Our time is one of permacrisis, affecting the economy, the environment, and everything in between. In this context, UK higher education faces an existential crisis, where the university sector has been transformed into a marketplace, turning students into consumers and limiting the critical potential of education. In moving beyond these limits, this article explores Democracy in Action (DinA), a final-year undergraduate module offered in a UK university that creates spaces for critical and transformative education through democratic theory and practice. Grounded in traditions of transformative learning, community-based pedagogies, academic activism, and prefiguration, DinA positions students as democratic agents working in solidarity with staff and the wider community. Drawing on in-depth interviews with students, we analyse the interplay between theory and practice to understand how learning can be understood as a form of democratic participation. The article makes an original contribution to the fields of democratic education and critical university studies by offering a novel framework for integrating academic activism, community-based learning, and prefiguration in higher education. We show how students’ experiences of building community, campaign planning, and prefiguring change generate not only deep transformative learning but also new forms of civic agency and collective action. We argue that, through community organising, students embark on a process of learning that involves three key transformative moments: effecting a perspectival shift from the individual to the common, foregrounding the activist dimensions of democratic politics, and envisioning the world we want through prefiguration. This pedagogical model demonstrates that higher education can become a space of lived democratic possibility, where hope, critique, and collective transformation are not only imagined but enacted.

In applying the concept of living experience to widening participation in higher education, a process of ‘consumption’ that creates profit for powerholders is discussed—while championing social mobility, the widening participation agenda has done little to address the long-standing social and economic inequalities of British society. Yet, through this process, a ‘sector’ of higher education built upon neoliberal principles has been created. Pushing back against the systems of metrification that threaten education’s authenticity, I propose that powerholders apply ethnographic research methods to their decision-making processes.

Increasingly, community‐based organizations (CBOs) that have a social impact are required to evidence their impact through accountability and evaluation methods that are complex and inappropriate for their specific context. In response to this challenge, we offer a participatory approach to social return on investment (SROI), which builds on a participant's own self‐narration of their past and their lived experience of engaging with the CBO. To do this, we draw upon participatory action research and oral history methodologies in combination with social value methodologies to refocus evaluation and accountability on the impact experienced by those in the community. By engaging in a tripartite approach—which we name the Living Impact Methodology—we are able to show the social impact of transformative projects, beyond what would usually be captured in accounting and accountability, shifting the way that CBOs engage with SROI evaluation. By engaging with community members in the process of transformative accountability, we demonstrate a methodological approach that academics can use to work with CBOs to pluralize and democratize forms of accounting and accountability in the evaluation and monitoring of community impact projects.

The ambition of policymakers to ‘raise aspirations’ among young people from disadvantaged backgrounds as a means for improving social mobility in Britain has been a mainstay of political rhetoric for the last three decades. Reports such as Higher Education in the Learning Society in 1997, Unleashing Aspiration in 2009, and Success as a Knowledge Economy in 2016 are all underpinned by an ideology of neoliberal meritocracy that has transcended political parties and governments since the Thatcher administration. Even those who lean more to the left of the Labour Party within contemporary Britain have perpetuated this narrative by reframing it as ‘working-class ambition’. This paper advances an alternative view which reconceptualises the way in which young people from non-privileged backgrounds experience and perceive the world, and their place within it. Drawing upon our work on Connected Belonging in 2025 and our research on the From the Centre to the Periphery project in 2025, we suggest that ‘hopeful optimism’ offers a more realistic lens through which to understand what is needed to address the ‘personal troubles and public issues’ that young people face. Unlike aspiration, which has an inherently individualistic and future-orientated framing, with value systems directed by dominant hegemonic notions of ‘success’ that are commonly positioned in economic terms, we recognise optimism as being a holistic and relational process that resides in the present as well as looks to the future. Optimism, grounded within principles of hope, allows young people the freedom to be and to dream; by celebrating who they are and their interconnectedness, it protects them from fears of failure; by reimaging what success might mean, it liberates them as creators.

The Opportunity Areas (OA) programme, launched by the Department for Education in 2016, was a £108 million place-based initiative aimed at improving social mobility in twelve areas identified by the Social Mobility Index (SMI) and The Achieving Excellence Areas (AEA) Index as having entrenched disadvantage. The programme focused on raising educational attainment, improving outcomes for disadvantaged pupils and fostering collaboration among schools, local authorities, and community stakeholders. This paper presents descriptive analysis of School Census data from 2014–2023 examining trends in attainment relative to national averages. Findings indicate that while attainment results showed short-term improvements in some areas following OA implementation, these gains were not sustained beyond 2018–19. The results suggest that OA interventions produced temporary effects but failed to deliver lasting improvements, highlighting the limitations of making educational improvement with area-focused mechanisms in addressing deep-rooted socioeconomic inequalities. Future policies may require integrated approaches combining education initiatives with broader social and economic reforms to achieve sustainable change.

Wellbeing has become an increasingly prominent concern within educational research and policy. However, dominant approaches frequently conceptualise wellbeing as an individual psychological attribute associated with resilience, self-regulation, and personal coping capacities. While such perspectives have generated valuable insights, they risk overlooking the relational and structural conditions through which wellbeing is shaped and sustained. This conceptual paper argues that Relational Wellbeing can provide a valuable framework for understanding and advancing inclusion, predominantly in reference to Anglophone educational contexts in the global North. Drawing on sociological perspectives on wellbeing, and a synthesis of theoretical work on power, capital and pedagogy, the paper reconceptualises wellbeing as a dynamic and socially embedded process constituted through relationships, recognition, and participation. Through a collaborative and interdisciplinary analysis, the paper examines how individualised understandings of wellbeing are reinforced by neoliberal educational discourses and explores the implications for inclusion. Four interconnected perspectives are used to develop the argument showing how relational conditions are structured, constrained and potentially transformed. First, an intersectional lens demonstrates how wellbeing is shaped by unequal relations of power and belonging in educational institutions. Second, social capital theory is employed to examine how relational inclusion may be generated through the development of bridging relationships in informal educational spaces. Third, a Bourdieusian perspective highlights how symbolic violence and unequal recognition can undermine the relational conditions necessary for inclusion. Finally, the paper considers how Radical Visible Pedagogy may support relational equality and meaningful participation. The paper concludes that inclusion should be understood not merely as access or participation, but as a relational condition grounded in recognition, equal status, and social worth across macro-level policy institutional practices, and everyday relational experiences. By positioning Relational Wellbeing as a foundation for inclusion, the paper offers a theoretical framework that contributes to contemporary debates on diversity, equity, wellbeing, and inclusive education.