Inclusion and participation in higher education is often considered through the policy discourses framed in terms of socio-economic disadvantage. Poverty, for example, is recognised as a significant contributory factor to lower rates of progression to higher education in the British context (DfE 2015a, 2015b; Morgan, 2015). Similarly, monitoring of participation along socio-economic lines is used in multiple European contexts (Riddell and Weedon, 2014). Such socio-economic indicators become proxies for inclusion and are used to justify active approaches towards inclusion.
However, children of military service families (hereafter “service children”) are seldom encompassed by such indicators. They are therefore rarely considered explicitly by higher education institutions in their strategies towards inclusion. We therefore argue that the inclusion of service children in higher education requires looking beyond questions of relative affluence. Instead it requires a systematic and critical engagement with the complexity of factors that characterise the lives of service children. This requires attention to the multiplicity of factors that represent the distinctiveness of one’s life. This necessitates the avoidance of stereotypes and misconceptions when considering how to engage with such students in education.
In the UK, approximately 4 in 10 young people from military service families do not progress to higher education, yet might have been expected to do so if part of the general population. This is despite such students apparently attaining as highly in academic terms as the general population (McCullouch and Hall, 2016). This apparent gap in progression, we argue, represents a case for considering service children as an under-represented, and therefore excluded, group in higher education.
This paper reflects on the outcomes of research funded by the Ministry of Defence in the United Kingdom to investigate the progression to higher education of service children (McCullouch and Hall, 2016). It addresses three key questions:
- What are the key characteristics of the population of service children (including numbers, progression rate to higher education, and academic attainment)?
- How are the educational journeys through and beyond schooling of service children conceptualised in the literature?
- How do children and young people from military service families conceptualise their own educational journeys through and beyond schooling?
In reflecting on the research findings, the paper focuses on the inclusion and exclusion factors that help or hinder the educational progression through and beyond schooling of children from military service families. It uses the question of young people’s progression to higher education as a starting point for exploring these factors.
The paper therefore seeks to identify possibilities for reconsidering approaches to inclusion in education that move beyond common discourses of deprivation, disability and under-attainment. In this respect it seeks to widen the debate on what it means to foster inclusion in education by drawing attention to ways in which established approaches to inclusion may fail to encompass the complex realities experienced by children who do not necessarily fit common definitions of the excluded. In this way it responds to Woodcock and Hardy’s (2017) challenge to move beyond the binary language of inclusion and exclusion and instead to “foster genuine and productive relations between people” (p.684). We therefore conclude that there is a case for the recasting of inclusion in higher education that moves beyond established categories of deprivation and special or additional needs.
Our arguments have relevance beyond the United Kingdom context. By troubling a reliance on socio-economic characteristics as a measure of inclusion, they have potential to prompt reflection on and investigation into the complexities and subtleties of inclusion in higher education in multiple national contexts.
