Home and away: building cultural capital to encourage progression to higher education

The Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire Collaborative Outreach Programme (DANCOP), part of the Uni Connect Programme (formally the National Collaborative Outreach Programme), procured the services of World Challenge to co-deliver three separate ten-day trips to Morocco for year ten learners from areas of low progression across Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. The trips were designed to improve the cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1977) of learners in response to schools’ requests for experiences that offer cultural enrichment and broaden horizons that they typically struggle to offer. With half of all local authority areas in the East Midlands being social mobility coldspots (Social Mobility Commission, 2017), DANCOP has had an opportunity to provide an experience for learners to encounter a completely different culture that they may not otherwise be able to engage with.
This chapter explores the successes and challenges of executing successful trips abroad for school-age learners from areas where progression to higher education is low. It also examines whether the trips have had a positive impact on learners’ views of progression to higher education and learners’ attitudes towards self. This chapter was originally written and submitted in autumn 2019.

Attribution 4.0 International