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This article analyses and critiques the discourse around widening participation in elite universities in the UK. One response, from both university administrators and academics, has been to see this as an 'intractable' problem which can at best be ameliorated through outreach or marginal work in admissions policy. Another has been to reject the institution of the university completely, and seek to set up alternative models of autonomous higher education. The article presents a different analysis in which the university is still seen as central and participation is seen as an aspect of pedagogy rather than as an administrative process. This is illustrated through a description of how a Foundation Year in Arts and Humanities was conceived, designed and implemented at the University of Bristol. This model is used to consider the problems, risks and successes in challenging received notions of how (and whether) widening participation can be achieved and whether it can reach those who are currently most excluded from elite universities such as those without qualifications. The article suggests how academics can utilise their expertise to solve key challenges faced by universities and reclaim autonomy in central aspects of university administration. At the same time, it demonstrates how change to the current model of student recruitment can also bring welcome-and transformative-change to the nature of elite higher education institutions in the UK and elsewhere.

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A woman's work is never done: in this 1970s poster from the See Red Women workshop (Figure 1), a female worker moves from the production line to the multitasking of the second shift. 1 In setting the experience of industrial work alongside that of the woman in a nuclear family, the poster seeks to draw attention to similarities between paid and unpaid work. The woman's factory overall is barely distinguishable from her housewife's tabard. The time discipline of the assembly line is paralleled by the equally pressing demands of a boiling pot and a crying child. In both workplaces, a cigar-chomping capitalist looks gloatingly through the window, mentally calculating the value that will accrue to him through her labour. The woman stands, arms to her side like a soldier, her blank stare suggesting the mental cost of this culture of exploitation. See Red's brilliantly polemical poster provides an apt starting point for this forum on women, work and value in postwar Europe. The research presented here is concerned with the female experience of work after 1945. Although this period saw rising levels of paid female employment, women were still expected to take on a large share of the care work that underpins contemporary European economies. These articles emerged from the international research network on Women, Work and Value in Europe, 1945-2015, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. It brought together over forty researchers from fifteen countries, from a range of disciplines including literature, film and cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, economics, history, geography, ethnography, social work and feminist and women's studies. The network focused on 'value' as a way of thinking about the different ways in which women's work was experienced, viewed, discussed and represented by men and women, workers, employers and politicians. So while some network members sought to capture how the economic value of women's work was quantified, others were concerned with literary or artistic representations of women in the workplace. The network also sought to question the dichotomy between paid and unpaid labour, with an expansive definition of women's work which included care work, body work, creative labour and political activism. The articles in this forum thus set paid and unpaid work alongside each other, and enquire into the value of both. Inevitably, this forum, which brings together articles on the United Kingdom, Italy and socialist/post-socialist Poland and Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic, cannot represent the full richness of the network's activities, but it does capture the main strands of discussion and debate. The activities of the network were driven by a desire to understand and historicise recent changes in the workplace, the structure of the labour market, conditions of work, the status and image of the worker, how work is rewarded and what values are attached to it. The fact that these changes are sometimes referred to as 'feminisation' is a sign that all is not well. 'Feminisation of labour' ...

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