Higher education participation has become an important focus for policy debate as well as for scholarly research. In many contexts, this debate has had a particular relevance to wider social concerns over equity and inclusion. Until recently, discussions of equity and inclusion in higher education tended to focus on access and entry to the system, with much less attention being paid to the distribution of outcomes from the system. This proposal is for a paper which takes a multi-country approach to critically understanding the experiences of non-traditional students in higher education. In doing so, the study straddles the sociology of social reproduction and the psychosociology of learner transformations.

The main research questions concern (a) the relative position of non-traditional students in different European systems; (b) the extent to which access and retention of non-traditional students are treated as distinctive policy concerns; and (c) whether particular interventions are believed to affect successful access and retention for non-traditional students.

The paper is based on a European research project with partners from seven different countries: England, Germany, Ireland, Poland, Scotland, Spain and Sweden. Using interdisciplinary research we are exploring what promotes or limits the construction of a learner identity among non-traditional adult students to become effective learners and which enables or inhibits completion of HE. Issues of class, gender, ethnicity and age are important in our research. To achieve this, the project partners are developing in-depth biographical and collaborative methods to illuminate and theorise the structural, cultural and personal dialectics of learning and agency in adult student’s lives.

When adults and other non-traditional students articulate narratives of their HE experiences they tell stories of increased self- confidence and self-esteem. These findings are consistent with the results of other recent studies of the wider benefits of learning. However, they are narrated within a particular set of storylines that are familiar from other qualitative studies of adult learners within tertiary education. Those who leave early, without completing their qualification, appear not to have any such access to existing storylines; their life histories offer few common clues to the experiences of what is conventionally referred to as ‘drop out’, and often the story is narrated through experiences of rejection, failure and shame.

The significance of this is that the enhanced self-confidence and self-esteem that successful students who have been interviewed talk about is not only an important developmental experience but also provide part of the habitus (or dispositions) that enhance access and retention in higher education. Critical theory evolves in the work of Honneth to include the connection between the search for identity and legitimacy – and, from the perspective of Winnicott, for instance, even selfhood itself - at the personal level with the social and political struggle for recognition and respect and by implication equality.

Bourdieu, P and Passeron, J. (19777/2000). Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. London, Sage. Honneth A (1995) The struggle for recognition: the moral grammar of social conflicts, Cambridge, Polity. Honneth A (2007) Disrespect: the normative foundations of critical theory, Cambridge, Polity. Merrill, B. and West, L. (2009) Using biographical methods in social research. London, Sage. Sclater, S.D. (2004). What is the subject? In Narrative Enquiry. 13(2): 317-330. West, L. (1996) Beyond Fragments: adults, motivation and higher education, London, Taylor and Francis. Winnicott, D. (1971) Playing and Reality. London, Routledge.