Counting the costs? The weight of administrative burden in widening participation

Administrative burden theory, emerging from public administration research, centres individuals’ subjective experiences of policy implementation as onerous. Its applicability to higher education (HE) studies, particularly in the United Kingdom , has driven our intellectual curiosity. As former widening participation (WP) practitioners and evaluators, we conducted a collective inquiry into the costs of this work, sharing and analysing our experiences through the lens of administrative burden. Our analysis foregrounds three dimensions of cost – learning, compliance, and psychological – surfacing how efforts to make HE accessible and inclusive to marginalised groups generate burdens that remain under-examined, particularly the psychological and emotional labour involved. Through our collective autoethnographic accounts, we identified commonalities accross our varied experiences, highlighting the extent of performativity and opacity characterising WP policy enactment. We conclude that administrative burden offers a valuable conceptual framework for analysing WP and other areas of HE policy where practitioners navigate complex, often contradictory, institutional demands.