Lead supervisor:
Dr Charlotte Brookfield 
Start date: October 2022 (Full time)
Award: General
Subject Pathway:
Education
Thematic Cluster:
Language, Learning and Behaviour Cluster
“Welsh higher education delivering a second-chance nation: It’s never too late to learn” Barriers experienced by mature students at Welsh universities
RESEARCH SCOPE:
This longitudinal case study with a quantitative strand explores the barriers to mature students' social and academic engagement with a pre-1992 university in Wales. The quantitative strand gathered largely demograhic data across five Welsh universities including the Open University in Wales.
BACKGROUND:
Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) data define mature students as those aged 21 or over on matriculation. HESA shows that the UK-wide attrition rates for these students are increasingly high compared to the students categorised as younger and ‘traditional’ (Briggs et al. 2012; Gill 2021).
Historic and contemporary research which explores mature students, particularly in Welsh universities is small-scale. Also, not much is known about how mature students including the migrants respond to the current social, academic, financial, and cultural challenges in Welsh higher education.
As Sellar and Gale (2011, p. 116) highlight, researchers should broaden their scope from merely focusing on the point of entry to examining the nature of the higher education experience. This approach may help us better understand how to enhance the capacities needed to foster social mobility for disadvantaged groups—hence, the importance of the longitudinal aspect of this study.
RESEARCH METHODS:
This study draws on in-depth interviews conducted at three time intervals during the academic semesters and a cross sectional survey. The Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) allows me to interpret the students' perceptions and experiences of a pre-1992 university in Wales by examining the causal contributions of the conditions to the outcome of interest, i.e., the presence or absence of student engagement with the social and academic contexts using Boolean algebra.
RESEARCH QUESTIONS:
- How does mature students’ engagement and non-engagement with university education evolve over time at a pre-1992 university in Wales?
- What barriers to learning can be traced in mature students’ perceptions and experiences of a pre-1992 university in Wales?
Research Impact
The findings from this longitudinal research on mature students in Welsh higher education may contribute to the design and implementation of Welsh higher education policies and teaching and learning initiatives specifically for mature students to support their progression from an access course through to the completion of their undergraduate study.