Mature Students Returning to Education: Stigma, Symbolic Violence and Moral Project of the Self

In the UK, higher education (HE) is often valorised as a ticket to social mobility, wealth and well-being, assuming working class individuals aspire to move ‘up’ and ‘out of’ their class. Government discourses still present HE as a largely unproblematic and straightforward means of achieving upward mobility for the working classes. In much of the literature on class inequalities in HE, the experiences and outcomes of mature working-class students are not well represented even though they are a target group in many widening participation strategies.
This oral paper extends the sociological study of educational inequalities, both empirically and theoretically, by exploring the experiences, narratives and perspectives of a group of eight mature working-class single mothers who returned to education, via an Access to HE Diploma course in England. It constructs their aspirations for HE around desires to remove stigmatising labels relating to claiming welfare, rather than move ‘away’ from their class. Neo-liberal and meritocratic discourses are connected with notions of stigma and symbolic violence as a framework to understand the effects of stigmatisation. Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence is applied to understand how the women engaged in the process of ‘othering’ as a way to distance themselves - social and morally - from other ‘fractions’ of their social class. In doing so we evidence how the widening participation agenda’s implicit meritocratic and neo-liberal narrative further embeds the stigma of being working class and claiming welfare. Moreover, this paper extends our understanding of the formation of classed identities and mature students' aspirations for HE.