Recognising how educational choices affect students differently, understanding the needs and barriers shaping their opportunities and outcomes.
Equity: The same choice, different experiences
Students do not arrive at education from the same starting point. They bring different experiences, responsibilities, resources, identities, abilities and expectations. The same learning environment, assessment or digital tool can therefore create opportunities for one student while presenting additional challenges for another.
Equity asks us to pay attention to those differences.
This matters as education becomes increasingly digital and AI-enabled. It can be tempting to assume that providing the same technology, resources or learning experience to everyone is inherently fair. Yet educational inequalities are shaped by a much wider set of circumstances. Differences in socioeconomic background remain associated with differences in access to higher education, continuation, attainment and graduate outcomes (Bolton and Lewis, 2025).
Digital capability adds another dimension. Having a device or internet connection does not mean every student has the same confidence, experience or skills to use digital environments effectively. Research into essential digital skills continues to find significant differences in capability across the UK population, reminding us that familiarity with technology cannot simply be assumed (Lloyds Banking Group, 2025).
New technologies can also reinforce existing inequalities rather than remove them. Reich (2020) argues that educational technologies, including those that are freely available, can disproportionately benefit learners who are already more advantaged. Technology might open new opportunities, but those opportunities are shaped by the circumstances and support surrounding each student.
As AI and learning analytics become more embedded in education, equity also means questioning what our technologies can see. Data can help identify patterns and potentially inform student support, but students cannot be reduced to their digital traces. Datafication increasingly translates complex educational activity into indicators and metrics, raising important questions about how those representations influence decisions about students (Williamson, Bayne and Shay, 2020).
For ABLE, Equity means looking at educational choices from the student’s perspective. It means asking who benefits, who might be disadvantaged, whose circumstances we have considered, and whose might be missing from our thinking.
Because treating every student in exactly the same way is not necessarily the same as giving every student a meaningful opportunity to succeed.
One question we should keep asking is: Who might experience this differently, and what could we do about it?
References
Bolton, P. and Lewis, J. (2025). Equality of access and outcomes in higher education in England. [online] House of Commons Library. Available at: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9195/. [commonslib…liament.uk], [researchbr…liament.uk]
Lloyds Banking Group (2025). Essential Digital Skills 2025. [online] Available at: https://www.lloydsbankinggroup.com/assets/pdfs/who-we-are/what-we-do/financial-wellbeing/lloyd-essential-digital-skills-2025.pdf. [lloydsbank…ggroup.com]
Reich, J. (2020). Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. [tsl.mit.edu], [hup.harvard.edu]
Williamson, B., Bayne, S. and Shay, S. (2020). The datafication of teaching in Higher Education: critical issues and perspectives. Teaching in Higher Education, 25(4), pp.351–365. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2020.1748811. [research.ed.ac.uk]