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The first key contribution of this thesis is conceptual: it argues that Access to Higher Education in Wales should be viewed not merely as a Level 3 qualification or a widening participation tool, but as a semi-autonomous disciplinary space within the Welsh post-compulsory education landscape. This reframes Access from the periphery of qualification policy to the heart of issues concerning governance, discipline, surveillance, and educational power. Rather than just being delivered within a governance framework, the qualification is, in significant ways, constituted by it. This idea is grounded in scholarship that understands subjects as formed through power-knowledge relations, yet capable of critique and self-transformation.
This conceptualization draws heavily on Foucault’s work concerning discipline, spatial organization, and governmentality, exploring how conduct is shaped. It aligns with scholarship that sees Foucault's later work on the self as a continuation of his interest in how subjects are constituted through discourse and power. This perspective views government not just as directing others, but as the strategic shaping of possible actions and the self-regulation of conduct according to norms. Access, in this view, occupies a unique position, differing from more rigidly standardized qualifications like A levels.
This means Access isn't unregulated, but governed through a dispersed network of awarding bodies, quality assurance processes, internal reviews, funding expectations, and institutional performance cultures. It’s a form of regulated autonomy where practitioners have discretion within defined boundaries. This moves beyond a simple freedom versus control dichotomy, showing autonomy as real but structured, with local flexibility permitted but never unconstrained. Governance operates through "governing at a distance," where regulatory authority is delegated and internalized.
This is evident in how Access course teams translate external expectations into everyday practices, becoming the "inspector within" through routine standardization, verification, and assessment monitoring. Educational power here is most effective when routinized and normalized within professional responsibilities. This view extends beyond a basic panoptic reading of surveillance, incorporating less visible forms like dataveillance, auditing, and performance tracking, suggesting control operates through decentralized, data-driven infrastructures.
From an educational standpoint, this conceptualization is vital because regulation isn't separate from pedagogy; it shapes curriculum, assessment, and valued learner and teacher dispositions. Actors are accountable not just to rules but to normative expectations of measurable effectiveness. However, the thesis avoids a deterministic view, recognizing practitioners as reflexive actors who negotiate and sometimes resist structures. This highlights constrained agency, where staff are active participants, not just passive recipients of policy.
The second major contribution is analytical: developing the concept of "regulatory drift" to explain the significant variations in Access provision across Wales. This variation occurs despite an overarching regulatory framework, in areas like admissions, curriculum, assessment burden, and learner experience. Regulatory drift describes a situation where formal frameworks remain, but interpretation and enforcement become so distributed that discrepancies gradually accumulate.
It’s not an absence of regulation or a simple compliance failure. Instead, it's a pattern emerging from distant oversight, fragmented authority, and the requirement for providers to translate broad expectations into local practices without a clear Wales-specific strategic settlement. Participants frequently noted ambiguity over who governs Access, strategic responsibility confusion, and inconsistency in curriculum and assessment. These are precisely the conditions fostering local interpretation that hardens into structural variation.
This analytical contribution answers the "why" behind inconsistencies, identifying a mechanism that reproduces weaknesses. The assessment methods are a clear site for this drift, with participants describing labor-intensive regimes and disparities in assessment numbers and organization. These aren't isolated complaints but reveal how local discretion, combined with unclear oversight, produces materially different learner experiences within the same pathway, shifting the issue to educational equity.
This connects to broader theoretical frameworks, showing how assessment acts as a disciplinary technology and how assessment-heavy models can risk a pedagogy of compliance. The governance structures that disperse authority and intensify assessment also shape pedagogical possibilities. Regulatory drift, therefore, is not just administrative fragmentation but a condition where governance reshapes the educational experience itself, influencing both what is taught and how educational value is recognized.
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