srhe

The Society for Research into Higher Education

Tag Archives: barriers to learning


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The deaf delegate – experiences of space and time in the conference (BSL version included)

By Dai O’Brien

In this post, Dai O’Brien discusses spatial and temporal challenges that deaf academics face when attending conferences, and presents some preliminary thoughts from his funded research project on deaf academics. This post is accompanied by a filmed version of this post in British Sign Language.

Access the British Sign Language version of this post here.

Attending conferences is all about sharing information, making those contacts which can help you with research ideas, writing projects and so on. This is the ideal. However, Continue reading →


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Please can we actually do something to arrest the decline in the number of disadvantaged adult learners in universities?

By John Butcher

As the UK higher education sector contemplates its New Year resolutions, let me put in an urgent plea for universities to address an unequivocal failure in attempts to widen participation: the potential disappearance of adult learners from English HE. HESA (2017) report a 61% decline in numbers of mature part-time and full-time learners in HE since 2010. Since adult learners are disproportionately likely to be from disadvantaged or under-represented groups, this should be deeply worrying for university leaders committed to widening participation, as well as to a government espousing social mobility. Imagine the furore if female student numbers dropped by 61%, or BME numbers… Continue reading →