I’ve recently been reading about research into working class students and their experience of Higher Education. Wolfgang Lehmann has written quite extensively about the topic, and describes the challenges working class students may find when entering higher education, experiencing “a ‘‘foreign’’ environment in which they feel like cultural outsiders” (2013:2). The higher education environment is, Lehmann suggests, classed, and as working class students come into contact with

“Positive image is vital for the West” my prize winning schoolgirl essay published In the Western Morning News, May 24th 1997 Tidying up, I just found an essay I wrote when I was 16 which was published in the Western Morning News after it was placed second in the Western Morning News – South West Enterprise Limited Business Essay competition in 1997. This is the opening of the essay, I think you’ll see why it made me laugh….! “As a whole the Westcountry has a poor economy, ch

I have just returned from a tour of the South of England – travelling to Cornwall, Brighton and central London visiting family and friends. As I travelled I was struck by the differences between these places, socially and culturally, and how my family and friends had made choices to move to, and live in, these places. This got me thinking about the way we might identify with places, as being ‘for us’ or ‘not for us’. So, for instance one of my gay friends once said that they