'You Need a Qualification for Everything these Days.' The impact of work, welfare and disaffection upon the aspirations of access to Higher Education students

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Abstract
This article examines the perceptions held by mature students on an Access to Higher Education programme at an inner-city college as to the social, cultural and economic significance of the qualifications they hoped to gain. Emphasising the critical potential of the students' voices, this ethnography depicts them mining their biographies in order to neutralise the educational site and imbue their Access projects with value sufficient to sustain them in taking the fraught step of returning to education. The voices of the group are saturated by tensions deriving from their experiences as disaffected workers on the peripheries of the labour market and their investment in further and higher education as the preferred means by which to escape social marginalisation and welfare dependence. Their motives and aspirations reveal a lived critique of the iconic notions of widening participation and social ex/inclusion in which contemporary post-compulsory education rhetoric is embedded.

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