Increasing and diversifying participation in higher education (HE) are key goals of education policy across a wide range of countries. Such goals have resulted in new and evolving institutional arrangements to break down barriers to participation in HE, including offering both higher education and lower level tertiary education within one institutional setting. In addition, new courses have been introduced that are shorter and at a lower level than the standard exit qualification from a university. These developments are linked to a renewed emphasis on vocationally-related HE. In England, this has involved Further Education colleges in the provision of HE courses, and in the introduction of two year Foundation degrees. Vocational ‘higher’ education, particularly when taught in the setting of a ‘further’ education institution, raises questions concerning what is meant by ‘higherness’, and what is ‘furtherness’. This paper considers these questions in relation to vocational HE, drawing on empirical research from a study funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council. This study used mixed methods to investigate the changing shape and experience of HE in England, including in-depth studies of four institutions (interviews with students, tutors, institutional managers, documentary analysis). The paper explores how these institutions, and staff and students within them, constructed ‘higherness’, and how ‘higherness’ played out in the practices in which they engaged. The paper links the data to themes in the literature, including the vision of lifelong learning researchers to create a reformed ‘transformative’ HE (Jones and Roberts, 2003), recent research which has explored teaching and learning cultures in English further education colleges (Hodkinson, Biesta and James, 2004), and work on higher education identities (Reay, 2004; Reay, David and Ball, 2001). Also of interest, is the developing debate around ‘knowledge’, in particular, knowledge in the context of vocational education (Young, 2008). Whilst the study draws attention to the opportunities that vocational HE may offer, the data gathered raise questions about the use of particular forms of ‘vocational’ HE for lower-achieving students, and the relationship between vocational HE and the realities of labour market opportunities. The dilemma which is considered in conclusion is whether new forms of vocational HE open up opportunities for a more diverse population of HE students, or divert them into less prestigious, and less valued forms of higher education.

This paper uses data from a UK ESRC-funded project (the FurtherHigher Project) which used both quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate the changing shape and experience of HE in England. The qualitative strand of the study included interviews with 80 students and 50 staff, involved in vocationally-related further and higher education. For this paper these interviews are analysed in relation to how students and staff construct ‘higherness’, what it means to them, the pedagogic practices in which they engage in ‘doing’ higher education, and how they construct their identities in relation to higher education.

The results of this research take the form of an analysis of the similarities and differences in constructions of higherness amongst students and their tutors, and the interrelationship between practice and the conceptualisations of higher education in the research and policy literature.