sector, the fd contributes to the employers' modernisation agenda and provides opportunities to create new roles, utilise the developed skills and offer appropriate remuneration for those who succeed in gaining the qualification. Foskett (2003) suggests that in the healthcare sector the fd will produce workers that can operate across inter-professional boundaries in a supervised environment and provide career progression and new grading structures.
However, the new qualifications and new roles have presented challenges for established roles. Daykin and Clarke (2000), Law and Aranda (2009), Rakovski and Price-Glynn (2010) have discussed the tensions created - for example in nursing by the AP role - and have highlighted issues around the hierarchical division of labour, the subordination of occupational groups and the exclusionary strategies used by nurses as they create distinctions between “clean” and “dirty” work. The debates generally have concluded that registered practitioners may need to rethink their relationships with support staff in order to develop more inclusive strategies for valuing support work and embracing the new professionals emerging from fd programmes.
Mature women and foundation degrees In a number of evaluations of foundation degree studies, mature women were the dominant group studied. In a study by Selfe et al (2002), over 80% of participants were 31 years or older with 45% of the assistant practitioners aged between 41 and 50 years old. David (2009) found that working class mature students considered that for people like themselves, the economic value of a degree in the workplace would never provide them with the same rewards as for those who accessed elite institutions which were inaccessible to them.
There were some interesting insights into mature women's experience of foundation degrees. In a discussion of the effectiveness of preparing mature entrants for HE, Martin and Munro (2010) quote Hoskins et, al. (1997) and Houltram (1996), who found that the best degrees were obtained by mature women with non- traditional qualifications. They also found that mature students were often well motivated and demonstrated that motivation was probably a better predictor of success than traditional entry qualifications. Motivation, it was felt, often provided the impetus to work through barriers.
In the exploration of barriers, a study conducted by Macdonald and Stratta (2001) examining tutors' responses to students on fd programmes, found that the attitudes of the tutors did not correspond with either the students' anticipation of the undergraduate study or the institutional strategy. In general the perception of staff was that mature students didn't actually enjoy their studies, became anxious and needed assistance in learning how to cope with the challenges of full-time employment, academic studies and life. Tutors felt that non-traditional students were needy and required a great deal of support with academic elements of programmes. Griffiths (2003), from a study conducted with mature women, identified that these non-traditional learners have not benefited from the taken-for-granted development provided by programmes of study that develop cognition and critical analysis skills. Reay (2002) looked at non-traditional students' backgrounds and found that one point of commonality which occurred across the intersections of gender, class and ethnicity amongst mature students, was a negative educational history where the contributing factors were as varied as the groups themselves.
Students' voices in the literature Students' voices have been present in only a minority of the studies on fd programmes. Tierney and Slack's study (2005) included narratives which outlined the students' perceived lack of interest and support from managers. This was corroborated in the findings of Kendall et, al. (2012) who, in addition, found that students felt that there was a lack of joined-up working between the HEIs and workplace practitioners, managers and
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