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From data to policy: building an evidence-based future for skills, work, and learning in Latin America

by Sabur Butt, Hector G. Ceballos, and Michael Fung

Latin America stands at a familiar crossroads. Once again, a technological revolution is reshaping how work gets done, what skills employers value, and how quickly the workforce must adapt. And once again, the region risks being a generation behind.

During the Third Industrial Revolution of the 1970s–1990s, East Asia invested decisively in microelectronics, computing, and technical education. Latin America, consumed by debt crises and macroeconomic instability, missed the wave. The cost was measured not only in lost output but in institutional habits of looking backward while others prepared to look forward. Today, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is unfolding faster than its predecessor, and the region’s central deficit is not money or talent. It is foresight leading to informed interventions.

A structural mismatch between work and learning

Industries now change in cycles of months. University curricula change in cycles of years. That gap is no longer a minor inefficiency; it is the bottleneck that determines whether a country prepares its workforce in time or trails behind it.

The numbers are sobering. Across the six largest Latin American economies, between 19% and 21% of workers face a high probability of automation-related displacement. Almost half work in informal jobs. University dropout rates exceed 50% in several countries, climbing as high as 76% in the Dominican Republic. Students perform consistently below OECD averages in foundational literacy and numeracy. By the time graduates from the educational system enter the labour market, there is already a structural gap between what they can do and what employers want.

What the region needs is not another labour-market report. It needs skills intelligence, a continuous, forward-looking system that informs policymakers what is rising, what is fading, and where the workforce can realistically move next.

Why traditional forecasting falls short

Most forecasting in the region still relies on expert panels, occupational surveys, and static taxonomies that take years to update. These tools were designed for a slower-paced world.

To illustrate the issue, consider how such static taxonomies treat “database management” as a single skill, when the real labour market is moving between MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Cassandra, and now vector databases, each with a different demand trajectory. Or consider the noise in a single automotive dataset, where the same assembly-line job appears as “ensamblador de carrocerías”, “operador de ensamble”, “ensamblador automotriz”, and “técnico en armado de vehículos”. Human annotators cannot keep up; even expert raters disagree on whether two skill descriptions refer to the same thing.

By the time a traditional taxonomy recognizes “prompt engineering” as a skill category, the labor market has already moved on to whatever comes next.

A data-driven alternative, already running

In our paper, we describe an operational deployment at the Institute for the Future of Education at Tecnológico de Monterrey. It is not a proposal; it is a working system (See Figure 1).

Figure 1. The framework links real-time labour market signals to an AI-assisted, expert-validated skills intelligence layer, which in turn informs curriculum design,reskilling pathways, workforce policy, and governance.

The approach combines large language models with retrieval-augmented generation to build dynamic, hierarchical skill taxonomies that update themselves as new job postings flow in. Each new skill is matched semantically against the existing taxonomy. Known skills are normalized to canonical terms. Genuinely new ones are flagged, classified, and added.

In Mexico’s automotive sector alone, the system has mapped more than 11,000 skill variations across 220 hypernym categories, identified 847 unique skills clustered into 12 occupational groups, and tracked the rise of electric-vehicle competencies in real time. Generative AI skills surfaced in the data months before they appeared in any official classification.

The infrastructure required is modest. A taxonomy covering 10,000 skills across major sectors can be maintained on standard cloud infrastructure for roughly $500–1,000 USD per month, within reach of education ministries in developing economies.

From data to policy

Technology alone does not change a system. The harder work is institutional. To shorten the lag between detecting a skill shift and updating a training program (currently 18 to 24 months) in most regions, curriculum committees must meet more often, must accept real-time data alongside surveys, and procurement procedures must allow timely equipment purchases according to the emerging skills.

Governance matters equally. Sustainable implementations bring together labour ministries, education ministries, economic development ministries, national statistics offices, industry associations, and universities. Each contributes something the others cannot: data access, curriculum authority, methodological rigor, domain expertise, and research capacity. No single actor owns skills or intelligence; the legitimacy of the system depends on shared ownership.

Localization also matters. Global taxonomies like ESCO and O*NET are useful starting points, but they need to incorporate regional terminology, indigenous skill categories, and sector-specific competencies. A skill system that does not speak the local language of work will not be trusted by the people meant to use it.

We also acknowledge real-world limitations. Many countries still hire through newspaper classifieds, physical noticeboards, and informal networks. Supplier tiers and small enterprises seldom advertise online. A system built solely on digital postings produces a geographically and structurally biased picture. Integrating offline data sources, replicating the approach across countries, and validating its predictions over time are the necessary next steps.

What success would look like

Executed well, skills intelligence reshapes reskilling itself. Instead of generic, fixed-duration programs, workers receive personalized pathways: a manufacturing technician’s quality-control experience mapped onto automated-systems monitoring; a mid-career professional alerted 12–24 months ahead of emerging demand; a young job-seeker pointed toward a stackable micro-credential that the market will actually reward.

For Latin America, this is more than a technical upgrade. It is a chance to break a historical pattern of arriving late to every industrial revolution and start arriving prepared. The region has the data, the talent, and increasingly the tools. What it has lacked is the institutional capacity to anticipate. That capacity is now within reach.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution will not wait. But for the first time, neither does the evidence.

Reference: Butt, S, Ceballos, HG, and Fung, M (2026) ‘From Data to Policy: Building an Evidence-Based Future for Skills, Work, and Learning in Latin America’ Policy Reviews in Higher Education 

Sabur Butt is a research professor at the Institute for the Future of Education, Tecnológico de Monterrey. His work focuses on artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and dynamic skills taxonomies, with a particular interest in how AI-driven labour-market intelligence can inform education and workforce policy across Latin America.

Hector G Ceballos is Director of the Living Lab & Data Hub of the Institute for the Future of Education (IFE) at Tecnológico de Monterrey. His research spans data science, knowledge engineering, and educational analytics, with a focus on building evidence-based systems that connect higher education to evolving industry and labour-market needs.

Michael Fung is Executive Director of the Institute for the Future of Education at Tecnológico de Monterrey. He was formerly the Deputy Chief Executive at SkillsFuture Singapore (SSG). He led the development of a comprehensive education and training ecosystem under the national SkillsFuture movement, which has become a global benchmark and reference for workforce skills development and lifelong learning across society.


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When papers become currency

by Carolina Guzmán Valenzuela

Over the last few months, I have found myself discussing academic publishing with young researchers in Germany and Chile. What struck me in both places was not excitement about ideas, journals or scholarly debates. It was anxiety.

At workshops on publishing strategies and scholarly journals (one at the HoFoNa Conference in Germany and another at the Institute of Education at the University of Chile) the conversations quickly moved away from writing itself and towards something far more pragmatic: survival.

Young researchers spoke about publishing in highly strategic terms. Which journals were ‘safe’? Which ones counted for postdoctoral applications and funding schemes? Which journals’ turnarounds were quick enough? Which journals offered the highest probability of acceptance?

Several participants openly discussed how they calculated publication decisions in relation to career survival. The question was often not where their work fitted best intellectually, but which journals were fast enough, prestigious enough and predictable enough to maximise their chances of securing a postdoctoral position, grant or future contract.

What I found quite revealing was how naturally many early-career academics now speak the language of optimisation. Quartiles, Article Processing Charges (APCs), turnaround times, indexing systems, impact factors and publication strategies are discussed with remarkable fluency. Many young researchers are being socialised into academia through the logic of strategic productivity before they have had the opportunity to develop a slower intellectual voice of their own.

And who can blame them?

Across many universities today, academic life has become increasingly precarious and accelerated. Temporary contracts, short-term postdoctoral positions, uncertain funding, metric-driven evaluations and intense competition have transformed publishing into something far more strategic than it was. In systems (such as Chile’s), where academic careers and funding schemes heavily depend on publications indexed in Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus, papers increasingly function as academic currency.

Under these conditions, it is not surprising that publishers promising continuous publication, high-volume output and relatively predictable editorial processes have expanded rapidly. This is one reason why publishers such as MDPI and Frontiers have become so deeply embedded within contemporary academic life. Some of their journals are indexed in WoS and Scopus, which count towards grants and promotions and contribute directly to institutional rankings and evaluation systems. In other words, they are not operating outside the university system. They are increasingly part of how the system itself functions.

It is fair to say, though, that some established journals are reporting turnaround times that are not radically different from publishers such as Frontiers or MDPI. Elements of acceleration and compressed editorial timelines are also becoming increasingly visible across the wider publishing ecosystem, suggesting that these dynamics are no longer confined to specific publishers.

In any case, average turnaround statistics do not fully capture broader differences in selectivity, publication scale, editorial oversight and peer review intensity. During my years as Coordinating Editor of Higher Education, manuscripts frequently went through several rounds of major revision over many months. Reviewer disagreement, editorial discussion and substantial intellectual reshaping were often central parts of the process. The deeper question, then, may not simply be speed itself, but whether meaningful scholarly judgement, rigorous peer review and sustained intellectual critique can realistically be maintained under conditions of industrial-scale publication.

This becomes particularly important in a publishing ecosystem increasingly organised around scale. Large editorial boards, continuous publication models and relatively low desk-rejection rates create a parallel publishing universe in which the formal conventions of academic publishing are maintained, but where critique, filtering and editorial curation risk becoming increasingly compressed and uneven.

APCs have also reshaped inequalities within academic publishing. Publishing open access in prestigious journals often depends on fees that remain inaccessible for universities and researchers in Latin America, Africa and other underfunded academic systems unless institutions are able to absorb the costs.

At the same time, substantial APCs are no longer confined to traditionally prestigious journals. Many high-volume publishing models also involve significant publication fees, suggesting that what many early-career researchers are increasingly paying for is not simply open access, but speed, predictability and reduced temporal uncertainty within an academic system governed by short-term contracts, funding deadlines and metric-based evaluations. In short, they are purchasing life chances.

The irony is difficult to ignore. The same universities and funding systems that demand constant productivity often make meaningful participation in prestigious publishing circuits governed by international rankings, indexing systems and performance metrics.

Meanwhile, reviewers, the invisible infrastructure sustaining the entire system, are visibly exhausted. Every week, I receive multiple emails asking me to review manuscripts within ten or fourteen days. Some are oddly urgent in tone, politely aggressive, reminding reviewers about editorial targets and turnaround times. Many read as though they were generated from the same automated template. At this stage, I rarely even reply. I simply delete them. What concerns me is not only the pressure itself, but how normalised this publication culture has become.

Sometimes the system reaches extremes. In Chile, recent controversies surrounding publication incentives revealed academics producing absurd numbers of WoS indexed papers while receiving substantial productivity-linked salaries and bonuses. In some cases, this meant publishing well over one hundred papers in a single year. The issue here is not simply individual behaviour. The deeper question is structural: what kind of national research funding system rewards institutions according to publication output and, in turn, transfers these pressures directly onto academics?

Artificial intelligence is likely to intensify these dynamics even further. AI did not create the culture of academic hyperproduction, but it is accelerating it dramatically. Faster writing. Faster reviewing. Faster summarising. Faster publishing. More output everywhere.  And less time for, or even interest in, thought as a result.

None of this means that traditional academic publishing represented an egalitarian system. It has long been shaped by oligopolistic publishers, exclusionary gatekeeping and profound global inequalities. Open access has unquestionably expanded the circulation of knowledge and enabled greater visibility for scholars outside elite institutions. Some forms of academic closure deserved to be challenged. But something important may also be getting lost.

During those workshops in Germany and Chile, I observed that many young researchers seemed caught between two incompatible temporalities: the time required for meaningful scholarship and the accelerated pace demanded by contemporary academic careers. That tension, more than any individual journal or publisher, surely represents one of the defining conditions of academic life today.

Carolina Guzmán-Valenzuela serves on the SRHE Governing Council. She is a Serra Húnter Fellow at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain) and Senior Research Fellow at the Universidad de Tarapacá (Chile). Her work focuses on higher education, epistemic justice, decolonial perspectives, and inequalities in global knowledge production, particularly in Latin America.


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Teaching in higher education: Connected practice for changing times?

by Karen Gravett and Simon Lygo-Baker

Why does teaching matter, and how might we understand what it means to teach in higher education, in contemporary times? This blog introduces our new book Reconceptualising teaching in higher education, published by Routledge. The book is created from our own reading, research, ideas, and practice as two academics working in the field of higher education, where we have been teaching for over twenty years in universities in the UK, America and Australia. It was inspired by our thoughts and discussions surrounding what it means to teach and the joys, pleasures and challenges that accompany our role.

At present there are many questions regarding higher education, its purpose and possible futures. For teachers too, questions remain regarding the necessity and shape of teachers’ contributions in a marketised sector mediated by artificial intelligence and pinched by precarity. And yet, this book is underpinned by our continued belief that teaching matters. We believe that meaningful teaching matters for our students, for our own development and experiences as educators, and for the futures of universities themselves. We argue that teaching provides opportunities for meaningful learning which matters for personal growth and for the development of knowledge. We believe that meaningful learning matters for the creation of new opportunities and possibilities. As bell hooks (1994) explains, fundamentally, education is about ‘the practice of freedom’. In a world where perhaps the experiences we have, the products we purchase, and the information we consume may not always seem meaningful, we believe that the connections that happen when we learn and when we teach have a power that should be harnessed and celebrated. Education matters, because not only does it open doors, but it allows us to recognise them and frame them for ourselves, offering the opportunity to challenge and evolve.

The book is designed for anyone seeking to develop their role as teachers in contemporary universities. This includes new teachers as well as those of us who still have questions and are still keen to develop and respond to our changing times. Specifically, it asks us to rethink our role and the directions we typically follow and suggests the need to disrupt these and to rethink our role as teachers, to take a different path, talk to someone new, or see things a different way. Viewing higher education from new positions can help us to reimagine our role and discover or reclaim the pleasure of teaching. 

To do this, our book challenges the traditional view of teaching as an individual act. Instead, it frames teaching as a relational and situated practice, built on connections with others. Secondly, we explore teaching as an affirmative and emotional endeavour that can inspire others and lead to joyful and generative moments of connection. Lastly, the book positions teaching as a critical practice, where educators are encouraged to embrace uncertainty, question assumptions, and let their approaches evolve. These ideas are all interwoven with practical insights into contemporary areas of practice, including assessment, learning spaces, feedback, digital education, artificial intelligence, learning design, belonging and inclusion, to develop ethical and relational pedagogic approaches. Specifically, the last chapter examines a wide range of key issues, for example feedback frustrations or student engagement, in order to examine how as a reader you might be able to develop approaches and ideas that work for you in responding to some of these challenges. We hope that readers will find the book useful and look forward to continuing conversations around what it means to teach in changing times.

References

Gravett, K and Lygo-Baker, S (2026) Reconceptualising teaching in higher education: Connected practice for changing times Routledge

hooks, b (1994) Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom Routledge

Dr Karen Gravett is Associate Professor of Higher Education, and Head of the Surrey Institute of Education at the University of Surrey, UK, where her research focuses on the theory-practice of higher education. She is Executive Editor for the journal Teaching in Higher Education, and a member of the editorial board for Learning, Media and Technology. Karen’s latest books are: Gravett, K and Lygo-Baker, S (2026). Reconceptualising teaching in higher education: Connected practice for changing times, Gravett, K (2025) Critical Practice in Higher Education, and Gravett, K (2023) Relational Pedagogies: Connections and Mattering in Higher Education.

Simon Lygo-Baker works as a Senior Lecturer in Clinical Education at King’s College London and has previously worked in the University of Wisconsin, USA and the University of Surrey, UK. He has previously worked on developing curricula with refugees, asylum seekers and other socially excluded groups, as well as working for a number of years in academic development.


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How many Black professors should there be in UK higher education?

by Zarus Cenac

There has been discussion on the low number of Black professors in UK higher education institutions (Arday, 2022; Essilfie-Quaye et al, 2025). The number of Black professors has risen over time (Nowell, 2025) – see Table 1; are there still too few Black professors? There are different methods of assessing Black representation amongst the professorship (Essilfie-Quaye et al, 2025; Advance HE, 2021). This blog post explores such methods in order to gauge whether there are too few Black professors. This assessment is organised through three headings: 1) professors and the UK population, 2) the professorship gap, and 3) professors and non-professors. Additionally, in the context of the different methods, this blog post estimates how large the shortfall of Black professors is. Data for the 2024–25 academic year (HESA, 2026) are used to represent the present-day situation.

The Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) provides data which have been referred to regarding Black professors (eg Arday, 2022; Parr, 2024). This blog post analyses data from HESA. When it comes to academic staff, HESA presents data regarding i) professors, ii) non-professors, and iii) a senior staff category which can include professors (HESA, 2022, 2024, 2026). Therefore, the number of professors in HESA data is probably lower than the actual number of professors (HESA, 2022, 2024, 2026). Consequently, data regarding that third category (senior staff) are not included in the analysis for this blog post.

Table 1 The Number of Black Professors in UK Higher Education

Note. Data are from HESA (2022, 2024, 2026). HESA rounds data to the nearest five (HESA, 2022, 2024, 2026). It should be noted that, in each year, race/ethnicity is not known for every academic (HESA, 2022, 2024, 2026). Going by HESA (2022, 2024, 2026) data, for the academic years 2016–17 to 2024–25, race/ethnicity is not known (on average) for 7.94% of professors and 9.31% of non-professors; for (all other) analyses (eg Table 2) undertaken in the present blog, data were not analysed regarding academics for whom racial/ethnic grouping is not known.

1. Professors and the UK population

For the 2024–25 academic year, the data (HESA, 2026) show that 1.13% of UK professors in higher education are Black. When assessing the representation of Black people in higher education, it is useful to make a comparison with the representation of Black people of working age in the UK Census (Gibney, 2022). Indeed, by consulting UK Census figures (Office for National Statistics, 2025), we can see that 4.05% of the UK working-age population is Black; when compared to Black representation in the UK working-age population, Black people are underrepresented amongst the professorship (Table 2). As for how much of a shortfall there is, use of HESA (2026) and UK Census (Office for National Statistics, 2025) data suggests that the number of Black professors is 699 people short of where it ought to be as of 2024–25 when compared to what would be found if the proportion of professors who are Black was to match the proportion of the UK working-age population who are Black (Figure 1).

Figure 1 Calculating the Shortfall of Black Professors

Note. Numbers are from (or calculated from) HESA (2026) and Office for National Statistics (2025).

2. The professorship gap

We can find the percentage of White academics who are professors, and the percentage of racial minority academics who are professors (racial minorities as a whole or for more specific categories), and then we can find the difference between the two percentages (Advance HE, 2021). What should we call this difference? Inspired by the term, the degree awarding gap, which refers to the difference in undergraduate degree performance between UK-domiciled White students and UK-domiciled racial minority students (London Metropolitan University, nd), we can refer to this difference in professorship percentages as the professorship gap. The term, the professorship gap, has been used elsewhere (eg Branson and Whitelaw, 2025), but, to the knowledge of the author, not in the same way in which the term is used in the present blog post. There is a professorship gap between Black academics and White academics (Figure 2, Table 2). The professorship gap looks to be greatest when Black academics are the group who are compared to White academics – this gap, like other professorship gaps, shows no indication of declining (Figure 2). Therefore, results suggest a continuing difficulty which Black academics will encounter in attempting to advance to professorship. Indeed, using HESA data (HESA, 2026), we can see that there is a shortfall of 806 Black professors when the situation in 2024–25 is compared to a situation where the ratio of professors to non-professors is the same for Black academics as it is for White academics (Figure 1).

Table 2 Statistical Tests

Note. Using HESA (2026) data of academics (professors and non-professors) for 2024–25, and census data (Office for National Statistics, 2025), z-tests (one- and two-proportion) were undertaken in R (R Core Team, 2025). Samples sizes are in the thousands (HESA, 2026); with huge samples, the smallest of differences can be statistically significant (Wasserstein and Lazar, 2016), therefore, statistical testing regarding Table 2 is not too informative. What would be informative is seeing if differences between proportions are big enough to mean something important, which can be achieved by calculating and interpreting Cohen’s h (Cohen, 1988). Regarding interpretation, Cohen offered suggestions for small but important (h = .20), medium (h = .50), and large (h = .80) differences, although suggestions were not intended to simply be applied in a blanket and definitive fashion (Cohen, 1988). Cohen’s h (Cohen, 1988), using code (Zieffler, 2025), was calculated in R; all hs are very close to .20 or equal/exceed it.

Figure 2 The Professorship Gap: The Gap Between White Academics and Racial Minority Academics

Note. Data used are from HESA (2022, 2024, 2026) for academic years 2016–17 to 2024–25.

3. Professors and non-professors

From the data (HESA, 2022, 2024, 2026), amongst non-professors, the percentage who are Black was 1.99% in 2016–17, and that percentage has steadily risen over the years, reaching 4.21% in 2024–25. Therefore, compared to the UK working-age population (Office for National Statistics, 2025), there was not an underrepresentation of Black people amongst non-professors in 2024–25. Accordingly, given that Black representation is lower amongst the professorship than in the UK working-age population (Table 2), it should not be surprising that, for 2024–25, Black people are represented less amongst professors than non-professors (Table 2). Regarding the extent of the shortfall in Black professors, a calculation using the data (HESA, 2026), shows a shortfall of 737 Black professors (Figure 1).

The shortfall: lowest acceptable number of Black professors?

Our estimation of how many Black professors there should be (and the shortfall) is affected by which of the three methods is used (Figure 1). Nevertheless, for each method, we can ask the question: how many Black professors would be an acceptable minimum number? For example, if there should be 969 Black professors given representation in the UK working-age population (Figure 1), would it be acceptable if there were 960 Black professors? 950? 900? The Cohen’s h statistic (Cohen, 1988) is where the answer may lie (for brief details on Cohen’s h, see Table 2). Essentially, Cohen’s h can be used to quantify the difference between the level at which Black professors are represented and how represented Black professors ought to be (see Cohen, 1988). The larger Cohen’s h is, the larger the difference is (Cohen, 1988). Therefore, if we examine the formula for calculating Cohen’s h (eg Zieffler, 2025), it is relatively straightforward to use Cohen’s h for calculating the smallest number of Black professors which is acceptable, ie the number which is close enough to the expected level (expected, for example, given the UK working-age population). However, what really would need to be decided is the smallest value of Cohen’s h where a difference actually means something important (ie a difference which is not negligible) when it comes to Black professorship (see Cohen, 1988). 270 Black professors (for the 2024–25 academic year) produces a Cohen’s h of/near .20 in the context of the UK working-age population and non-professors (Table 2) and there appear to be considerable shortfalls (Figure 1). This suggests that the shortfall does indeed represent an important and non-negligible difference, and it also indicates that a Cohen’s h of .20 is too high a value to use if we want to calculate the minimum total of Black professors which is satisfactory.

Conclusion

Based on three methods of analysis, there are still too few Black professors in higher education within the UK (Table 2). An averaging of three shortfall estimates (from the three methods) gives an averaged shortfall estimate of 747 Black professors for the 2024–25 academic year. Given that there were only 270 Black professors in that academic year (HESA, 2026), this shortfall is concerning. What may also be concerning is that (as shown in Table 1), in 2024–25, the increase in the number of Black professors was just half that of 2023–24, and just under half of what was found in 2022–23 (there was a sharp rise in 2022–23 (Gibney, 2024). Why may this have happened? It is worth considering if a greater appreciation of the vital need to increase the number of Black professors led to the boost in Black academics being promoted to professorship in 2022–23 (see Gibney, 2024) which carried on through to 2023–24. Therefore, the gains (promotions) in 2022–23 and 2023–24 may have had the effect of significantly decreasing the number of Black academics who would have been strong candidates for professorship in the next few academic years. However, if the bar is set high for Black academics when it comes to promotion (eg Adisa et al., 2025), then there may very well still be a healthy number of Black academics who are strong candidates in those next years.” Essentially, we must thoroughly address if the relatively notable gains of 2022–23 and 2023–24 were temporary phenomena, and if there is now a return to a norm of the weaker increases of earlier academic years (Table 1). Data for 2025–26 will be crucial for helping to address these ideas and concerns.

References: Cohen, J. (1988). Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences (2nd ed.). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Zarus Cenac has worked at UK universities, for example, he was a visiting lecturer at City, University of London. His interests include race and ethnicity from an interdisciplinary perspective.


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Revealing university identity: a methodological reflection

by Michelangela Verardi

The blog is based on the outputs from my DBA in Higher Education Management (University of Bath) thesis entitled: ‘University identity: Statutes and Architectures”

Understanding what a university is – not only what it claims to be – requires a methodological approach capable of grasping identity in motion. Identity in higher education is rarely singular, it shifts across texts, spaces, and lived experience. To capture this complexity, I developed what I call the three‑card trick method: a triangulated approach designed to reveal organisational identity by examining how it is declared, embodied, and interpreted.

This method was tested through work with two Italian private universities that offered naturally contrasting contexts for methodological refinement. Their differences mattered only insofar as they enabled the method to be stretched, challenged, and sharpened.

The three‑card trick draws inspiration from the dynamic model of identity proposed by Hatch and Schultz (2001), who describes identity as a continuous movement between internal culture, expressed identity claims, and the images reflected back from external audiences. Identity, in this view, is not a fixed essence but a circulation. Their caution, following Baudrillard (1997), that identity signs can become detached from underlying reality – drifting into simulacra – reinforces the need for a method that can test alignment between what institutions say, what they materialise, and what people experience.

The three cards I propose are the statutes, the architectures, and the community narratives. Each represents a different mode of institutional expression. The method aims not simply to analyse each card but to understand the dynamics of identity produced by their interaction.

The first card, the normative corpus, includes statutes, codes of ethics, internal regulations, and other formal documents through which universities define their mission, values, and governance arrangements. These texts constitute the institution’s official voice. They are stable, durable, and often crafted with significant care, especially in systems where they must meet regulatory scrutiny. Analysing them involves reading not only what is said but how it is said, what is emphasised, and what is left unsaid. Rather than focusing on legal technicalities, the method treats these documents as identity artefacts: expressions of the university’s formal self‑understanding. To analyse this first card, I carried out a close textual reading guided by legal hermeneutics criteria, paying attention to wording, silences, and framing to uncover the identity logic embedded in formalised norms. The normative corpus provides the frame through which a university declares who it is, what it stands for, and how it intends to act. Yet these documents also reveal strategic adjustments, selective formulations, and silences that may reflect external pressures of bureaucratic control or evolving internal orientations.

The second card, architecture, concerns what the university expresses without words. Buildings, spaces, and material artefacts convey identity continuously, whether intentionally or not. Architecture shapes how people move, gather, celebrate, and learn; it anchors institutional memory; and it projects messages to newcomers, visitors, and the wider public. In this method, campuses are examined as symbolic landscapes. The analysis draws on a researcher‑generated visual archive – photographs, observations, and campus maps – to interpret space in terms of its semiotic and functional qualities. Three types of spaces are considered. Lived spaces are the places in which daily academic life unfolds: classrooms, courtyards, cantinas, shared areas. Representational spaces are used for ceremonies, governance, or ritual moments and often communicate concentrated symbolic meaning. Symbolic artefacts include statues, inscriptions, paintings, or any object that repeatedly signals aspects of identity. For this second card, I applied a visual‑interpretive method, using systematic photo‑analysis to understand how spatial arrangements and artefacts embody identity messages. Architecture is often where identity is most enduring – and where discrepancies become visible.

The third card, community narratives, focuses on identity as lived and interpreted. Through semi‑structured interviews, enriched by tools such as photo‑elicitation, participants are invited to interpret their own spaces and articulate what the university represents to them. This method avoids direct questions about identity, instead creating space for the emergence of themes related to belonging, values, distinctiveness, and institutional meaning. Narratives play a crucial role in understanding how identity circulates. They capture how members internalise or resist official claims, how they interpret symbolic spaces, and how they perceive the institution’s evolution. For this card, I used thematic analysis to draw out recurring patterns across interviews, tracing how individuals make sense of the university’s character and development. Community narratives sit at the intersection of expressing, impressing, reflecting, and mirroring, showing how identity is reproduced or transformed through lived experience.

The power of the three‑card trick lies in combining these forms of evidence rather than treating them separately. Analysing only the normative corpus risks confusing idealised statements with actual practice. Relying solely on architecture risks attributing static identity to institutions that are evolving internally. Listening only to narratives risks privileging individual interpretations without recognising structural or symbolic constraints. Triangulation allows identity to be seen not as a fixed point but as a set of movements. It highlights coherence when the three cards reinforce one another, and it exposes misalignment when one card diverges significantly from the others. Importantly, the method is not designed to declare whether an institution’s identity is true or authentic. Instead, it reveals how identity is declared, embodied, and experienced; how it evolves; and how it becomes contested or stretched under external pressures. When the three cards move in harmony, identity appears legible. When they move apart, the institution may face identity friction – an early signal that adjustment or reflection is needed.

In an era of increasing regulation, marketisation, and pressure to differentiate, universities often feel compelled to communicate distinctive identities while simultaneously conforming to external norms  and pressures. The three‑card trick provides a practical, conceptually grounded method for observing identity in this tension. By keeping all three cards in sight, the method helps institutions recognise what they are truly communicating, intentionally or otherwise, and how they might align their identity more coherently as they evolve.

Dr Michelangela Verardi is a senior technologist and grants manager at the University of Milan, where she oversees the legal and organisational frameworks for artificial intelligence research projects in health science. A qualified lawyer, she brings extensive expertise in university governance and institutional legal affairs, following a long tenure as Legal Office Director at Bocconi University. Dr Verardi holds a DBA (Doctorate in Business Administration) in Higher Education Management from the University of Bath and serves as an adjunct professor at Accademia del Lusso. Her research interests include university identity, branding and IP protection, the internationalisation of academic systems, and the judicialisation of university policies.


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Complaining to the OIA

by GR Evans

The Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIA) has stressed in its Annual Report that the system it operates is under strain. The expectation that universities would offer a route for students to make  complaints became a requirement at the turn of the century as  providers began to recognise the existence of a ‘student contract‘. That made the student a ‘consumer’ of the ‘higher education provider’. ‘Complaints procedures’ for students to use began to appear alongside ‘grievance procedures’ for employees. Scrutinising the performance of higher education providers in that task falls to the Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIA).

The OIA was created as a company in 2003 and began work as a voluntary scheme. It was designated as operator of a student complaints scheme in 2005. Its current ‘members’ are various sector bodies including  Universities UK and GuildHE. Its Board, headed by the actual Adjudicator, and it includes student representatives.

It first needed to show itself to be independent. The OIA faced criticism early on when a petition with 43 signatures, called for its abolition, complaining that it was a ‘biased, unreasonable, and non-impartial organisation. The petition called for:

Full evidence-based investigation into student complaints, fully independent of the University’s internal processes, and in accordance with existing educational and non-educational law,

and ‘a public enquiry into all decisions made against student complaints, by the OIAHE since its inception’, withnew rules:

to provide full legal aid cover for all students whose employment prospects are, or may have been, damaged as a result of their adverse experience with a public educational institution, and who remain unemployed as a result.

This was not followed through in those express terms. The stated objective of the process now followed by the OIA is to ‘put the student back in the position they  would have been in if the problem hadn’t occurred’.

Meeting that demand presents difficulties in two respects. The relationships of students to their ‘higher education provider’ have changed. They are its ‘members’ in the case of Oxford and Cambridge but in other providers a governing body of between twelve and twenty-four constitute the ‘members’ under the Higher Education and Research Act 1992. Elsewhere  they are likely to be, in effect, paying customers ‘buying’ a course. There is a contract and if the providers does not fulfil its part, the student may complain and seek redress in the form of repayment of fees.

A sense of student entitlement may arise from the sheer cost to a student. In England, tuition fees for the academic year 2026-7 will rise to £9,790 for standard full-time courses, £11,750 for full-time accelerated courses and £7,335 for part-time courses, for providers with a Teaching Excellence Framework award and an Access and Participation Plan. That will increase for the year 2027-8 to £10,050 for standard full-time courses, £12,060 for full-time accelerated courses  and £7,530 for part-time courses.  Costs for ‘maintenance’ and accommodation are additional.

The procedures to be followed in making a complaint have needed repeated updating. Key terms have had to be defined. For example, the Annual Report of Oxford’s Sexual Harassment and Violence Support Service reports ‘an increasing complexity of cases, and those requiring a longer duration of support’. Where there is a complaint it recognises the need for clarity as to whether a dispute is a ‘University’ or a ‘college’ matter, noting ‘a marked increase in college-based, student-to-student reports of reported incidents’. The University is therefore improving its provision for training to ensure that those with responsibilities for students are clear about what constitutes ‘consent’.

Nationally, is the system now simply overloaded? The OIA published its Annual Report in April, recording the scale of the  rise in the number of complaints it receives. In 2008 the OIA received 900 complaints against an England and Wales enrolment denominator of 2,117,535 – a rate of 42.5 complaints per 100,000 students. In 2025 there were 4,234 complaints, an increase of 17 per cent from the previous year. The 4,234 complaints in 2025 ‘translate’, it says, ‘to roughly 165.8 per 100,000. in 2025’. In October 2025  alone there had been 516 complaints, recorded as the busiest single month in its history. In the face of this demand the OIA  resolved 3,950 cases within six months and brought the average case handling time down to 81 days.

Stress-points are evident. Its Report notes that the complaints the OIA receives ‘prematurely’ are brought by students who ‘have begun the process but feel that they have waited too long for a decision’:

most of the complaints raised with us prematurely are brought by students who have begun the process but feel that they have waited too long for a decision. Delays are a symptom of a system under strain and may be one impact of the financial challenges facing providers.

Jim Dickinson’s blog for WonkHE on 26 April 2026 pointed to further evidence arguing that the fact that 42% of complainants now disclose a disability could mean a sector which is still structurally unable to accommodate them. So even if the growth in complaints may reflect an increasing sense of entitlement among students, the OIA suggests that the Adjudicator makes recommendations – or requires compensation to be made – that is ‘an indication that a student has not received the service they expect at a time when fees and cost of living pressures are increasing’.

The continuing multiplication of ‘alternative providers’ seems likely to lead to more complaining. They may admit unqualified students and be imperfectly regulated. The OIA publishes a list of ‘case summaries’ on providers where problems have emerged. The ‘worked example’ given in the OIA’s Report is that of Brit College, on which the OIA had already published concerns as of ‘public interest’ in November 2025.

The OIA had made Recommendations and had reported the College’s refusal to comply with its Recommendations to its Board in September 2025 and shared information about the complaint with the Office for Students (OfS), Department for Education (DfE) and Ofqual.  None of this led to reform. Companies House reports that Brit College Ltd is subject to Receiver Action, with its accounts and confirmation statement overdue and apparently heading for liquidation.

There seems, then, to be a question as to the effectiveness of the OIA not in terms of its work but in terms of its powers, where a provider of higher education falls beyond the reach of a complaints procedure.

SRHE member GR Evans is Emeritus Professor of Medieval Theology and Intellectual History in the University of Cambridge.


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A new social contract and a revival in public funding for higher education

by Vincent Carpentier

Longstanding tensions between funding and massification of higher education have significantly intensified, bringing a sense of vulnerability to the system, its institutions, staff, and students. I argue in a recent paper (Carpentier, 2026 – “Is there a case for the revival of public funding in UK higher education? Lessons from history.” Globalisation, Societies and Education, 1–9) that a relentless decline in upfront public funding derailed cost-sharing in higher education, launching a process of public-private substitution with strong implications for sustainability, stability and equity. I connect this shift to the erosion of the post-war consensus initiated by the 1973 crisis and intensified by the 2008 crisis. I discuss how revived public funding towards a reformed higher education system might contribute to and benefit from a revisited welfare state, renewing the social contract away from an increasingly unequal socioeconomic system.

The long retreat of public funding

Public funding was a key driver of the first phase of massification of the 1960s under a binary system shaped by universities and the public sector of higher education spearheaded by polytechnics. Grants to institutions and their students, driven by aligned political, economic, and social rationales, were considered as integral parts of the construction of the welfare state driving the post-1945 social contract.

Figure 1: Income structure of higher education institutions and enrolment (universities only before 1992) UK 1921–2024.

Source: Carpentier, 2026

This public investment peaked at 90% of higher education income in the early 1970s. It was then interrupted by the 1973 crisis which challenged the postwar consensus with supply side lower taxation policies seeking to limit public funding of the social sphere and encourage its privatisation. The translation of that process to higher education led at first to a slowdown in expansion in the 1980s before becoming the template of a much more marketised second phase of massification (under a newly unified system with the polytechnics having become universities in 1992). Cost-sharing – which had started with the introduction of international fees in 1967 and their rise to full-cost in 1981 – was extended to home students with the introduction of loans in 1990 and of £1K means-tested upfront fees in 1998. Differences within the UK are important to consider as Scotland abolished fees in 1999 unlike the other nations (Shattock and Horvath, 2020).

In 2006, home fees tripled to £3K and became deferred, funded by income contingent state-backed loans. What were then called ‘top-up fees’ coincided, as part of a cost-sharing agenda, with sustained grants to institutions and students: however, the share of public funding had already declined to 50% by 2008. The global crisis intensified that decline. Home fees tripled again in 2012 while teaching grants to institutions were largely scrapped in 2010. Grants to students were gradually replaced by loans and suppressed in 2016: public funding only represents 20% of institutional income today (28% if an estimation of non-refunded loans subsidised by the government is included).

Shift from cost-sharing to public/private substitution of funding

I argue that this concomitance of the rise in fees and reduction of grants represents a shift in the dynamic between public and private funding: fees started to replace rather than top up public funding. This process of public/private substitution, which derailed the cost-sharing agenda after the 2008 crisis, had many implications. Firstly, substitutive fees do not generate additional resources and therefore do not address issues of financial sustainability affecting institutions and their staff (Carpentier and Picard, 2024). Moreover, substitution increased the vulnerability of institutions and the whole system which, in the absence of the shield of public funding, became over-reliant on volatile private resources such as home and international fees. Substitution also intensified a longstanding unequal institutional differentiation. The inequalities between universities and polytechnics at the heart of the binary system of the first massification of the 1960s were reproduced by those between pre/post-92 and Russell group universities of the unified system of the second phase of massification (Carpentier 2021).

Substitution also affects equity as higher fees coincided in a context of austerity with the gradual replacement of grants by increasingly less generous loan system with rising repayment costs (Callender, 2017): this deactivated the cost-sharing mechanisms designed to mitigate for the negative impact of fees on access and students’ debt (de Gayardon and Callender, 2025; Ghaffar and Hordósy, 2026). Finally, substitution affects how higher education is or is perceived: lower public funding and higher fees reflecting marketisation (Robertson and Martini, 2023) and hypercommodification (Boliver and Promenzio, 2025) slowly undermined the real and perceived public good of higher education (Marginson and Yang, 2025) while strengthening its conception as a private good. That private good was itself increasingly undermined by a falling graduate premium and unemployment (unequally according to institutions and social capital), aggravated by higher inflation and loan interest rates. Both public and private cases for higher education are now increasingly difficult to make.

Inequalities and the erosion of public services and socioeconomic vulnerabilities

The issues raised by substitution threatening higher education are symptomatic of wider ideological choices regarding the links between economic and human developments that characterised the post-1973 socioeconomic model. That favoured competition over collaboration, the individual over the collective, focusing on public deficit while minimizing private debt, considering social spending as a byproduct of growth rather than an investment. Those approaches shaped the growth model of the 1990s based on deregulated globalisation, financialisation and lower social protection – which generated unsustainable levels of inequality masked by private debt and cheap imported products until the explosion of the subprime market kicked off the 2008 crisis. Inequalities were initially acknowledged as a source of the crisis  (Piketty, 2024) before being overlooked and intensified by austerity policies (Farnsworth and Irving, 2018).

Covid-19 showed (Tooze, 2021) the cost of not having addressed inequalities and the erosion of public services in terms of vulnerabilities of economies and societies but also demonstrated the value of what remained of the welfare state as collective shielding (Carpentier, 2021).  Again, this acknowledgement vanished with the “return to normality”. Stagflation and energy crises are reminders that we ignore the impact of the crisis of neoliberalism on inequalities at our peril, especially as they fuel neonationalist tensions within and between countries. This should lead to reflect on finding another route out of the crisis through a revisited welfare state and to consider how higher education might contribute to it and benefit from it.

A new social contract: transformative crises and the case for countercyclical spending

Is the post-1945 progressive social contract based on the welfare state a one-off historical product of unmatched human and physical destruction? Can socioeconomic transformations addressing inequalities only be triggered by catastrophic events? The human impact on climate change seems serious enough to require a new social contract still nowhere to be seen. Looking back at Kondratiev cycles offer hopeful examples of earlier crises which, unlike 1973 and 2008, were deeply transformative (Carpentier, 2015). The crises of 1833, 1873 and 1929 all triggered countercyclical social spending funded by progressive taxation leading to technological and social innovations. Each crisis revived productivity while reducing inequalities and incrementally transformed the socio-economic system and crystallised into the post-war consensus (Fontvieille and Michel, 2002).

A revival of fair taxation today to finance countercyclical spending might be the opportunity to drive a new social contract correcting an unsustainably unequal socioeconomic system characterised by the emergence of technological innovations without social transformations and regulations protecting people, their economy, society, and environment. Higher education should contribute to that change alongside other levels of education (Scott, 2021) and the whole social sphere. Reversing public/private substitution through revived grants to institutions and students is urgent to ensure that higher education shifts its focus from its own unsustainability and instability to tackle inequalities and address the interrelated political, economic, social and environmental challenges ahead (Carpentier and Unterhalter, 2022; McCowan, 2025). Rebalancing the funding of higher education is about realigning its economic and other rationales (Ashwin et al, 2026) and reviving a public service of higher education anchored to a revisited welfare state able to drive a renewed social contract reconciling economies and societies.

Vincent Carpentier is Professor of Higher Education and Society at the UCL Institute of Education. His teaching and research activities are located at the interface of history of education and political economy. His comparative research explores the historical relationship between educational systems, Kondratiev cycles and social change. He is particularly interested in exploring the long-term connections and tensions between funding, expansion and institutional differentiation of higher education systems at both national and global levels.


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International students as a national project: how states brand their higher education

by Evelyn Kim, Annette Bamberger and Sazana Jayadeva

From student choice to state strategy

International student mobility is often framed as a story of individual aspiration. Students, it is widely assumed, choose destinations based on rational calculations of what they stand to gain: prestigious degrees, global networks, enhanced career prospects, and immersion in new sociocultural contexts amongst others. This narrative centres students and to a lesser extent institutions, which compete for their patronage. Yet it often obscures the role of the state in shaping where, and how, international education is imagined in the first place (Bamberger & Kim, 2022; Sidhu, 2006).

The recruitment of international students has increasingly become a national project. While established destinations such as the UK have long maintained coordinated campaigns and online platforms to promote their higher education systems, what is particularly noteworthy today is the spread of such initiatives across a wider range of countries. Governments now invest in coordinated branding campaigns, frequently under the moniker “Study in X” websites (such as Study in Hong Kong and Study in Germany), that promote entire higher education systems under the national banner, often accompanied by social media channels such as Facebook and YouTube. These platforms are carefully curated spaces through which states project what they perceive makes their country distinctive and attractive as a study destination.

We argue that this constitutes a form of nation branding: the strategic creation and projection of ‘the nation’ throughhigher education (Kim & Bamberger, 2025; Lomer et al, 2018). These campaigns do not focus solely on academic excellence or global competitiveness. They weave together claims about innovation, economic power, cultural richness, affordability and safety, constructing an integrated narrative in which higher education becomes a gateway to the nation.

The persuasive strategies used in these campaigns vary. Some build credibility through rankings and research metrics, while others appeal to emotion by invoking culture and a sense of belonging. Still others foreground practical considerations such as affordability or post-study employment opportunities. Across these approaches, national higher education branding relies on distinctive “identity markers” to position countries as attractive study destinations Particularly in contexts associated with geopolitical or social tensions, branding efforts may seek to recalibrate external perceptions by foregrounding narratives of excellence and stability, while leaving more contentious political realities out of view.

It is in such contexts that national higher education branding becomes most revealing. As we examine in our recent article, India, Israel and South Korea offer striking examples (Bamberger et al, 2026). These countries embarked on higher education internationalisation at different moments, with Korea taking an early lead in the 2000s, while India and Israel launched major initiatives in the late 2010s. All three have seen notable growth in international student enrolments over the past two decades, even if they still host far fewer students than established Anglo-European destinations. Each is also a relatively young political state with strong ethnonational identities, close ties to diasporic communities, and enduring regional geopolitical tensions. These dynamics shape how the nation is perceived internationally, making higher education branding a particularly strategic tool.

To explore how destinations beyond the established core construct their national higher education brands, we analysed how three government-affiliated websites – Study in Korea, Study in India and Study in Israel – have evolved since their launch, drawing on both archival versions of the websites and their current content. We traced the identity markers these websites create over time: who they claim to be, what they omit, and how they try to persuade prospective international students.

What quickly became clear was that these platforms do far more than market universities. They tell a broader story about the nation itself. Familiar tropes in higher education marketing, such as academic excellence and global competitiveness feature prominently, but so too do promises of cultural experiences, inclusive and vibrant student life, and future career opportunities.

Yet the stories these websites tell are not the same. While several identity markers recur across the campaigns, each country communicates them in strikingly different ways.

Different paths, different priorities

One of the most striking findings from our research is that national higher education brands evolve in markedly different ways. The trajectories of these campaigns reflect shifting national priorities, as well as how each country positions itself within the global higher education landscape.

South Korea’s branding demonstrates the greatest degree of adaptation. Early versions of the Study in Korea platform emphasised the country’s rapid transformation from post-war hardship to global economic success, drawing on emotional and credibility-based appeals. Over time, however, the narrative shifts toward measurable indicators of performance, with global rankings, international assessments such as OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment, and employability becoming central to claims of excellence. These comparisons often highlight how neighbouring countries perform, particularly where they rank lower. In this way, regional comparison becomes evidence of South Korea’s educational strength.

More recently, emotional appeals have re-emerged through international student ambassadors and social media storytelling, alongside a stronger emphasis on post-graduation employment opportunities, reflecting mounting concerns about South Korea’s shrinking workforce.

India’s campaign, by contrast, has followed a trajectory of relative continuity, albeit with subtle shifts. The Study in India website consistently foregrounds civilisational heritage, multiculturalism and the country’s long history as a centre of learning, positioning India as both ancient and globally connected. In early versions of the website, it drew on narratives predominantly associated with Hindu civilisational traditions to position India as an enduring source of knowledge and spiritual heritage. These were complemented by claims about the scale and diversity of India’s contemporary higher education system, as well as portrayals of India as a “pocket-friendly” and accessible destination.

However, more recently, signs of change have begun to emerge. There has been a gradual recalibration in emphasis, with a relative de-emphasis of cultural and civilisational narratives in favour of more pragmatic appeals to affordability, accessibility and global competitiveness. While the overall framing remains stable, these shifts suggest an attempt to reposition India more clearly within an increasingly competitive international education market.

Israel represents yet another trajectory. Since its launch in 2017, the Study in Israel website has changed relatively little despite major geopolitical developments, suggesting that national higher education branding may not always be a sustained policy priority. The campaign continues to project a stable narrative centred on innovation, positioning higher education within the country’s reputation as a “Start-Up Nation”. In this framing, higher education is closely associated with research intensity, technological entrepreneurship and strong links to high-tech industries. The campaign also emphasises academic excellence and draws on representations of Israel’s religious and historical heritage, alongside a tourism-oriented student experience. It further constructs distinct appeals to both international students and the Jewish diaspora.

What the branding leaves unsaid

Notably, the campaigns also reveal what is left unsaid. None of the websites explicitly addresses the longstanding geopolitical tensions surrounding these countries, including regional conflicts such as Israel-Palestine, India-Pakistan, and the Korean peninsula. Instead, these platforms largely sidestep overt political issues and historical disputes, foregrounding alternative narratives that present the nation as stable and welcoming.

Multiculturalism and openness are frequently emphasised, particularly in the cases of India and Israel, where appeals to tolerance and diversity help construct an image of inclusivity. Safety also emerges as a prominent marker in Israel’s campaign, which provides detailed descriptions of security infrastructure while simultaneously presenting an image of harmonious coexistence that downplays more complex social and political realities.

This selectivity, we posit, is not incidental, but the result of deliberate curation in how the nation is represented to external audiences. What is highlighted, and what is omitted, reflects a broader effort to position the country favourably within international student mobility flows, echoing critiques of national education branding as a selective and performative practice (Stein, 2018).

Seen in this light, national higher education branding becomes more than a strategy for attracting students. It is a state-led project through which countries mobilise particular identity markers and, in doing so, position themselves within an increasingly competitive and multipolar global higher education landscape.

Evelyn Min Ji Kim is Lecturer in Education in Asia at the UCL Institute of Education, where she also serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Global Higher Education. Her research centres on student happiness and well-being policies, the global governance of education policymaking, and the internationalisation of higher education.

Annette Bamberger is Lecturer in Higher Education, UCL Institute of Education and Senior Lecturer and Head of Higher Education Track at Faculty of Education, Bar-Ilan University.

Sazana Jayadeva is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Surrey. She is an Associate Editor of the journal Sociology and co-convenes SRHE’s International Research and Researchers’ Network. She is also affiliated with the GIGA Institute of Asian Studies in Germany as an Associate Researcher. Her research revolves around the broad themes of education, migration, and digital and social media.

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What will the Office for Students do now?

by Rob Cuthbert

SRHE News Editorial, April 2026

The Office for Students has had a significant reset, after it was heavily criticised, not just by the HE sector, but also in a coruscating report by the House of Lords Industry and Regulators Committee in 2023. That report said “the regulator had a poor relationship with both students and providers, and that it lacked independence from the government.” In January 2024 the National Audit Office produced a scathing report on student finance in franchised providers, and Sir David Behan was commissioned to produce an independent review of the Office for Students, published in July 2024 as Fit for the Future: Higher Education Regulation Towards 2035. After the general election in 2024 the new Labour Government replaced the Chair of the OfS, former Conservative MP Lord Wharton, appointing Edward Peck CBE, the widely-experienced former VC at Nottingham Trent in March 2025. Peck had been appointed by DFE as the first Higher Education Student Support Champion in 2022, so might be seen as bipartisan. OfS chief executive Susan Lapworth left at Easter 2026, and John Blake, Director for Fair Access and Participation, left in 2025 to join Wonkhe’s new venture The Post-18 Project, replaced on an interim basis by his widely-respected predecessor Chris Millward.

There are now almost 500 OfS staff, about twice as many as the Higher Education Funding Council for England had when it was disbanded. The Chief Executive has a leadership team comprising eight ‘Directors’ and another 13 ‘Senior leaders’; it is difficult for outsiders to understand exactly who is responsible for what. There are Directors for: Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom; Quality and Access; Strategy and Delivery; Regulation, and Enabling Regulation; Resources and Finance (2); and Legal Counsel (but, mysteriously, not the Director of Fair Access and Participation). The ‘Senior Leaders’ are Heads of: Interventions; Monitoring; Student Equality and Welfare; Financial Sustainability; Enforcement; Quality and Standards; Communications; Market Entry; Chief Data Officer; Student Outcomes; Provider Governance; Consumer Protection; Pathways and Funding.

If only most problems would fit into those pigeonholes – there must be a lot of day-to-day negotiation about who leads on which issues. With 500 staff there is scope to give every one of the 424 institutions under OfS regulation a different contact person, without even troubling the 22-strong leadership team, but perhaps that would just be too easy to understand. Behan’s 25th recommendation was “That the OfS develops a more transparent style of communications to demonstrate to the sector its independence from government.” It could start with more communication about staff and how the organisation is supposed to work.

New chair Peck wasted no time in recasting the OfS strategy to take account of the many criticisms of the OfS. After the Lords inquiry the Behan review called for a narrower focus on key priorities, and the Strategy for 2025-2030 said the OfS goals were “grouped into three areas”: quality; student experience and support; and sector resilience. Equality of opportunity was “woven into everything we do”. Peck chose four phrases to capture the approach:

  • “Ambitious for all students from all backgrounds”
  • “Collaborative in pursuit of our priorities and in our stewardship of the sector”
  • “Vigilant about safeguarding public money and student fees”
  • “Vocal that higher education is a force for good, for individuals, communities and the country”

The OfS announced on 30 March that Ruth Hannant and Polly Payne had been appointed as the new CEO of the OfS, job-sharing as they did as Director-General at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, after previously being DCMS interim Permanent Secretary during 2023. They also job-shared as Director of Higher Education in the DfE from 2014-2017. Josh Fleming, current director of strategy and delivery at the OfS, will be interim chief executive until Hannant and Payne take up their new role on 15 June 2026. How will they make the new strategy work? What will be at the top of their agenda?

Their first problem is that the Office for Students, because of its name and remit, has a Strategy which can only deal obliquely with the most pressing and interconnected problems facing English HE: finding a way to finance HE sustainably (and sorting out the student loans row) and finding a way to cope with the many failures of the statutory HE market. Issues of academic freedom, freedom of speech and the once-ubiquitous culture wars may now be receding in prominence; at least, that will be the hope on all sides. Financing and markets will be the primary concern of the DfE’s promised review of HE finance, but there is no reason to suppose it will appear soon. Chancellor Rachel Reeves recently declared that the student loans issue was not top of her agenda. This gives scope for the new brooms at the OfS to rearrange the HE furniture in ways which may guide the DfE development of workable proposals.

The NAO issued a damning report on 7 December 2017 on The higher education market. It said that, if HE had been a financial product, they would be complaining of mis-selling by universities. But the NAO’s deeper criticism was of the idea that HE could be treated as a market at all, with the report listing all the ways that the market and its regulation fell short of what was necessary and desirable. The new chief executive(s) at OfS were in charge of HE at the DfE from 2014-2017. They must have been closely involved with the NAO investigation, but even more closely involved in the passage of the Higher Education Act 2017, which created a statutory HE market and the Office for Students.

Markets, student tuition fees and higher education financing have been inextricably linked since 2017. The Labour government in 2006 raised undergraduate full-time fees from £1000pa to £3000pa and created income-contingent loans as a means of repayment. In the 2010 general election a new Coalition government faced the perennial question of how to finance mass HE. Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg had made a very public pre-election ‘pledge’ to abolish undergraduate fees, but instead  the government tripled them, to £9000 pa from 2012. Deciding exactly how to make it work proved to be rather tricky. David Willetts, the universities minister in BIS, repeatedly promised an HE Bill setting out new policy, but it took years to arrive, prompting scepticism if not ridicule. Willetts declared that markets would “drive up quality” in HE. The hare had been running on ‘low quality courses’ even before Labour HE minister Margaret Hodge complained about ‘Mickey Mouse courses’ in universities (so the hare was really Bugs Bunny). Willetts believed that HE institutions would choose to set fees in a range from £6000-9000, reflecting their supposed ‘competitiveness’ in the market. Every university, of course, understood that price signals quality and accordingly set fees at £9000. From that moment the HE market – as imagined by statute – was dead.

Nevertheless the 2017 Higher Education and Research Act institutionalised the economic idea that markets and regulation are the answer to effective performance of the whole HE sector, even though Willetts’ Special Adviser Nick Hillman always knew that “Straight comparisons between regular markets and educational markets don’t actually make much sense.”, as he said in response to the 2017 NAO report.  By 2017 Willetts had been replaced by Jo Johnson (later ennobled by his brother Boris), who doubled down on the script about “low-quality courses”, as did most of his many successors, with the honourable exception of Chris Skidmore.

Behan’s review said:

“I am of the view that higher education is not a ‘pure’ or ‘perfect’ market, but rather a ‘quasi-market’. Some of the reasons for this include:

• There is a complex relationship of choice between the student and the provider whereby students’ choices are dictated not solely by their preferences, but also by their expectations at being accepted/rejected by the provider.

• Government not only sets the price of a domestic undergraduate course that a provider can charge, but also heavily funds the sector through student loans.

• There are numerous and significant cross-subsidies between cohorts of students. 

• There are significant asymmetries of power and information between providers and students. Taking on a student loan and pursuing higher education is likely to be the biggest contract new undergraduate students will ever have entered.” 

With that list of deficiencies, calling HE a ‘quasi-market’ was charitable, even if – at a stretch – it reflected academic thinking. HE providers responded to the market in various ways, many eventually frowned on or outlawed. After 2010 new ‘challenger institutions’ expanded sub-degree business courses in London, exploiting the income from students able to gain £9000 tuition fee loans – money paid direct to institutions. They grew so much that in 2013 23 private colleges were suspended from student loans eligibility by the DfE. Government didn’t want that kind of response to market demand.

As universities increasingly suffered from rising cost but frozen tuition fees, many saw international student recruitment as the answer. Increasing numbers of universities outside London decided to open a London campus to exploit the overseas market, but were and still are criticised for it. The sector’s broad reliance on optimistic projections for international recruitment was deemed unsustainable and too risky. Government didn’t want that kind of response to market demand – but it decided to cash in anyway, with a levy on institutions for every international student recruited. Meanwhile some institutions thought they could still tap into new demand by expanding franchise relationships with partner colleges, but some of the largest of these have also now been discouraged or discredited. Government didn’t want that kind of response to market demand either.

Despite the downturn in franchising some people made a lot of money. Mike Ratcliffe noted on his MoreMeansBetter blog that the for-profit London School of Commerce had been “… incredibly profitable, with over £100 million paid in dividends to the family that own it.” He asked “Surely we can’t allow companies to stop being providers but to hang onto tens of millions in cash or other assets if either there have been a majority of non-genuine students or only a fraction of genuine students have completed their courses?”. It seems there were Mickey Mouse students as well as Mickey Mouse courses. Elsewhere, responsible HE institutions faced increasing financial problems as their real income fell precipitously. That line in the OfS strategy about resilience has a lot of work to do, and the OfS should look again at Behan’s recommendation “That the OfS board reviews its risk appetite framework and approach with a view to becoming more proactive in anticipating, identifying, and responding rapidly to address emerging risk.” After all, the new Strategy says; “We intervene where we have concerns that public money is not being used as intended …”

Students have repeatedly pronounced themselves largely satisfied with their course experiences in successive National Student Surveys, but this did little to quell the politicians’ and media obsession with course quality. The 2017 Act envisaged a Designated Quality Body to work with the OfS, the QAA was accordingly designated, but the OfS set increasingly restrictive conditions which the QAA ultimately deemed incompatible with its international role and credibility. The House of Lords Industry and Regulators Committee

“… expressed concern about the circumstances surrounding the QAA’s de-designation … The QAA … “blamed” this suspension on the “OfS’ regulatory approach”. The committee said it was “concerning” that England’s regulatory framework had “shifted away from European standards” because it had the potential to damage the international reputation of England’s HE sector. … it was unclear if the OfS had the capability to take on the role previously carried out by the QAA. It called on the regulator to align its framework with international standards and to appoint the QAA or another arms-length body to perform the quality assurance role.”

The OfS instead formed an apparently permanent intention to conduct quality investigations itself, defying the explicit intention of the 2017 Act. OfS now has many Senior Leaders with a finger in the pie, presumably including those for Interventions, Monitoring, Enforcement, Student Outcomes, and Consumer Protection, but most of the others might have grounds to join in.

The quality investigations by OfS generally reach conclusions much too late to benefit the students whose experience prompted the investigations. The OfS strategy says: “We will help drive improvement across the sector, recognising that while much provision is already excellent, there is room to improve further. And we will hold institutions to account when they fall short.” So far the OfS investigations have focused on newer providers or universities near the bottom of the pecking order. The OfS has not, for example, investigated the very public problems with veterinary courses at Cambridge. In those as in many others it seems that institutional self-regulation can deliver better and quicker results.

Those with long memories will recall the opposition of the pre-1992 universities to any incursions by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate, as it then was, which had the run of post-1992s. But HMI were able exactly to be “proactive in anticipating, identifying, and responding rapidly to address emerging risk.” Perhaps the OfS should not only reappoint a DQB but also look around for an independent and respected cadre of, say, His Majesty’s Inspectors. Behan said: ”The OfS should develop its regulatory model to create a virtuous policy circle with the objective of driving improvements in the quality of the higher education sector, and thus acting in the interests of students. The OfS and higher education providers should regard quality improvement as their common shared goal.”

English HE continues to be highly respected and in demand worldwide, but time is running out. The ‘narrow reputational range’ acclaimed by David Watson is jeopardised by misbehaviour by some new providers, misjudgments by a handful of institutions in desperate financial straits, and cutbacks  everywhere. Nevertheless, the National Student Survey shows that students continue to be broadly satisfied, while identifying particular problems such as feedback which institutions have worked hard to address. Some in the media persist in asking “Is higher education worth it?” by highlighting graduate debt, but student demand remains doggedly high. This suggests that you really can’t buck the market, and what we need is the right kind of review to deal with the student loans row and make higher education finances sustainable. In this the OfS has a huge role to play: the new OfS Chief Executives have to transform how the OfS works, to live up to this optimistic but necessary condition for success: “We will deliver our work in collaboration with students and the institutions we regulate. Accepting there will be issues on which we disagree, we will cultivate relationships based on mutual respect, confidence and trust. We will work with student bodies, sector agencies and other partners that share responsibility for stewardship of this important sector to support a cohesive regulatory environment and foster a thriving ecosystem equipped to create opportunity and drive growth. We will champion the many benefits of higher education for society, culture and the economy and regulate in a way that enables universities and colleges to drive growth, create opportunity, champion free expression and support a flourishing society.”

Rob Cuthbert is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Management, University of the West of England and Joint Managing Partner,Practical Academics rob.cuthbert@btinternet.com. X/Twitter @RobCuthbert. Bluesky @robcuthbert22.bsky.social.


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Telling by hand: why academics need a different kind of reflection

by Elizabet Kaitell

On slowing down, noticing, and visual reflective journaling in the accelerated university

There are mornings when I arrive at my workstation, and my mind is foggy, my shoulders tight, before I have even opened a single email. Sometimes this is the residue of a difficult week. Sometimes it is something from outside work entirely, something happening in my life, in my body, in the people I love, that has followed me here, because, of course, it has. We do not leave ourselves at the door.

This is something we rarely say plainly in academic life: that we are not separate from our private selves, our families, our losses, our fears. We are embodied and embedded, porous, complex, open organisms, shaped by and shaping the environment we inhabit. What happens at home registers in the body that shows up to teach. What happens in a difficult seminar is carried home. The influence runs in every direction at once, and no amount of professional resolve, resilience training, or determined compartmentalisation changes this. The body does not take instructions. It registers, carries, and tells what our environment imprinted on us, often in ways we only notice when we finally slow down. This matters more than it might first appear: our sense of self is anchored in our capacity to feel and interpret these physical sensations — we do not fully know ourselves without access to them (Van der Kolk, 2015). And yet the conditions in which we increasingly work make exactly this kind of noticing harder.

We work increasingly in what Vostal (2016) calls the ‘accelerated academia’, a culture that prizes productivity, accountability, and efficiency at the expense of human sustainability (Mountz et al, 2015). These conditions require scholars to ‘excel at work rather than be well’ (Nørgård et al, 2024, p 133), with university staff showing significantly lower well-being than the general population (Kinman & Wray, 2021). In this environment, something quietly gets lost: our capacity to notice what is actually happening in our bodies, our encounters with students and colleagues, and in the texture of our everyday working lives.

I have been learning, slowly, imperfectly, to work with this rather than against it. Not to lock things away before I enter the classroom, but to notice what I am carrying, to let it surface with some gentleness, and then, with practice, to let it move through rather than accumulate. That is what this piece is about.

A different kind of reflection

Over the past few years, emerging from my doctoral research, I have been dwelling on a practice I refer to as Visual Reflective Journaling (VRJ). It began as a method of generating data about my own academic experience, but became something more: a way of staying with experience rather than rushing past it. Knowing is not confined to cognition but emerges through ongoing interactions between bodies, materials, and environments, and VRJ became a way of engaging these entanglements in practice.

The practice is deliberately simple. A notebook. A pen. Words, images, marks, fragments, brought together not to produce something polished or insightful, but to let the hand move in response to what the body already knows. Drawing on Ingold’s (2013) notion of ‘telling by hand’, where drawing is understood as a way of telling that keeps us closer to sentient engagement with the world, mark-making becomes a way of remaining closer to experience as it unfolds rather than processing it from a distance. A stick figure cycling uphill can carry more truth about a difficult week than three paragraphs of structured reflection.

VRJ starts not with a framework but with the body. Before writing or drawing anything: what is here right now? Is there tightness somewhere? Heaviness? A sense of bracing? These are not trivial questions. Our bodies carry the emotional labour of teaching, the tension before a difficult seminar, the weight of anonymous feedback that research suggests disproportionately targets women and marginalised colleagues (Heffernan, 2023), the physical and emotional effects that accumulate from student incivility (Lampman et al, 2009). By translating these somatic cues into marks, images, and fragments, we begin to see patterns that no single incident review would reveal. In doing so, we hold together words, images, and bodily experience in ways that can generate forms of knowing that exceed what any one mode might evoke alone (Ellingson, 2017).

Not a tool. Not a solution.

I want to be clear about what VRJ is not. It is not a coping strategy, not a resilience intervention, and not an institutional remedy for structural problems. Proposing an individual practice within a sector under systemic pressure risks reproducing exactly the narratives of self-management that make academic life harder. VRJ does not fix workloads, or eroded professional trust, or the conditions that produce burnout.

What it offers, more modestly, is a practice of attunement, a way of remaining present to one’s own experience within conditions that actively discourage it. Arts-based reflective practices have been shown to deepen reflection and heighten awareness of personal and contextual influences on practice (McKay & Barton, 2018), while visual journaling specifically can support mood repair and emotional sense-making in ways that purely verbal reflection cannot (Drake et al, 2011). Viewed through the lens of slow scholarship as a counter-narrative to accelerated, productivity-driven academic cultures (Nørgård et al, 2024), VRJ is a small enactment of deliberate slowness: pausing, noticing, staying with what is there rather than managing it away.

An invitation

You do not need artistic skill. You do not need special materials. What I would invite is this: find a notebook you like the feel of, keep it somewhere close, and occasionally, after a teaching session, at the start or end of a working day, when something is sitting with you, open it and spend five or ten minutes with whatever is there. Draw. Write fragments. Make marks that don’t mean anything yet.

A journal entry at the end of a working day, pausing before leaving, noticing what the day had left in my body before asking it to carry anything else. The dense, tangled marks at the head capture the weight of an overcrowded mind, and the beginnings of a migraine that comes when too much has accumulated, from work, from life, from everything at once. The orange lines tracing the neck and shoulders map tension and the persistent discomfort of an injury still healing. The circled warmth in the stomach is anxiety, not dramatic, just present, as it often is. This is not an analysis. It is simply noticing. [Figure 1].

Figure 1: End of Day

Over time, the practice generates its own knowledge. The journal becomes less a static record and more a space where past encounters, present sensations, and imagined futures intermingle (Phelps, 2005) The body’s quiet registrations, the things we have been moving too fast to notice, begin to become visible. And something in how we move through academic work starts, gently, to shift.

The body that shows up

This shift is not only personal. It touches something more fundamental about how we understand the academic body itself. Building on Dania and Ovens’ (2026) conceptualisation of academic bodies as lively material presences, continually producing and absorbing meaning through their encounters, I suggest that accelerated academic cultures privilege edited, high-functioning scholarly personas, rendering the lived body comparatively invisible. The body that walks into a seminar room is not a neutral delivery mechanism. It carries the morning’s difficult email, the tension from a conversation that didn’t go well, the particular exhaustion of a week that has asked too much. Students sense this, not consciously, perhaps, but in the quality of the encounter, just as we sense what they are carrying into the room with them. Within such conditions, VRJ creates a space in which the academic body can appear not as a polished performance but as a sensing and responsive presence.

Telling by hand is a way of letting that body back into view. Not to resolve the structural pressures shaping higher education – those remain, and individual practices cannot undo them. But within those pressures, VRJ may open small moments of freedom: spaces where experience can be explored rather than managed, where embodied forms of knowing can quietly reassert their place, and where the academic body can appear not as a performance to be sustained but as a presence to be inhabited.

Elizabet Kaitell is a Senior Lecturer in Learning and Teaching at Kingston University’s Learning and Teaching Enhancement Centre. She completed her doctorate at the University of Roehampton, where Visual Reflective Journaling emerged as part of her a/r/tographic methodology and sparked a curiosity that has continued to evolve since. She has a longstanding interest in embodied ways of knowing and ‘whole body selves’ in higher education.