The UK policy rhetoric of commitment to widening access to higher education has identified mature students as playing a pivotal role in the expansion and reform of higher education. The article draws on the experiences of 23 mature access students in an inner London further education college in order to explore the range of opportunities and constraints mature students confront in their efforts to make the transition to higher education. In particular, the article focuses on the narratives of the seven students who failed to complete the access course. It is argued that complexities of ethnicity, gender and marital status intersect with, and compound, the consequences of class, making the transition process particularly difficult for working-class, lone mothers. The article concludes that if the Government's 'New Learning Age' is not to reproduce past educational inequalities, then the rhetoric on widening participation needs to move beyond rhetoric into policies which provide possibilities for realisation.