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The pressure on higher education providers (HEPs) and national programme partnerships to evaluate the impact of widening participation (WP) interventions has intensified as a result of wider changes in higher education (HE) policy and regulation, including the imposition of market forces. This chapter describes how policy stakeholder assumptions about how evaluation works and the outcomes it delivers have evolved over the last two decades. It shows how regulatory emphasis has shifted from a focus on monitoring and tracking, through to a call for return-on-investment analysis, before falling back on a pragmatic theory-informed approach. This chapter goes on to locate WP evaluation in the middle of a paradigm war, caught between proponents of a medicalised trial-based conception of evaluation methodology, and a practitioner-led position, which points to the complex contextual character of WP activities. It continues by exploring some of the many practical challenges faced by WP evaluators and argues that these have contributed to the sector’s perceived failure to deliver robust evidence of the impact of fair access activity. This chapter concludes with a look at the expanding market for WP evaluation products and services, which emerged in response to new flows of WP investment created by the 2012 increase in tuition fees.

The Teaching Excellence Framework was explicitly introduced as a mechanism to ‘enhance teaching’ in universities. This chapter suggests, however, that the highly complex ‘black box’ methodology used to calculate TEF outcomes effectively blunts its purpose as a policy lever. As a result, TEF appears to function primarily as performative policy act, merely gesturing towards a concern with social mobility. Informed by the data and metrics driven Deliverology approach to public management, I suggest the opacity of the TEF's assessment approach enables policymakers to distance themselves from and sidestep the wicked problems raised by the complicated contexts of contemporary higher education learning and teaching. At the same time, however, I argue that the very indeterminacy through which the framework achieves this sleight of hand creates a space in which engaged teaching practitioners can push through a more progressive approach to inclusive success.

Widening participation (WP) has increasingly become part of the normal ‘business’ of English higher education (HE) providers during the last 25 years. WP entered the policy mainstream for the entire HE sector following the Dearing Review (NCIHE, 1997) and the election of a new Labour government wedded to notions of social justice but also concerned with ‘lifelong learning’ in the name of human capital growth. This book employs a dual usage of the term ‘business’ in relation to WP policy, practice and culture in the context of the marketised English HE system. The first, figurative, usage explores the ways in which WP has been drawn into institutional positionality as HE providers are encouraged to differentiate themselves in the market. The second, literal, usage explores the ways in which the business of WP has become ‘business as normal’ for the sector and institutions, increasingly intertwined with other activities and which play out variously, often in response to regulatory demands of the state. This introductory chapter first contextualises these developments with a brief overview of the evolution of the HE sector in England before proposing a multilevel model – the HE policy enactment staircase – as a way of thinking about how policy is made, enacted and implemented within the sector. This chapter then draws upon this model to acts as a structure for this book. It does this by moving from a macro-level exploration of ideological levels of policymaking, through National/Sectoral level right down to the issues at an institutional and operational levels. In doing so, this chapter creates a framework from which to understand how the various elements and levels of the business of WP play out within the English HE sector.

The prevailing theory of action underlying accountability is that holding schools and students accountable will increase educational output. While accountability's theory of action intuitively seemed plausible, at the point of No Child Left Behind's national implementation, little empirical research was available to either support or critique accountability claims or to predict the long‐term impact of accountability systems on the success of at‐risk students and the schools that served them. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the work and perceptions of school teachers and leaders as they seek to meet the requirements of educational accountability.

Interviews with 89 administrators, staff and teachers revealed a variety of methods utilized to manage risks associated with low test scores and accountability ratings.

The findings reported in this paper challenge the proposition that accountability improves the educational outcomes of at‐risk students and indicates that low‐performing Texas high schools, when faced with the press of accountability, tend to mirror corporate risk management processes, with unintended consequences for at‐risk students. Low‐scoring at‐risk students were often viewed as liabilities by school personnel who, in their scramble to meet testing thresholds and accountability goals, were at‐risk student averse – implementing practices designed to “force kids out of school.”

In this paper, the authors use theory and research on risk management to analyze the work and perceptions of school teachers and leaders as they seek to meet the requirements of educational accountability. This paper is among the first to use this particular perspective to conceptualize and understand the practices of educational organizations with regards to the treatment of at‐risk students attending low‐performing high schools in the midst of accountability.