It is the case that, within primary and secondary education, pupils from some BME backgrounds are more likely to be excluded from school than White pupils (EHRC 2010, 2015). Some groups of Black pupils have been identified as nearly four times more likely to receive a permanent exclusion than the school population as a whole (DofE 2012:ii).

In 2013 I was commissioned by the Higher Education Academy to undertake a large project exploring the relationship between disciplinary background and retention and attainment rates of different groups of HE students (HEA/Woodfield 2014). One of the key findings was that BME students were more likely to leave university without their degree than White students, and that this varied somewhat by disciplinary background. A number of issues that warranted further attention arose from this research.

One was the fact that, within higher education, despite the fact that we generally talk about ‘student retention’ in a relatively homogenous way, there was a strong case for looking further at students who withdraw voluntarily as a separate and distinct group from students who are required to withdraw. In HE, this latter group are students whose progress is disallowed because of academic failure reasons or because of exclusion i.e. they are deemed to have broken institutional behavioural or financial rules. Whilst it is true that students who are recorded as withdrawing ‘voluntarily’, for say ‘health’ reasons, may feel that their withdrawal is ill-described as such, students who are required-to-withdraw by their institution nevertheless constitute a qualitatively different category of leaver. The second issue of interest was whether the same trend that is observable within compulsory education, whereby BME students are more likely to be excluded, is identifiable within HE. Finally, the role of disciplines in creating variation in the retention rates of students seemed to be a potentially rich seam of further enquiry as it firmly suggested that differences in retention are likely to be a function of different contextual factors within higher education itself.

student leavers from a White background were considerably less likely than all other ethnic groups to exit their studies non-voluntarily

I embarked upon an exploration of these specific issues by looking at all student leavers from English universities in 2011. This revealed that student leavers from a White background (29%) were considerably less likely than all other ethnic groups to exit their studies non-voluntarily; all other ethnic groups had required-to-withdraw levels above 40%. In the case of some Black and Asian groups, the majority of student leavers were required-to-withdraw; with most being required-to-withdraw because of academic failure, while a minority were excluded.

The relationship between ethnicity and non-voluntary withdrawal was then further explored to see whether it held true across two matched pairs of disciplines: two Social Science disciplines (Business/Management; Education) and two Science disciplines (Biological Sciences/Psychology). This analysis explored whether ethnicity played an independent role in the likelihood of being required-to-withdraw, once other factors that predict lower retention rates generally were controlled for, including: gender, age, university type, and socio-economic class. It revealed considerable variation across even cognate disciplines, so that for instance, within Business/Management, Black and Asian students were respectively over four and three times more likely than White students to be withdrawn non-voluntarily, whereas in Education student leavers from BME backgrounds were not significantly more likely to be withdrawn non-voluntarily than White students. Similarly, within Biological Science ethnicity exerted an independent impact on the likelihood of non-voluntary withdrawal, whereas it did not in Psychology.

Overall, these findings suggest that the composition of the required-to-withdraw category is, to some extent, a determination of disciplinary cultures, customs and practices rather than characteristics of students themselves. In other words, it is fundamentally social in construction. This, in turn, suggests that if we want to address the unusual but non-trivial phenomenon of non-voluntary withdrawal, we should start by focusing on how we manage the student experience within universities, and whether it is as consistent as it should be across different student groups and disciplinary areas.

For more information about the subject of this blog, see “Undergraduate students who are required to withdraw from university: the role of ethnicity” in British Educational Research Journal; forthcoming.

References

Department of Education (2012) A profile of pupil exclusions in England. Education Standards Analysis and Research Division, Research Report DFE-RR190. Available online at: www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/183498/DFE-RR190.pdf (accessed 1 October 2015).

EHRC (2010) How fair is Britain? Triennial review 2010. Available online at: www.equalityhumanrights.com/sites/default/files/documents/triennial_review/how_fair_is_britain_-_complete_report.pdf (accessed 1 October 2015).

EHRC (2015) Is Britain fairer? The state of equality and human rights 2015. Available online at: www.equalityhumanrights.com/sites/default/files/uploads/IBF/Final-reports/EHRC_IBF_-MainReport_acc.pdf (accessed 1 October 2015).

HEA/Woodfield, R. (2014) Undergraduate retention and attainment across the disciplines. Higher Education Academy Report. Available online at: www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/resources/undergraduate_retention_and_attainment_across_the_disciplines.pdf (accessed 1 October 2015)