Upward Bound in Islington, a Model of Direct Intervention Pedagogy in Widening Participation for Students with Low Prior Attainment : An ethnographic study of participants’ perspectives of the culture, processes and meaning of an out-of-school time programme for academically at-risk adolescents in London

Cloutterbuck, Quaco and Passey, Don (2025) Upward Bound in Islington, a Model of Direct Intervention Pedagogy in Widening Participation for Students with Low Prior Attainment : An ethnographic study of participants’ perspectives of the culture, processes and meaning of an out-of-school time programme for academically at-risk adolescents in London. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

In older, western, urban societies like the United Kingdom (UK), political and economic 21st century restructuring policy and plans collide with pre-existing social inequalities and established social status order. Widening Participation (WP) represents the 21st century restructuring of state education institutions, higher education institutions and the British status order through paradigms reflective in the Knowledge Based Economy. These 21st century influences contextualise the structure of widening participation direct intervention pedagogy. These processes bind WP student engagement with institutions of further and higher education. While WP students may be under-represented in the higher education population, within the cohort, there is a subset who experience further marginalisation through low prior attainment (LPA) and low predicted grades, as well as marginalisation along the lines of race, class and gender. These students are further marginalised within a cohort of students who are known to be marginalised. The Upward Bound in Islington WP programme was established at London Metropolitan University as a complementary initiative to support the wider social mobility agenda by raising the educational attainment of secondary school students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Upward Bound in Islington is one of very few WP projects which specifically target students labelled as having LPA. This study is one of few which place WP students who may have low prior attainment and the practitioners who work with them at the centre of the research. The researcher adopts a holistic, ethnographic approach to better understand how individual and institutional networks develop social relationships which may provide a model for broader dissemination of direct intervention widening participation pedagogy that helps low performing students make choices of value and achieve in their GCSE examinations.