The off-side trap

Policies aimed at widening participation in higher education (HE) and diversifying the health and social care workforce have contributed to the changing profile of the pre-registration occupational therapy (OT) student population in the UK. In 2005, 67% of the intake was mature, aged 21 years or older (College of Occupational Therapists 2007), and increasing numbers are entering with ‘non-traditional’ academic backgrounds. Together with students from minority ethnic groups and working class backgrounds, this could be perceived to constitute the ‘masses’ in the UK move away from its historically elite model (Leathwood and O’Connell 2003). However, with much of the expansion in UK student numbers driven by school-leavers aged 18–21 (Elliott 2003) and those from more affluent families (Franklin 2006), participation has increased to a greater extent than it has widened. In the absence of significant challenges to the dominant hegemony, the broad HE environment has not changed dramatically, and it is evident that many of the challenges faced by students from non-traditional backgrounds stem from HE’s long-established culture, which generally remains oriented towards the traditional white middle-class student (Archer 2003).A valuable framework for exploring the experiences of students who enter HE is provided by Bourdieu’s key conceptual tools. The degree of fit between an individual student’s ‘habitus’ and their portfolio of ‘capital’ and the taken-for-granted practices and ‘rules of the game’ inherent in the new ‘field’ of HE they enter can have a marked influence on the nature of the learning experience and the learner identities they develop. These concepts underpinned the analysis of data emerging from a longitudinal, instrumental case study that explored the educational experiences of students with non-traditional academic backgrounds throughout their studies on an undergraduate OT programme within one of the UK’s research intensive universities. This paper draws on examples from amongst the study’s thirteen participants to illustrate the challenges encountered by students as they learn how to play ‘the game’ and how to present knowledge and understanding in the ‘legitimate’ form recognised and accepted by the field. It illuminates student experiences in a powerful way by highlighting the impact on learner, and even personal, identities bought to bear by varying degrees of congruence between individual habitus and the dominant culture of a specific HE institution