This article reviews the five contributions to the Forum on ‘Access and transition to higher education’ in Volume 2 of this journal, and considers the needs of all potential undergraduate students–especially those from backgrounds from which students have rarely come, including the most disadvantaged. The article reflects upon secondary school curricula and pastoral care provision, and also on the need for more specific tuition in key skills in the courses offered by universities.

This article begins by showing that students’ failure to complete degree courses is an international problem. It suggests that a major cause of this is the lack of a planned transition between school and university. Using the teaching of English in British universities as a case study, it examines factors both within and beyond the academic discipline which contribute to the difficulty of making this transition. It concludes that greater efforts need to be made to liaise between the two sectors.

This article continues the debate about the transition from school to university begun in the international forum in volume 2 of this journal and developed in the thoughtful response from Michael Marland in volume 2. It examines some of the many points made there in relation to students’ own views. Interested colleagues at different institutions were invited to issue a short questionnaire to first-year undergraduates studying English, to discover how well prepared they felt for specified aspects of this transition. Some (...) of the outcomes have discipline-specific implications, but others may be applied more widely. The article focuses on students’ responses to the different teaching methods used, the amount of reading required of them, and essay writing. It identifies areas where the transition is fairly smooth, but highlights others where student responses suggest that all those involved, including policy makers and politicians, need to rethink. (shrink)

This article examines the teaching of Advanced level students in both years of their studies at two secondary schools in the Staffordshire area. The purpose of the investigation is to compare the tuition of A level students to the teaching of first year undergraduates at Keele University, specifically in relation to concerns raised by the undergraduates during the potentially disorientating period at the start of their degree studies. The question of whether there is a need to manage the students’ transition (...) to higher education more effectively is considered. (shrink)

This article reports a project designed to foster first-year music students' academic study skills and to investigate their expectations and experiences of starting at university. Data gathered through questionnaires, diaries and in-class tasks reveal the change in learning strategies and musical identity the students experience in their first semester of the music degree course. Academic work and anxieties about workload and assessment challenge the focus on performing which has previously been the students' main source of musical involvement, necessitating a redefinition (...) of what it means to be musically successful. These findings are discussed in the broader context of musicians' life-span development, and the article concludes with some implications for practice in higher education and beyond. (shrink)