This article was written in collaboration with GSA colleague, Eileen Reid, Head of Widening Participation. The article was commissioned following our 2009 conference presentations on the same theme - issues of access & inclusion in art, design and architecture education - to the University of Stirling, ‘Centre for Research into Lifelong Learning’, International Conference 2009 ‘Lifelong Learning Revisited: What Next?’, 23rd - 26th June 2009, and to Edge Hill University, ‘Widening Participation Research Centre’, ‘Mainstreaming Equality in Higher Education’, 2nd June 2009. The article seeks to understand particular inequalities in art, design and architecture education utilising Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital, in tandem with the updated treatment of Bourdieu’s work by Tony Bennett et al (2009). The work reflects on the given cultural status of certain potential applicants and matriculated students from the vantage point of Bourdieuean discourse on cultural taste, and argues for a levelling of conventional discrepancies in cultural capital by 1) assisting access to the art academy and to cultural institutions for widening participation students and 2) by defusing some of the loaded language within art, design and architecture education which would bolster conventions of cultural taste. In as much, the article makes two direct contributions to highly topical and current debate around access and inclusion, 1) it offers ideas and guidance in respect of staff expectations and criteria for admissions processes, and 2) it argues for the need to critically examine, and profane where necessary, those normative vocabularies within art, design and architecture education which might serve to reinforce unhelpful distinctions in respect of cultural taste and cultural capital. Other contributors to the anthology include: Jackie McManus, Penny Jane Burke, Jane Tynan, John Wood, Bernadette Blair, Keith Russell, Stephanie Taylor and Karen Littlejohn.