Racial gaps without racism: how English universities frame inequality in access and participation plans

Journal article

Racial inequalities are pervasive in higher education despite concerted efforts to redress issues of access, progression, and continuation. Little attention has been paid to how universities themselves construct race within their policy texts. Drawing on a QuantCrit framework as its interpretive lens, this paper analyses Access and Participation Plans produced by English universities between 2018 and 2024 to investigate the discursive construction of Blackness and Whiteness within regulatory widening participation discourses. Using a corpus-assisted discourse studies approach, we generate and qualitatively code 1200 concordance lines for the terms White and Black. The analysis identifies a notable asymmetry in racial framing. Whiteness is typically classed and personalised, most often through the figure of the “White working-class boy”, who is positioned as vulnerable and in need of aspiration-raising interventions, while also functioning as a yardstick against which other groups are measured. Blackness, by contrast, is largely constructed relationally and in deficit terms, frequently aggregated into broader categories, and framed through quantified and ‘unexplained’ attainment gaps. We argue that these institutional framings enable universities to acknowledge racial disparities whilst decentring structural explanations such as racism and institutional responsibility. This constrains how institutional responsibility for racial inequality is understood and acted upon within higher education. Through highlighting the role of quantification in shaping racialised meanings, this paper contributes to debates on racial inequalities and governance in English higher education.

Authors: Hart, B; Šumatić, M

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Wiley
• Journal: British Educational Research Journal
• Publication date: 2026-05-07
• Acceptance date: 2026-04-20
• DOI: 10.1002/berj.70199
• EISSN: 1469-3518
• ISSN: 0141-1926
• Language: English
• Keywords: race; higher education; access; equity