Sociological research on first-in-family (FiF) participation in higher education has consistently demonstrated that access to and experiences of higher education are socially patterned, shaped by classed inequalities, institutional cultures, and uneven distributions of economic, social, and cultural resources. Across national contexts, FiF students are more likely to encounter institutional opacity, feelings of misrecognition, and uneven access to informal knowledge about higher education. Much of this literature, however, has centred the individual student as the primary unit of analysis, with families positioned as background influences, constraints, or sites of limited cultural capital. While this body of work has been vital in challenging meritocratic assumptions and deficit narratives about participation, it has paid comparatively little attention to how higher education participation is collectively experienced, negotiated, and sustained within families over time.

This study addresses this gap through the central research question: How do first-in-family students and their immediate families experience higher education as a relational and intergenerational process? Rather than conceptualising participation as an individual educational transition, the research examines how higher education becomes embedded within family relationships, reshaping roles, expectations, responsibilities, and identities. It explores how FiF students share, translate, and mediate their experiences of higher education with immediate family members, and how families respond to, support, and make sense of participation in the absence of prior institutional familiarity. In doing so, the study foregrounds participation as a process that unfolds relationally, across generations, and within everyday family life.

The project is situated within the sociology of education and draws on theoretical perspectives concerned with class, inequality, institutional habitus, aspiration, and belonging. It builds on Bourdieusian analyses of how educational institutions privilege particular forms of knowledge, confidence, and cultural familiarity, while also engaging with more recent scholarship that examines lived experiences of participation, identity formation, and belonging in higher education. The study extends this work by shifting analytical attention from the individual student to the family as a relational site in which educational meanings are produced, negotiated, and sustained. Families are conceptualised not as passive contexts but as active participants in educational trajectories, undertaking significant emotional, relational, and practical labour to support participation.

The research also engages critically with widening participation discourses that emphasise individual aspiration, choice, and resilience. While such frameworks have been influential across European higher education systems, they often obscure the relational conditions that shape participation and persistence. By foregrounding emotional and relational labour within families, the study challenges deficit-oriented framings of FiF families and highlights the collective work that underpins access to higher education. This theoretical framing enables a more nuanced understanding of how inequality is reproduced and contested through everyday family practices.

The European and international relevance of the study lies in its contribution to comparative debates on widening participation, social mobility, and educational inequality across massified higher education systems. Despite variation in national policy contexts, European widening participation agendas frequently rely on individualised models of participation that assume independent navigation of complex institutional systems. By examining FiF participation as a relational and intergenerational process, this research offers a framework that is transferable across national contexts and sensitive to differing welfare, education, and family regimes. It contributes to broader sociological debates on transition, belonging, and inequality, and demonstrates the value of family-centred qualitative approaches for understanding participation in higher education within Europe and beyond.

The study adopts a qualitative research design informed by interpretive phenomenological approaches, enabling in-depth exploration of how first-in-family (FiF) participation in higher education is experienced and made meaningful within family contexts. The design is particularly suited to examining relational, emotional, and intergenerational dimensions of educational participation, even where accounts are generated through individual interviews. Data are generated through semi-structured individual interviews with a total sample of fifty participants (n = 50). This includes fourteen family groupings in which a FiF student and at least one immediate family member (parent/guardian, sibling, or child) participated, alongside additional FiF students who were interviewed individually and reflected on their own experiences in relation to their families. All interviews were conducted on an individual basis. This approach was adopted to ensure participants could speak freely about family relationships and experiences, and in recognition of the practical and ethical challenges associated with recruiting multiple family members. Recruitment of parents and siblings proved challenging, reflecting wider patterns of limited engagement with higher education research among families unfamiliar with university contexts. Rather than treating this as a limitation, the study incorporates FiF students’ reflective accounts of family relationships and dynamics as a complementary source of insight into how higher education participation is understood and negotiated within families. The analytic strategy combines two complementary approaches operating at different levels of analysis. First, interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) is used to analyse the fourteen family groupings as singular analytic units. This stage focuses on how higher education participation is collectively experienced and interpreted within families by examining points of convergence, divergence, and relational meaning-making across linked family accounts. Findings from this analysis are presented in a dedicated chapter that foregrounds family-level experiences of higher education. Second, thematic network analysis is applied across the full dataset at the level of individual participants. This enables systematic identification of patterns across accounts and supports movement from basic themes to organising and global themes, situating individual experiences within wider sociological debates on class, education, and inequality. The combination of these approaches allows the study to capture both collective family processes and individual experiences of participation. Ethical considerations are central to the research design. Individual interviews support confidentiality and emotional safety when discussing sensitive topics such as inequality, wellbeing, and family relationships. Ethical approval has been obtained, and reflexive practices are embedded throughout data generation and analysis.

This study is expected to demonstrate that first-in-family participation in higher education is not solely an individual educational transition but a relational process shaped by family relationships, meanings, and responsibilities. While higher education is formally undertaken by the student, findings are anticipated to show that participation is experienced and interpreted in relation to family histories, expectations, and emotional dynamics. Analysis of the fourteen family groupings is expected to illustrate how higher education becomes a shared family project, reshaping roles, responsibilities, and understandings of education. Families are likely to be shown to collectively negotiate pride, aspiration, uncertainty, and strain, alongside the emotional and practical work required to support participation in the absence of inherited institutional familiarity. These findings foreground family-level processes that are often rendered invisible in individualised accounts of educational participation. Findings from the wider sample of first-in-family students are expected to complement this family-level analysis by demonstrating how students reflect on and interpret their higher education experiences in relation to their families, including where direct family participation was not possible. These accounts are anticipated to highlight practices of translation, mediation, and sense-making through which students manage institutional demands while maintaining family relationships and identities. At a theoretical level, the study is expected to contribute to the sociology of education by reconceptualising first-in-family participation as a relational and intergenerational process, extending analyses of institutional habitus beyond the individual student and foregrounding emotional and relational labour as central dimensions of educational participation and mobility. At a policy level, the findings are expected to challenge widening participation frameworks that rely on individualised assumptions, highlighting the need for more relationally informed approaches that better recognise the family contexts within which educational transitions are embedded.

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