belonging and success over the next three years.
The framework is intentionally structured around the whole student journey rather than discrete intervention points, because that is what the evidence supports and because, frankly, anything narrower would not address the problem. It names collective responsibility as a core principle not as rhetoric but as a practical commitment: the work of each action area in the framework sits with named colleagues, programme teams, and the School's teaching and learning infrastructure, not with me alone.
The framework is still developing. Some of the conversations it depends on have not yet happened. Some of the data we would need to evaluate our work properly is not yet fully in place. There are questions in it I do not yet know how to answer. I think that is the right way to launch a piece of work like this - transparently, with an acknowledgement of what is still unknown, rather than with the kind of polished confidence that tends to make frameworks feel authoritative and then quietly shelf them after the launch event.
Looking ahead, and an invitation
As we move into the 2026-27 academic year, there are things I intend to make concrete. The WP Co-Curricular Programme for SEED will bring together a series of events across the year that are designed not as add-on provision for a small group of students, but as part of the fabric of what it means to study in this School; events focused on belonging, academic confidence, employability, and the kind of peer connection that institutional structures do not always make easy. I am also in the early stages of a research project, grounded in the same frameworks that shape my scholarly work, that will generate real evidence about what shapes belonging and attainment for students from underrepresented groups in SEED; not to report against targets, but to understand what we need to change and why.
And I want to develop the WP Intelligence Briefings I mentioned; short, accessible documents for programme and course unit directors that put access and participation data directly in the hands of the colleagues who can act on it, without requiring them to become experts in the field or wade through institutional reporting.
But here is what I want to say most clearly, and why I have written this piece as a reflection rather than a report: the most important thing I learned this year is that this work belongs to all of us. Not in the diffuse, nobody-owns-it sense that sometimes functions as an excuse for nothing changing. In
the specific, practical sense that the colleagues most able to make a difference for our students are not, by and large, the people with WP in their job titles. They are the people who design assessments, who hold academic advising meetings, who write induction handbooks, who decide how and when things are communicated.
If you teach in SEED, or support students in any capacity, and you have a question about your own practice, or an example of something you have tried, or a concern about something you have noticed, I would genuinely like to hear from you. The network I am building only works if colleagues want to be part of it; and the framework only means something if the people it depends on have shaped it.
The student who disappeared from the seminar room, I think about her more than the data would justify. Not because her case was exceptional, but because it was not. And because the question my colleague asked deserves a better answer than the one we currently have: yes, it is a widening participation issue; and yes, it is also one of those things; and the only way to make fewer of those things happen is to decide, together, that we are responsible for them.
Please get in touch: loretta.okeke@manchester.ac.uk
Dr Loretta Anthony-Okeke is a Senior Lecturer in Education at the Manchester Institute of Education and Associate Director for Widening Participation in SEED.