Access and Participation Plans and the Ethnicity Degree Awarding Gap: Widening Participation, accountability and Research.

This paper focuses on the Ethnicity Degree Awarding Gap (EDAG) and uses comparative data from the Access and Participation Plans (APPs – a regulatory requirement linked to Widening Participation) of 4 HEIs to explore the tensions inherent in the Widening Participation agenda. Combining corpus linguistics-aided discourse analysis (Perez-Paredes 2020), critical discourse analysis and perspectives from Critical Race Theory, the paper will explore the ways in which a racialised ‘gap’ is being conceptualised and what assumptions these reveal about HE, teaching and learning in HE and how to bring about change. Problematising the production of knowledge through statistics in this area, the paper ends by proposing that research rooted in a racially and intersectionally literate methodology is essential to illuminate the causes of the EDAG. Such a methodology would need to foreground the lived experiences of black and brown students, the perspectives of teaching staff and of community participants.