Tracing trajectories: how lived experience and structural inequality shape foundation year students’ retention and progression in higher education

Chivers, Emma 2025. Tracing trajectories: how lived experience and structural inequality shape foundation year students’ retention and progression in higher education. SPPD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

Foundation Year (FY) programmes have become a key mechanism through which higher education institutions seek to widen participation, yet the lived experiences of those who enter through this route remain poorly understood. This study examines how FY students’ backgrounds, biographies and prior educational trajectories shape their engagement, retention and progression within Higher Education. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, capital and field, the analysis explores how educational identities are formed, disrupted and reconstructed across the broader educational system. Using a multi-qualitative case-study design, the research draws on semi-structured interviews with FY and undergraduate students, alongside practitioner perspectives. The findings reveal that disadvantage is relational, cumulative and deeply classed, emerging through the interplay of structural conditions, institutional practices and significant life events. While working class participants often encountered constrained opportunities linked to limited economic, social and cultural capital, middle class students, also experienced disruptions to educational advantage when bereavement, bullying or undiagnosed learning needs destabilise their trajectories. These dynamics illuminate how habitus is continually reshaped in response to shifting field and unequal distributions of capital. Despite experiences of poverty, instability, exclusion, marginalisation and unmet learning needs, many participants mobilised alternative forms of capital that enabled persistence and progression. The study challenges deficit framings of FY provision by revealing the heterogeneity and complexity of FY students’ trajectories and demonstrates the need for relational, trauma-informed and equity-focused approaches within widening participation policy and practice.

Item Type:	Thesis (SPPD)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Schools > Social Sciences (Includes Criminology and Education)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General)
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	18 May 2026
Last Modified:	18 May 2026 14:07
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/187040

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