Towards a More Inclusive Modern British History? Reflecting on Barriers, Challenges, and Opportunities in Twenty-First Century UK Higher Education

the UK's Higher Education Academy (HEA) commissioned an investigation into what the future of 'inclusive' teaching and learning at British universities might look like.Their report was published in the same month in which I began my academic teaching career.The HEA report offered an early, if somewhat bland, definition of inclusive teaching and learning: 'the ways in which pedagogy, curriculum and assessment are designed and delivered to engage students in learning that is meaningful, relevant and accessible to all.' 1 Thirteen years later, this policy discourse has become embedded in Higher Education (HE) across the UK, expressing objective values of 'fairness and equality of opportunity for all citizens to access education as a basic human right' and emphasizing respect for the identities and cultures of all learners. 2 The growing trend towards 'inclusivity' has informed all three areas of researching, teaching, and learning modern British history in clear ways.Essentially, research within the field has placed new, frequently intersectional approaches to telling a more multi-layered, representative story of the modern British past in dialogue with pedagogical debates over which parts of this past are taught and how, and advancing fresh considerations of who learns this history, and how.Since 2010, I have taught modern British history at the Universities of Edinburgh and Manchester, both of which may be classed as 'conventional' ancient and redbrick universities respectively.In early 2023, however, I became a lecturer at The Open University (OU), a distinctively and proudly 'non-conventional' university whose lineage and raison d'être is grounded in providing open access to higher education and designing and delivering inclusive forms of learning.Accordingly, this reflection places 'inclusivity' in HE within a slightly less familiar frame, offering a series of purely subjective perspectives on how teaching and learning modern British history 'works' within a very different kind of institutional context.