How should we develop genuinely transformative Widening Participation (WP) interventions of benefit to those who might need them most? The need for practitioners to consider the importance of this question is highlighted by the development of WP in the UK against a backdrop of marketisation and rising inequality. In this article, we map this context in order to demonstrate an alternative pathway to WP. We do this through consideration of a WP programme in Politics and International Relations (PIR) at Lancaster University, using a new means of recruitment for the flagship summer school, New Political Minds, to demonstrate genuine potential for interventions capable of transforming not just approaches to Higher Education (HE) but young people’s analyses of their own circumstances.