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The quiet epiphany: what ‘Stoner’ teaches us about academic life

by Dr Goran Erfani

Over the recent holidays, I finally had a chance to read Stoner by John Williams. This novel has quietly become a cult classic since its original publication in 1965, despite selling almost nothing at the time. It tells the story of William Stoner, who teaches English literature at the University of Missouri (US) for forty years, and whose life, on the surface, is unremarkable: no great triumphs, no dramatic falls, just the long accumulation of an academic career.

And there is as yet very little about it that feels outdated. The perceived career barriers, the departmental politics, the strange intimacy of a life built around a library and a lecture hall all read as though they were written last year, not eighty years ago. Reading the novel raised a few academic-life questions for me: how much of a career is really chosen versus tripped into, how little control academics may have over the wider forces that shape their work, why the office can so easily become a refuge from everything else, and why recognition so often arrives too late to matter.

The epiphany that redirects a life

The protagonist, Stoner, begins his journey as an agriculture student, sent to university by his farming parents to learn better methods for the land he’s expected to inherit. Then, almost by accident, he takes an optional literature module which was not very popular among students from other departments. A single class, a moment his teacher, Archer Sloane, later calls his epiphany, reroutes the entire course of his life. He abandons the farm, and the future his parents assumed for him, to become an academic instead.

This story is a powerful reminder of something many of us recognise from our own paths: academic careers are rarely the exclusive product of a grand plan. More often our careers turn on one unplanned module or a seminar, one conversation, one person who saw something in us before we saw it ourselves. The novel is generous in this sense, and it doesn’t treat Stoner’s choice as either triumphant or tragic, just as the quiet hinge on which everything else swings.

When the wider world intervenes

The novel doesn’t pretend the wider world stays outside academia, although Stoner’s career unfolds almost entirely inside university walls. His two closest friends from graduate school, Dave Masters and Gordon Finch, both go off to fight in the First World War: Masters is killed within months, while Finch survives and later becomes dean of the faculty. Despite the prevailing social disfavour, Stoner stays behind, choosing to finish his PhD rather than enlist. The novel doesn’t treat this decision as cowardice, or even really as a deliberate choice. In fact, Stoner just quietly stays where he was, against a backdrop of events entirely beyond his control. He rarely dwells on it afterwards, but the war reshapes his career as much as his friendships: with so many young men gone to fight, teaching posts open up that might otherwise have taken him years to reach. He ends up moving up faster than he probably would have otherwise, and it’s not something he ever really has to reckon with. The same war that costs his closest friend his life is the one that clears space for Stoner’s.

It’s a useful corrective to how we sometimes talk about academic careers as though they were shaped only by our ambition, ability, and choice. Wars, recessions, pandemics, policy changes, and funding cuts imposed from far outside a department are just as often what redirect them. And as Stoner’s case shows, that redirection isn’t always a loss, since it sometimes opens a door for one person precisely because it closes one for somebody else. The university, however insulated it can feel, has never really been separate from the world beyond it.

Perfunctory interest, and the retreat into work

What struck me most, though, was how Williams describes Stoner’s relationship to everything outside his academic work. His marriage fails early and never really recovers; his daughter drifts from him; and increasingly he treats his own home life with a kind of ‘perfunctory interest’— present, dutiful, but never fully engaged. The office becomes his real home. Long hours grading papers or losing himself in medieval literature aren’t just work; they’re an escape from a domestic life he can’t fix and, eventually, stops trying to.

It’s an uncomfortable thing to recognise, but many academics will know some version of it: the pull of the office as sanctuary, ‘one more hour of reading’ as a fairly acceptable form of avoidance. The pressure to keep publishing more and more doesn’t help either. I’ve caught myself judging a whole day by how much I’d written, not by much else that happened in it. The novel doesn’t moralise about any of this. It just leaves you sitting there with it.

A career recognised too late

Stoner’s professional life follows its own quiet cruelty. A departmental rival, Lomax, pushes him away from the teaching and supervision he loves most and is best at. Recognition, becoming a full professor in more than title, comes only at the very end of his career, at the point of retirement, when it can no longer change anything. It’s a sharp, understated commentary on how academic institutions can delay or withhold recognition until it’s almost beside the point.

This is also a familiar pattern in academic life more broadly. Promotion panels and tenure timelines are often slow to catch up with what someone has actually contributed, and by the time recognition arrives, sometimes years after the work that earned it, the person it’s meant for has usually moved past caring about it.

The balance we still struggle with

Reading it today, it’s hard not to measure how far academic culture has moved on this front, or how little. It also raises a potentially uncomfortable question: would Stoner survive in today’s academic culture? Everything quiet about him, the private choices, the unhurried devotion to reading and writing, is perhaps what current academic life has the least patience for. His love of the discipline was rooted in learning and literature for their own sake, not in being judged primarily by his publication outputs — an orientation that sits awkwardly with how academic worth is now measured by metrics, the REF (Research Excellence Framework), or grant income.

But the main loss may not be the metrics themselves so much as what they’ve gradually displaced: unstructured time to simply read, think, or sit with a text without needing to turn it into a deliverable output. Stoner’s long hours in the library produced nothing that would count on a REF return, and that, more than any single policy, is what makes his kind of academic life hard to imagine now.

Even so, higher education institutions (in the UK and beyond) now talk openly about work-life balance, wellbeing, and boundaries in a way Stoner’s generation never could, and most of us have absorbed at least the language of it (I catch myself using it in meetings I attend). Yet the pull he feels towards the office, the sense that there’s always something else waiting to grade, read, or write, will still be familiar to plenty of academics negotiating where work ends and home and social life begin. We have the vocabulary now to name the imbalance Stoner never thought to question. I’m not sure we’re any better at actually living with it.

Why it still resonates

Stoner isn’t a true story, but it captures something true about academic life all the same: the ongoing tension between institutional demands and personal passion, the way one small decision can redirect a life, and the cost of retreating into work instead of confronting what’s difficult at home. It’s a quietly unsentimental book. It doesn’t romanticise academic life or condemn it. It simply shows it in full and trusts the reader to feel the weight of it. Reading it now, in a very different era of higher education, I find it less a period piece than a mirror.

Reference: Williams, J (1965) Stoner. New York: Viking Press. Currently available through NYRB Classics (US) and Vintage Classics (UK).

Dr Goran Erfani, FHEA, is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Healthcare and Nursing Sciences at Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne. His research interests include people-place-health dynamics, public health, digital inclusion, and health equity. Email: goran.erfani@northumbria.ac.uk. X/Twitter: @GoranErfani.


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Learning analytics won’t close awarding gaps. Better teaching will.

by David Mather

Universities have invested heavily in understanding awarding gaps. We know more than ever about differential outcomes between student groups. We have sophisticated learning analytics platforms, increasingly accurate predictive models and growing confidence in our ability to identify students who may disengage, withdraw or underperform. This is important work, as it has helped institutions move away from reactive support towards earlier and more informed intervention.

Despite this, awarding gaps remain stubbornly persistent. Perhaps that is because we have spent the last decade using data to identify students rather than improve teaching. If we have become better at identifying students who are likely to struggle, why have we made less progress in changing the outcomes we are trying to improve?

Perhaps the answer lies in the purpose we have given our data. Learning analytics has become one of higher education’s greatest success stories. Universities now know more about their students than at any point in the sector’s history. Attendance, engagement with virtual learning environments, assessment patterns and a range of demographic indicators provide increasingly sophisticated pictures of student behaviour (Romero & Ventura, 2024). Most institutions now use this information to answer a single question: who is most likely to struggle?

It is an important question, but I am no longer convinced it is the most educational one.

Learning analytics has become remarkably good at supporting institutional decision making. It helps us identify educational risk, target student support and improve continuation. However, prediction is not pedagogy. Identifying students who may struggle is not the same as understanding how teaching might change their trajectory. Awarding gaps are not created by dashboards. They emerge through complex interactions between curriculum, assessment, expectations, recognition, belonging and students’ experiences of learning. They will not be closed by increasingly sophisticated prediction alone. Therefore, the assertion of this article is simple: better teaching closes awarding gaps. The role of data should be to improve teaching rather than improve prediction.

The distinction that I have presented became clear to me long before I joined higher education. My career began in further education, where I taught and led in sixth form colleges. Like many colleagues working in that sector, I became accustomed to using ALPS, a value added system that compares students’ outcomes with those expected from their prior attainment (ALPS Education, 2025). The numbers themselves were rarely the most interesting part of the conversation – the pedagogic conversations they created were.

Course teams did not gather simply to identify students who might miss their target grades. They asked why one assessment had produced stronger outcomes than another. They debated whether curriculum sequencing was helping students build confidence. They compared approaches to feedback and questioned whether different teaching strategies had influenced progress. Data became a catalyst for professional dialogue. It encouraged teachers to think critically about pedagogy rather than simply monitor performance.

One observation emerged repeatedly. Students at either end of the attainment spectrum were visible. Those achieving well continued to receive stretch and challenge. Those facing significant barriers rightly attracted additional support. However, those in the middle of those two poles often received much less attention. These were students who attended lessons, completed assignments and achieved respectable grades. They were progressing, but they had begun to plateau. Their potential remained largely hidden because nothing within the data suggested they required intervention.  I have become increasingly convinced that higher education contains the same group.

Earlier this year I described those between the two poles as the silent middle (Mather, 2026a). My argument then focused on belonging. Universities have become increasingly effective at identifying students who excel and students who experience significant challenge. Those in between often remain unnoticed because they continue to progress through their programmes without attracting concern. Progress, however, should never be mistaken for fulfilled potential. My earlier articles have led me to a conclusion that the silent middle is not simply a group of overlooked students – they reveal something more fundamental about the questions we ask of our data.

Learning analytics tells us who is likely to struggle. It tells us much less about where teaching is most likely to make the greatest educational difference. Those are not the same question. One helps universities manage institutional risk. The other has the potential to improve educational practice. The distinction is significant because universities cannot close awarding gaps through prediction alone. They will close them by improving teaching, strengthening relationships and creating learning environments in which more students can succeed. Learning analytics has an important role to play in that ambition, but only if we stop asking it to tell us merely who needs support and start asking what it can teach us about teaching itself. The question is not whether universities should continue to invest in learning analytics (they should). The question is whether we have become too comfortable allowing learning analytics to define the educational problem.

For the past decade, learning analytics has largely been framed as an exercise in prediction. Institutions seek to identify students who may withdraw, fail or disengage so that support can be targeted before those outcomes become inevitable (Romero & Ventura, 2024). This represents an advance over retrospective approaches that identified concerns only after students had already fallen behind. Early identification and timely-bound support are crucial. The sector should not lose either.

However, prediction is not an educational strategy. Prediction tells us which students are most likely to experience difficulty. It tells us very little about what educators should do differently. A dashboard cannot redesign a curriculum, improve formative feedback, strengthen relationships between students and staff or create cultivate belonging. All of those are fundamentally pedagogical acts.

Awarding gaps emerge through pedagogy as much as they emerge through student characteristics. Curriculum design, assessment practices, expectations, feedback, representation and relationships all influence whether students flourish or merely progress. All of this means that learning analytics should be judged not simply by its ability to predict outcomes, but by its ability to improve teaching.

The distinction between prediction and teaching quality has profound implications for educational leadership. Every university leader understands that resources are finite. Personal tutors, learning developers, academic skills teams and lecturers cannot provide intensive support to every student throughout the academic year. Decisions therefore have to be made about where educational effort should be concentrated. Those decisions are often informed by indicators of risk. Students who stop attending, miss assessments or disengage understandably receive attention. That is appropriate and necessary, but I wonder whether we have overlooked another question: where is teaching most likely to change a student’s trajectory?

That question shifts the purpose of learning analytics completely. Instead of asking who is most likely to fail, we begin asking where educational opportunity exists. Instead of identifying institutional risk, we begin identifying pedagogical opportunity. Those are not competing priorities – they are different ways of thinking about educational gain.

My experience in further education suggests that this distinction is crucial. ALPS data did not conclude conversations about attainment – it started them. Teachers debated why one class had responded differently from another, why particular assessment approaches appeared more effective and which students seemed to benefit most from timely feedback or increased challenge. Data did not replace professional judgement – it sharpened it. Higher education has an opportunity to claim that mindset.

Freire (1970/2005) argued that education is transformative because it encourages dialogue, reflection and action rather than passive acceptance. His critique was directed at pedagogy, yet it also offers a useful way of thinking about educational data. Learning analytics should not become another form of educational banking in which institutions accumulate information without fundamentally changing practice. Data has educational value only when it changes the conversations educators have about teaching.

Addressing data for the purpose of informing pedagogy and practice should intersect with the conversation about awarding gaps. Universities have invested considerable effort in understanding differential outcomes across student groups. That work has transformed institutional awareness of structural inequalities and rightly challenged assumptions that degree classifications simply reflect individual effort or ability. Research has consistently demonstrated that awarding gaps emerge through complex interactions between curriculum, assessment, belonging, institutional culture and wider social structures rather than any single deficit within students themselves (Mountford-Zimdars et al, 2015). Addressing those gaps therefore requires sustained institutional commitment.

The institutional commitment I refer to is where the silent middle re-enters the conversation. Those in the silent middle are rarely identified as requiring support because they continue to engage, submit work and progress through their programmes (Mather, 2026a). They do not generate alerts because they are doing precisely what institutional systems expect them to do. Many achieve marks in the middle classifications throughout their degrees. They are neither failing nor flourishing – they simply continue. My question is: do our data encourage us to notice them? 

I suspect they do not. As such, the consequence is that some of the students with the greatest capacity for educational gain receive the least pedagogical attention. Universities rightly identify students whose continuation is at risk. We devote much less effort to identifying students whose attainment could be transformed through relatively modest changes to teaching, feedback or academic relationships.

Educational gain is not distributed evenly across a student population. Some learners require substantial pastoral support simply to remain engaged, whilst others may experience significant academic development following one timely conversation, carefully designed formative feedback or an increased sense of belonging within their discipline. If learning analytics cannot help us distinguish between those different forms of educational opportunity, then we are asking increasingly sophisticated systems to answer significantly limited questions. Perhaps the challenge facing higher education is not to build better dashboards – perhaps it is to ask more educational questions of the data we already possess.

The argument I have made in this article is not that universities should invest less in learning analytics. Institutions should continue to develop their analytical capability because understanding students’ experiences is crucial if they are to be enhanced. However, my concern is that we have become so focused on prediction that we have paid insufficient attention to pedagogy. Learning analytics has become exceptionally good at telling us which students are most likely to struggle. It has been much less successful in helping us understand how teaching itself should change. If universities genuinely want to reduce awarding gaps, I contend that we should ask different questions of our data.

First, what do the data tell us about our teaching rather than our students? Much of our current use of learning analytics encourages us to examine student behaviour. Attendance, engagement and submission patterns become indicators of individual risk. Those measures have value, but they tell us little about the effectiveness of our curriculum, assessment design or feedback practices. Every dashboard should prompt course teams to ask whether the learning environment itself requires attention before concluding that the student does.

Second, where is the greatest opportunity for educational gain? Universities have become highly effective at identifying educational risk. We should become equally interested in identifying educational opportunity. Some students require substantial pastoral intervention to remain engaged. Others may transform their academic performance following timely feedback, clearer expectations or a stronger sense of belonging. Educational gain is not distributed evenly across a student population. Learning analytics should help us understand where relatively modest pedagogical changes are likely to have the greatest impact.

Third, who have we stopped noticing because they continue to pass? The silent middle is not simply a descriptive label. It represents a challenge to institutional assumptions about success (Mather, 2026a). Students who consistently achieve marks in the middle classifications rarely appear within institutional dashboards because they generate little concern. Their continued progression can disguise unrealised potential. Universities that are serious about improving outcomes should become just as interested in students who have plateaued as those whose continuation is at risk.

Fourth, what should we teach differently tomorrow because of what the data tell us today? This is the most important question of all. Learning analytics should not conclude a conversation, it should start one. If programme teams leave meetings with a list of students to contact but no discussion about teaching, assessment or curriculum, then the data has served an administrative purpose rather than an educational one. Professional judgement remains the most powerful tool available to educators. Analytics should strengthen that judgement, not replace it.

Finally, how will we know whether our teaching has changed outcomes? Universities devote considerable resources to measuring continuation, progression and degree classifications. Those metrics are important, but they should not become proxies for educational quality. We should also ask whether students have become more confident learners, whether they participate more actively, whether they experience a greater sense of belonging (on their terms) and whether teaching has enabled them to exceed the trajectories that seemed likely at the beginning of their studies. Those are educational outcomes. They deserve to be measured with the same seriousness as institutional performance indicators.

None of the questions I have posed requires higher education to adopt a system such as ALPS. Schools, sixth form colleges and universities pursue different purposes, educate different learners and operate within different frameworks. The lesson is not the system itself – it is the educational philosophy that underpins it. Freire (1970/2005) argued that education becomes transformative through dialogue, reflection and action. The same principle should apply to learning analytics. Data should not become another mechanism for classifying students or managing institutional performance – it should encourage educators to reflect critically on their practice, challenge assumptions about learning and act in ways that improve students’ educational experiences.

My own work over the past year has explored transition, belonging, good teaching and the silent middle (Mather, 2026a, 2026b). This article has helped me realise that these are not separate conversations; they point towards the same conclusion: students succeed because teaching matters. Relationships matter, recognition matters, belonging matters and curriculum matters. Learning analytics only become educationally significant when they help us improve all of those things.

David Mather is Associate Head of School (Students) and Senior Lecturer in Educational Leadership and Management at the University of Portsmouth. His research explores identity, recognition, and transition across educational and professional contexts, with a particular interest in improving educational practice and the student experience. He is the founder of We See You, an initiative supporting Armed Forces, veteran, and Blue Light communities in higher education.


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A narrator Is not a witness: what AI got right — and wrong — across three Ghanaian MBA classrooms

by Carlene Kyeremeh

It was late, and I was building slides on fiscal policy for a class of twenty, most of whom had never taken economics before. I asked an AI tool for a worked example of expansionary policy — something concrete enough to anchor the mechanism. It answered in seconds: a government cuts taxes and raises infrastructure spending; roads get built; contractors hire; demand rises. Clean. Usable. American. The mechanism travelled, but the roads were interstate highways, and the government spending the money was not one my students would ever petition. The example had arrived so quickly, and so confidently, that I nearly pasted it in. For a moment, convenience almost became curriculum.

Then, in the same session, the same tool did something I could not have done as well alone. I asked it to scaffold the vocabulary — a glossary that assumed nothing and met students who did not yet have the words. It was patient in a way I am not always patient at that hour. It found analogies; it sequenced the terms so that each rested on the one before. That slide was better for the machine’s help.

Within a single sitting, the tool had lowered the barrier for my students and quietly imported the exact default my work exists to help people notice. Across three MBA courses this term, I began to see the same pattern: the tool improved many aspects of how I prepared to teach, and became least dependable where the teaching required local knowledge, current evidence or an institution named correctly. The help landed on form. The failures landed on specificity.

In my international trade finance course, I extend a running case — Adom Naturals Ltd, a Kumasi agribusiness I built so that trade finance stops being abstract and acquires a location, a product and a currency exposure. I asked the tool to situate the firm against current conditions: what the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) changes for a business like this, and where COCOBOD now sits in the picture. It answered in assured paragraphs and told the familiar story: Ghana grows some of the world’s finest cocoa, ships much of it out with limited processing, and watches the greater share of value accrue downstream. Fluent, orderly, and a season out of date.

The confident narrator

It missed what I happened to be holding in a government source that week: in February 2026, Cabinet directed that, from the 2026/27 crop season, a minimum of 50 per cent of Ghana’s cocoa beans should be processed locally. For Adom Naturals, that reform changes the opportunity set. Cocoa liquor, butter, cake and other processed products can retain more value within Ghana and may qualify for preferential treatment in African markets where the relevant AfCFTA rules of origin and tariff requirements are satisfied. The tool had narrated the extractive arrangement in the present tense and missed the policy intended to change it.

Nothing marked the claim as stale. The tool warns that it can make mistakes, in a line printed beneath every answer, but a caveat attached equally to everything is not calibration; it is the absence of it, dressed as candour. A colleague says: I am sure of this; check me on that. The tool says it might be wrong about anything, then says everything in the same even voice. The danger was never that it made mistakes. Every source makes mistakes. The danger was that it sounded exactly as certain when it was wrong as when it was right.

The wrong institution

Financial regulation showed me the problem from another angle. Ask a general-purpose tool about capital adequacy, disclosure or market conduct and it is fluent, because the published record is thick with Basel standards, US and UK regimes, and decades of commentary. Ask it to route the same questions through Ghana’s regulatory architecture and the fluency thins.

When I asked which body supervises an insurer in Ghana, and then which oversees a securities offering, it reached both times, confidently, for the Bank of Ghana. The answer was plausible because the central bank is prominent in Ghana’s financial system. It was nevertheless wrong. Insurance supervision belongs to the National Insurance Commission under the Insurance Act, 2021; securities-market regulation belongs to the Securities and Exchange Commission under the Securities Industry Act, 2016, as amended. When I named the specific commissions, the tool corrected itself at once. The information was retrievable; it was not the default.

Three defaults, one voice

Set the three moments side by side and a more complicated pattern emerges. The fiscal-policy example exposed a geographical default; the cocoa case, a temporal one; and the regulation case, an institutional one. These were different failures, but they arrived in the same confident voice.

I cannot inspect the tool’s training archive, so I cannot attribute every error to missing data alone. A stale policy claim may reflect a knowledge cut-off or the absence of live search. A regulatory error may reflect weak retrieval, poor weighting or the greater prominence of a general institution over a specialised one. What I can observe is an asymmetry of retrieval: general and North Atlantic formulations arrived unprompted, while Ghanaian specificity had to be named, sourced and verified into view.

That asymmetry belongs in the larger conversation about AI and epistemic justice — about whose knowledge is dense enough, accessible enough and prominent enough to be retrieved fluently, and whose is thin enough to be flattened, displaced or missed. The tool did not invent the hierarchy of whose knowledge counts. It inherited a record shaped by that hierarchy and can reproduce it at scale, in fluent prose. Better models may reduce some errors, but model improvement alone cannot repair knowledge that remains absent, inaccessible or systematically underrepresented.

I develop that argument more formally elsewhere, in work currently under review. Here, I want only to report what it looks like from inside three classrooms, at the point where defaults become examples and examples become curriculum.

Verification is the work

I use these tools daily and they earn their place, so let me be honest about the difficulty. The answer is not refusal; refusing the help is not a decolonial act, only less help. The answer is the discipline I have argued for all along, now turned on the machine: no sentence enters the curriculum until it points to a source I can hold. Verification is not the friction that slows the tool down. With a tool like this, verification is the work.

I have also begun turning that work into a learning activity. I place selected AI outputs beside the relevant primary or institutional sources and ask students to identify what the model has generalised, dated or assigned to the wrong body. Verification becomes not only my quality-control procedure but part of the curriculum itself.

Perhaps that is the graduate skill this moment now asks for. Not simply how to find information, the tool is generous with information, but how to test information whose presentation gives no sign whether it has earned our trust. The scarce skill is no longer retrieval. It is discernment. Teaching has always required two kinds of expertise: explaining ideas well, and knowing where they belong. The tool is becoming remarkably good at the first; the second is still ours. It narrates beautifully — but a narrator is not a witness, and decolonising the curriculum now includes learning to interrogate the archive that speaks back.

If your tool has ever been confidently wrong about your own institution, your own regulator or your own country’s data, I would like to know what it got wrong — and whether a student would have caught it.

Dr Carlene Kyeremeh is an Associate Professor and Vice President, University Advancement, Recruitment & Research, at All Nations University, Ghana, where she teaches managerial economics and international trade and finance on the MBA programme. Her research examines decolonial curriculum reform, gender equity and academic mobility in African higher education, with the African Continental Free Trade Area as a recurring empirical anchor. She is currently researching the reintegration of diaspora-return faculty in Ghanaian universities. She writes The Decolonized Curriculum, a newsletter on curriculum decolonisation in African higher education. 

LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7412983304175534080]

Author’s note: This article is adapted and substantially expanded from Issue 13 of The Decolonized Curriculum.


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Come back, Robbins, all is forgiven…

by Paul Temple

Mike Shattock and I are at present working on a book on English higher education policy from 1963 to the 2024 general election (forthcoming from Bloomsbury, since you ask). Our start date was set for us by the publication in that year of the Robbins report (Committee on Higher Education, 1963), which offers a classical model of “rational” policy formulation, identifying choices based on knowledge of various kinds, supported by testable data, and located in a defined organisational and policy environment. Distinctively, the report addressed both what universities should do, and how they should do it. Perhaps most crucially for the future of British higher education, it demolished the “pool of talent” argument, which claimed that only a fixed proportion of the population would be able to benefit from a university education, and so substantial expansion would pointlessly “dilute” the quality of existing provision. It was remarked at the time that it was indeed a happy coincidence that the size of the “pool of talent” in Britain exactly matched the number of existing university places. Taking this and other research findings, the Robbins Committee proposed a scheme of expansion of higher education in Britain that received cross-party support in Parliament, and created the structure that, in large measure, survived into the twenty-first century.

Simply to outline the work of the Robbins Committee is to invite nostalgia for a bygone age of policy-making, in Britain and probably most Western countries. Rory Stewart, a former minister in the Conservative administration of Boris Johnson, serving between 2015 and 2019, describes how he came to realise that, in different ministerial roles, his task was not to devise and implement policies in order to achieve actual performance improvements in his areas of responsibility – variously, air pollution and prisons – but to present anticipated failures in these fields in the most politically-helpful way: government as performativity (Stewart, 2023). Pathways to improvement in the areas of Stewart’s responsibilities were well-understood within the relevant professional groups, but were blocked by political and organisational obstacles, not least, as Stewart recognised, by the short-term nature of ministerial appointments and changing political priorities, set against the long timescales for change in most areas of public policy. Stewart came to realise that attempts to overcome these obstacles in the time likely to be available to him would merely highlight his political naivete. As a result, policy was enacted as performativity, which, various writers suggest, has become the dominant approach to public policy making in the UK and many other countries (Kim, 2024; Voss, 2014). The contrast with the world of the Robbins Committee is of course depressingly stark.

Performativity may also give rise to overlapping policy agendas that are not necessarily incompatible but which have been developed apparently in isolation from each other. One example is what happened following the 2011 Higher Education White Paper when new policies were intended to create dramatic changes to British higher education. But the performative approach to policy (“How can we present this in a headline-grabbing way?”) produced what has been termed “layering”, when new methods are attached to existing ones, which may change the ways in which the original structures worked (Mahoney and Thelen, 2010: 16; Ward et al, 2025). Thus, the new student fee regime was intended to change institutional methods by giving students market power; however, the institutional status hierarchy was unchanged, and student market power could only be exercised, if at all, in relation to institutions towards the bottom of the status hierarchy. A complicated fee regime was thus overlaid on an institutional structure created on a different basis.

As if that was not bad enough, the implicit (though unstated) assumption was that the students whose tuition fees were to be loaned from public sources would be attending one of the then-established universities, having met relatively rigorous entry requirements, and where considerable effort would be put into ensuring student progression and completion. That is to say, the new fees-and-loans system was to be operated within a well-understood and stable institutional environment. But simultaneously with this radical policy development, the same government was encouraging the creation of profit-making institutions, applying minimal entry requirements and with no control on student numbers and with little interest in academic achievement. These privately-owned companies would then be able to maximise the fee income paid to them on behalf of their students, which they would be free to use as they wished.

Put together, these two policies have created a situation that is financially and educationally disastrous (the same situation that existed in the United States), but no policy-makers seemed willing, at the time or subsequently, to assess the joint impacts of the two policies: each made a certain sort-of performative sense, but together – well, have you heard a coherent defence of the current set-up? Do let me know if you have.

SRHE Fellow Dr Paul Temple is Honorary Associate Professor in the Centre for Higher Education Studies, UCL Institute of Education.


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Capability for special, adult, and further education

by Gavin Moodie and Leesa Wheelahan

The capabilities approach focuses on human flourishing rather than augmenting productive capacities, although the latter may be necessary for the former. It is also concerned with the potential of people to achieve or become, rather than maximising happiness or the sum total of utilities that individuals have. It is concerned with the real freedoms people have rather than economic resources, as it recognises that different individuals, communities and societies need different types and different levels of resources to live dignified lives.

Students with special educational needs and disabilities

The capabilities approach provides the basis for understanding and addressing multiple and overlapping forms of disadvantage. Tikly explained that the capabilities approach ‘implies a focus on the institutional and cultural barriers that prevent inclusion of different groups’. It has implications for resourcing because it recognises that some groups will need more resources to achieve comparable capabilities as the basis for exercising choice in their lives. This is one reason why the capabilities approach was first drawn upon by the those fighting for the human rights and dignity for those with disabilities. Terzi argued that the capabilities approach ‘is innovative with respect to the centrality of human diversity in assessing inequality’. It offers another theory to guide the development of students with special educational needs and disabilities in further and higher education. This has implications for policy, funding and governance. As capabilities are embedded in their social context and manifest differently in different contexts, they require local engagement with social partners, educational institutions and a nuanced understanding of the different needs of different students.

Education for adults and part time students

The SRHE Blog has noted the under-provision of education for adults and its editor Rob Cuthbert observed that ‘Part-time students are vanishing from the system, as funding regimes repeatedly ignore their different needs and discourage institutions from providing for them.’ Capabilities theory offers a further argument for improving provision for adult and part-time students, if one is needed.

Further education

Tikly argued that the capabilities approach ‘allows for an expanded view of the purpose of [Technical and Vocational Education and Training] as supporting the development of human capabilities and functionings that individuals, communities and society at large have reason to value’. He applied the capabilities approach to understanding the broad purposes of vocational education and the role it can play in society, and also to issues of funding and governance.

We apply human capabilities to vocational education by considering what people are able to ‘be and do’ at work and through work to realise themselves and their goals. We understand capabilities to refer to the resources and arrangements of work and the broad knowledge, skills and attributes that individuals need to be productive at work, to progress in their careers, and to participate in decision-making about work, and in their life. Vocational education students need to understand how their field of practice fits within their communities and societies, and they require the capacity to be ‘citizens’ within their field, so they can help shape its future.

We argue that vocational education develops students’ capabilities in two ways. It develops students’ understanding of the world and their capacity to act in the world. And its educational processes facilitate students making decisions about their education and how they undertake it, even within strongly framed programs.

To do this vocational education should prepare students for a broad field of practice rather than a narrowly defined occupation, or worse, narrowly defined skills aligned with work-place tasks and roles. Vocational education should also contribute to and benefit from helping students develop the building blocks of these broader capabilities.

Strong institutions

The development of capabilities is underpinned by institutional frameworks and social partnerships. This points to the importance of strong public vocational education institutions in mediating the development of capabilities and in mediating links between students and other social partners. And, this requires strong public vocational education institutions to participate in discussions and debates about the nature of capabilities, and to support their development.

Sen explained that we live and operate in a world of institutions, and that ‘Our opportunities and prospects depend crucially on what institutions exist and how they function’. He explained that institutions must be evaluated by the extent to which they contribute to capabilities and to freedom. Winch said that a vocational education framework needs stability:

“… so that it can evolve along pathways familiar to participants, and so that routes and qualifications are recognized by all stakeholders … Governments must resist the temptation to change TVET structures for short-term political benefit, and should plan for robust and long-term stable structures. Last, but not least, qualifications should contain substantial theoretical content to facilitate permeability and broad occupational capabilities.”

Capabilities provide the conceptual basis of vocational education and its qualifications, but the specific focus and content of teaching and learning and curriculum requires deep understandings of the contexts for which students are being prepared, engagement with local communities of interest, and negotiation over the outcomes. For example, the capabilities that electricians need will differ from those of childcare workers.

The extent to which individuals can realise their capabilities at work is partly related to the extent to which a workplace facilitates their agency in work, the level of autonomy and support they are offered, and where they are situated in organisational structures. Hierarchical and managerial workplaces restrict agency, whereas a more expansive approach may provide opportunities for development and growth. It is particularly salient for vocational education that workers’ capabilities as workers depends crucially on the capabilities of their work unit. Work groups have been studied extensively since the Hawthorne studies of the 1920s which identified considerable variation in the effectiveness of different work groups. A work unit that supports and encourages its members to develop their knowledge and skills develops its members’ work capabilities more than others, and according to Senge, learning organisations have competitive advantages over other organisations.

Caveats in using the capabilities approach

There are important caveats in understanding the way in which the capabilities approach can be used. Tikly explained that ‘the capability approach should not be seen as providing ready-made answers to the policy issues and challenges facing the TVET sector today’. He argued that it ‘should be seen as a way of framing issues and as a starting point for evaluating policy choices’.

The second caveat is that while the capabilities approach provides a normative framework for evaluating, assessing and providing the conditions for individual well-being and social arrangements, it does not provide explanations about the causes of ‘capability deprivation’. The capabilities approach cannot be applied in the absence of theorising about social relations of power and domination.

The third caveat is that while the capabilities approach could help renovate vocational education so that it is more holistic and developmental, it cannot on its own ‘fix’ the problems of the labour market. To do this would require a focus on the labour market itself, and not just vocational education qualifications. For example, while vocational education may provide education that helps students develop capabilities, these capabilities may not be able to be realised in workplaces that resist change, are discriminatory, or provide few opportunities for discretionary learning or for the develop­ment of autonomous practice.

The fourth, crucial, caveat, is that capabilities cannot be considered in the abstract. Capabilities are not just an individual attribute: they include the resources available to a person and their personal, social and environmental circumstances that make it possible for them to realise what they reasonably value. A problem in some of the literature is that it considers capabilities in the abstract to generate idealised lists of individuals’ attributes such as general skills, employability skills and graduate attributes. However, since these are detached from the requirements of occupations and the circumstances in which they are practised they don’t advance analysis beyond other lists of general skills and attributes.

Dr Gavin Moodie is Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Department of Education

Leesa Wheelahan is Professor Emerita and William G. Davis Chair in Community College Leadership Emerita at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Department of Education.


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Capability for higher education

by Gavin Moodie and Leesa Wheelahan

The developers of the capabilities approach Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum argued that education is fundamental to expanding peoples’ capacity to understand and act in the world and thus lead the kind of lives they value and have reason to value.

Capability for education is the freedom to choose a curriculum or a course one has reason to value, that will support students to develop their emerging conceptions of how they want to live their lives, and provide them with the educational foundation that is necessary to do so. This offers higher education an alternative rationale to human capital theory that has dominated post-secondary education since the Robbins Report of 1963, but which has been losing its appeal as the return on investment in higher education has been plateauing.

Moreover, the value of and confidence in qualifications, particularly higher education qualifications, has been diminishing because they are perceived to no longer deliver on the promise of a good job with good career prospects. If the value of higher education qualifications (and indeed, all educational qualifications) are evaluated only by the extent to which they ‘deliver’ on labour market outcomes, then their value will be questioned. However, qualifications have multiple purposes which, of course, include, but cannot be limited to, labour market outcomes.

Students’ capabilities are advanced by higher education with multiple complementary values, and this helps us to consider the enduring value of and importance of qualifications. Qualifications have intrinsic value for students to realise their self to ‘be’ in the world and to live a life they have reason to value. Qualifications have educational value for accessing the knowledge needed for students to participate in debates and controversies in society and in their field of practice and to proceed to higher levels of education.

Qualifications have use value as a necessary foundation for an occupation and an occupational identity, and exchange value to access the labour market and contribute to an occupational identity. Qualifications also have social value for democratic, socially inclusive communities and society. These different forms of value lead us to posit that qualifications for the capability approach have four purposes, while recognising that different types of qualifications will fulfil these purposes in different ways:

  1. Individual, to develop individuals’ agency to live lives they have reason to value, and to contribute to their families, communities, society, and occupation;
  2. Educational, to develop graduates’ and society’s understanding of theoretical, abstract knowledge;
  3. Occupational, to develop graduates’ individual and work groups’ collective productive capacity; and
  4. Social, to advance society, and social justice and inclusion.

Education should include students’ capability for voice – the capacity to express their wishes, expectations, desires, and concerns, and to have them count when decisions concerning themselves are made. Bonvin related the capability for voice to Appadurai’s ‘capacity to aspire’ or ‘to project oneself in the future’. A capacity to aspire is important because people adapt their preferences according to what they perceive to be achievable. In contrast, education should take account of students’ different capacities and aim to develop their capacity to transform themselves, to increase their agency, to expand their choices about how they wish to live. Thus, ‘the development of capabilities requires the ability to construct one’s preferences (capacity to aspire), to voice them and make them count (capability for voice)’.

Post-secondary education should seek to develop students’ voice in their education, work and wider society. Education should extend its application of these principles to the workplaces where students undertake work integrated or work-based learning. However, trainees may have less scope to exercise their voice at work than on campus.

Collective capabilities

Sen argued that ‘[T]he basic building blocks’ of the capabilities approach is ‘the freedoms of individuals’. Sen is interested in expanding individual liberties and he called his book developing his capabilities approach Development as freedom. But individuals’ freedoms and capabilities are constituted not just by their individual circumstances, but by their membership of social institutions which themselves have varying capabilities. Most basically, the social institution of the family greatly affects members’ capabilities, and reproduces not only people, but differentiated capabilities of successive generations of family members.

Yet families have their own capabilities depending, for example, on their literacy and levels of education, which in turn provides different resources upon which family members can draw. Families have unequal levels of economic, social and cultural capital, which is shaped by relations of class, gender and race and other dimensions of power. Education is collective in three ways, through peers, occupations, and social change. The peer effect is a social multiplier, whereby adults share knowledge with their neighbours and those with whom they interact, developing their peers’ knowledge. This educative role is also collective in building social institutions such as schooling, participating in post-secondary education, and credentialing, although some have argued credentialing has been excessively institutionalised. Education’s educative role is also collective in developing educational organisations such as libraries, educative websites, public lectures, and community education, all of which play a particularly important role in education for adult working learners and other members of the community.

Universities are strongly institutionalised – the idea of a university, of an undergraduate, a lecturer, and a degree are widely understood and reinforced by norms and expectations, despite local variations and changes over time. Universities have strong roles in building and extending social institutions of education and related institutions for the advancement of knowledge and promotion of rational inquiry. Postsecondary education organisations and their staff and students also contribute to the educational, social and cultural leadership of their communities by participating formally and informally in local associations, committees and boards. This develops ‘networks of civic engagement’, which develops communities’ capacity for collective action. Through this post-secondary education institutions anchor their communities by developing knowledge and skills within their region; establishing links and exchanges outside the region; contributing to civic, political, cultural, and social activities and networks in their region; developing facilities and amenities used by the community; and, contributing to their region’s economic activity. Gertler and Vinodrai add that universities foster tolerance, openness and social inclusion:

“First, the university plays an important role in shaping the quality of place and fostering openness and tolerance in the community. Crucial to this process is the ability of the university to create a social environment that is open to dialogue and debate, tolerant of different viewpoints, and accessible to many different social, ethnic, and cultural groups (locally, nationally, and internationally). In other words, the university has a role in reducing ‘barriers to entry’ and working towards social inclusion.”

Capability for higher education at three levels

Thus, higher education develops capabilities at three levels: 1) the individual, 2) social and work groups, and 3) society. Most attention has been given to higher education’s contributions to individuals, and to society. More recently higher education has given attention to teamwork but much of this has been about individuals’ capacity to work in teams rather than the development of the capabilities of groups. The capabilities approach is also strongly applicable to adult, further, and special education, which is the subject of the next in our SRHE Blog series, and of our open access book.

Dr Gavin Moodie is Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Department of Education

Leesa Wheelahan is Professor Emerita and William G. Davis Chair in Community College Leadership Emerita at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Department of Education.


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Introducing the capabilities approach

by Gavin Moodie and Leesa Wheelahan

In 2015 in a blog for SRHE, Rajani Naidoo mentioned, almost in passing, the potential of the capability or capabilities approach to complement the wellbeing framework, which was the approach she advocated.  However, she did not elaborate the approach. Yet the capabilities approach is important for educational and general public policy, and has the potential to transform peoples’ agency. It has become increasingly important in the scholarly literature in all sectors of education.

The capabilities approach was developed by the economics Nobel laureate Amartya Sen and by the distinguished USA philosopher Martha Nussbaum. Sen argued that the aim of public policy should be ‘the expansion of the “capabilities” of persons to lead the kind of lives they value—and have reason to value’. Sen’s argument is that human capability is an alternative to utilitarianism, rights theories of justice, and to human capital theory. While the aim of human capital theory is to increase economic output which may benefit humans, the aim of capabilities is to increase peoples’ freedom, which requires economic resources, but importantly also other arrangements –

“At the risk of some oversimplification, it can be said that the literature on human capital tends to concentrate on the agency of human beings in augmenting production possibilities. The perspective of human capability focuses, on the other hand, on the ability — the substantive freedom — of people to lead the lives they have reason to value and to enhance the real choices they have. The two perspectives cannot be but related, since both are concerned with the role of human beings, and in particular with the actual abilities that they achieve and acquire.

But the yardstick of assessment concentrates on different achievements.”

As Belgian philosopher Ingrid Robeyns explained, the capability approach is a broad normative framework for evaluating and assessing individuals’ well-being and social arrangements, the design of policies, and proposals about social change in society. The capabilities approach is therefore not a list of desirable attributes that people may have, as is suggested by reductive and distorted presentations of the approach. It is not another term for competencies or for skills. It refers to the real freedom individuals have to pursue the things that matter to them, and to live a life they have reason to value, and to the social, economic, political, and the environmental resources and conditions that are needed to realise these opportunities. It is at its core, a relational approach that links individuals, their families and communities, with their society and asks about the social arrangements that are needed to support individuals to realise their aspirations.

Capabilities and functionings

The capabilities approach distinguishes between capabilities and functionings. Capabilities are people’s capacity to act, while functionings are the outcomes from people using their capabilities to achieve a particular goal. A complex set of capabilities provides individuals with the basis for making choices in their lives, whereas functionings are the outcomes they achieve when they exercise choice. A particular set of capabilities can produce any number of outcomes. Walker and Unterhalter explained that: “The difference between a capability and  functioning is one between an opportunity to achieve and the actual achievement, between potential and outcome”. Two people with similar capability sets may make choices that result in different functionings or outcomes. Capabilities cannot be regarded as isolated attributes or resources. Rather, they need to be understood as a ‘set’ or ensemble of interlocking capacities or potentials for action that allows people to make choices.

Agency

In addition to capabilities and functionings, a third key concept in the capabilities approach is agency. Agency is a person’s ability to pursue and realise goals that they value and have reason to value. People need agency to identify, value, and prioritise capabilities. For this Sen emphasised transparent scrutiny, general social discussion, and continued public reasoning. For Sen, capabilities are contingent on circumstances specific to their context and the purpose for which they are identified, and reflect the particular reality that any particular society faces.

The capabilities approach emphasises the importance of agency and distinguishes between different forms of agency, particularly between ensuring people have the freedom to choose how they will pursue their goals (process freedom) and the opportunities that are needed to realise their goals (opportunity freedom). However, it does not develop a full conception of the human agent, leaving this to different ‘capability theories’ and the uses towards which it is being put in different contexts.

We use the work of capability theorists, Bonvin and Laruffa, to think about human agency. They  draw on anthropology to argue that at the core of the capability approach is a conception of people as receivers (of support for vulnerable people, as we all are at different times of our lives), as doers (who are actors able to contribute to society), and as judges (who are political beings with aspirations, values and desires). Living a life that one has reason to value needs to incorporate all these aspects of our being, and allow us to fulfil multiple aspirations.

We also draw on the work of the late British sociologist and leading critical realist scholar Margaret Archer, who distinguished between individuals and social structures, arguing that each is different and irreducible to the other. She explained, for example, that individuals have the capacity for reflection and introspection, whereas societies have social structures and institutions. Archer argued that the self must simultaneously exist in the natural world, the practical world (for example, engaging in activities at work or at home) and the social world.

Archer argued that the way we mediate and navigate our way in each world is through our ‘internal conversation’, wherein we reflect, consider, make decisions, change our minds and so forth. She argued that the self is defined by the things that matter to us, including who and how we choose to love, and issues, problems or concerns such as these cannot always be reduced to self-interest. We build a social identity through our relational engagement with others and not just because of individual effort, even though our agency helps to shape the nature of this engagement.

This provides a foundation for considering human rights, the obligation that all of us have to each other and the social conditions that underpin civil and political life, which includes work, occupations, and the labour market. It also provides a basis for thinking about the purposes of education and the ways in which it can support human agency.

Conversion factors

Robeyns pointed out that a person’s capacity to convert resources into capabilities and thence functionings depends on three types of conversion factors: personal, social, and environmental.

Personal conversion factors may be relatively unchangeable such as being blind, or they may be more changeable such as not being able to read. Both of these conversion factors affect a person’s capability to read unless they are mediated in some way, such as braille or a text to voice conversion application for the person who is visually impaired, or literacy classes for the person who is not yet literate.

Thus, we see that personal conversion factors may be mediated by social conversion factors. These examples also illustrate that social policies should reflect people’s diversity to ensure that everyone has access to the social resources they need to participate fully in society and to achieve their aspirations. People’s capabilities are also influenced by other social conversion factors such as ‘public policies, social norms, discriminating practises, gender roles, societal hierarchies, power relations’.

The third type of conversion factors is environmental, such as geography, infrastructure, and climate. While most discussion is of the capabilities of individuals, we argue that it is also necessary to consider the capabilities of groups and the collective capability of society.

Broader resources

Capabilities therefore rest upon broader social, economic, cultural and technological resources. For example, people need to have the language, literacy and mathematical skills for engaging and progressing in study and work. They need to have access to the social and economic resources that facilitate their participation in study and work, such as the necessary housing, healthcare, transport and childcare, and enable their participation in civic society and in their communities.

People also need to have the knowledge, skills and attributes required to navigate, negotiate and engage in these aspects of life and in work as the capacity to be skillful in both emerges from broader knowledge, skills and attributes.

Application to education

As Sen and Nussbaum elaborated, clearly education is fundamental to expanding peoples’ capacity to understand and act in the world and thus lead the kind of lives they value and have reason to value. The capabilities approach has therefore been applied to education, and more recently to vocational education, as we elaborated in our open access book and as is explored briefly in our subsequent SRHE Blogs.

Dr Gavin Moodie is Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Department of Education

Leesa Wheelahan is Professor Emerita and William G. Davis Chair in Community College Leadership Emerita at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Department of Education.

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The World Cup issue

by Rob Cuthbert

SRHE News Editorial, July 2026

Once again, people across the country are anxiously awaiting results after years of effort leading up to the finals. Will their results be good enough to qualify for a favourable place in the next round? Everywhere individual performances are evaluated to decide who should be chosen. Different participants will be suited to different sides, all playing the same game, but in very different ways at different levels. Some sides are underrated, others are up and coming, some are always at the top, others live on fading glories of past exploits. And above it all sits an agency which organises and sets the rules for the competition, but seems immune from and impervious to criticism or public pressure.

Yes, students, schools and universities are waiting for GCSE and A-level results to be announced.

A-level candidates have spent years preparing to put in the best performance they can when it matters. Examination boards are referees, judging performance and applying sanctions as they see fit. For GCSE the sanctions are clear – no grade 4 or better in English and Maths, and it’s a red card for progression to the next round in school or college (unless you can improve to grade 4 or better in a resit) (or unless you can get Donald Trump to call the head of OfQual). For A-levels, universities and colleges are the teams choosing the people they want for next year. Some people would like to give a red card to anyone who has no A-levels. Ofqual are like FIFA, deciding on the rules affecting grade boundaries and whether Very Anxious Reviews (VAR) of results are eligible for appeal.

But GCSEs and A-levels are well ahead of the World Cup in terms of the integrity and credibility of the competition. To understand why, you need to understand how marking and grading works. Marking is not, of course, an exact science, but it can be monitored, moderated and checked to make it as rigorous and fair as possible – which is what happens, by and large. To convert marks to grades you look at whether a mark falls above or below a grade boundary. Grade boundaries are set by Ofqual, which aims to ensure that exams from one year to the next treat each year’s cohort of candidates fairly. This is not an easy task, and during Covid Ofqual relied on what PM Boris Johnson called (wrongly) a ‘mutant algorithm’, producing results which had to be abandoned at the last minute and replaced by centre-assessed grades. The debacle shone fresh light on a long-running problem with grades, which had already been exposed in analyses by independent consultant Dennis Sherwood. In essence, if a mark is close to a grade boundary it might be converted to either the higher or the lower grade. The explanation is set out clearly and in detail in Sherwood’s 2022 book Missing the Mark. Ofqual themselves admit that

“…more than one grade could well be a legitimate reflection of a student’s performance and they would both be a sound estimate of that student’s ability at that point in time based on the available evidence from the assessment they have undertaken.” (Ofqual, 2019).

In other words, if you were close to the borderline your B might have been an A, and both grades might have been regarded by Ofqual as equally ‘sound’. Not much consolation if you got AAB and needed AAA for your chosen university.

In a World Cup penalty shoot-out, you either score or miss. That’s what FIFA say. But Ofqual would say, if you nearly scored, or hit the bar, it might count as either a goal or a miss, depending on the referee. If that had been the World Cup system, FIFA would have had to change it – straight away. But Ofqual, who have known about this problem for more than ten years, have not tackled it. Instead they doubled down. They changed the rules on reviews and appeals, to make it more difficult, and more expensive if unsuccessful, to get A-level scripts re-marked: it was as if VAR had been switched off. They played the man and not the ball in the media, claiming that Sherwood’s analysis was ‘without merit’. And when complaints persisted, critics have sometimes been silenced. Desperation to “maintain public confidence” in the examination system has outweighed  considerations of fairness to individuals within each cohort of candidates, and Dennis Sherwood’s arguments have never been contradicted; there has never been any official rebuttal, and he continues to air them where he can.

It doesn’t take a Donald Trump to jeopardise the credibility of A-level grades. They are already jeopardised by the grading system which Ofqual has established. There are many possible solutions, identified in Sherwood’s book, but none have been taken up, nor (it seems) even considered. The powers that be prefer to maintain public confidence in a flawed and unfair system, rather than change it to make it fairer. As GCSE and A-level results days approach, most people will once again believe that it is their performance that matters. But in fact one in four grades will be wrong, and “on average, about one “wrong” grade is “awarded” to every candidate in the land. With no right of appeal.” Every participant in the GCSE/A-levels penalty shoot-out will have one attempt which either counts as scoring when they missed, or counts as missing when they scored. This is not a beautiful game.

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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Navigating research culture(s) in HE: Pracademia and professional identity

by Monika Foster, Jill Dickinson and Debbie Rigby

The intensification of the research agenda across higher education (HE) has sharpened questions about who participates in research, on what terms, and with what support. This is perhaps most prominent in post-1992 institutions whose applied agenda historically called for professionals to join academia to enhance knowledge-practice links, but who are recently experiencing a shift in research intensification. Academics with practitioner experience, commonly referred to as pracademics (Volpe and Chandler, 1999), have the potential to occupy an increasingly significant, yet under-recognised position within this landscape. Entering academia from professional practice, they must simultaneously navigate unfamiliar research cultures, renegotiate their professional identities, and reconcile competing demands from the worlds of practice and scholarship (Huey and Mitchell, 2016).

In this blog, we focus on a British Academy/Leverhulme funded project (Leeds Beckett University, 2026) that explored how pracademics might renegotiate their identities as they operate within, and move between, the different working contexts presented by practice and academia (Johnson and Ellis, 2023; Huey and Mitchell, 2016). We reflect on the findings that highlight the gaps that exist within both the literature and university practices to support pracademics who work within post-1992 institutions in renegotiating their identities as they navigate the research culture within HE.

Understanding research: the practitioner-academic identity and research divide

The literature suggests that pracademics can complement a diverse faculty (Dickinson and Griffiths, 2023) by transgressing boundaries, serving as network brokers between academia and industry, and creating new channels to enhance cooperation and communication across the academic-practitioner divide (Powell et al, 2018; Panda, 2014). However, an emerging pracademic identity may take time to adjust as practitioners might simultaneously hold on to their practitioner identities whilst developing new skills and connections in academia. Institutions and external partners that achieve higher levels of practitioner-academic collaboration are more likely to be more successful (Hughes et al, 2011; Posner, 2009). Organisations with the strongest academic networks and research capacities are likely to produce wider social, community and policy impacts as well as the benefits for business (Nicolaou and Birley, 2003; Siegel et al, 2007).

Against this backdrop, we sought to explore the following three questions: What do pracademics understand by the phrase ‘research within HE’? To what extent do pracademics perceive themselves as able to engage in, and navigate, the research within HE? And What other factors do pracademics perceive as either supporting or inhibiting their potential to contribute to the research within HE?

Practitioner-academic identity and research culture

We have purposively sampled institutions that are likely to employ a significant number of pracademics and that are developing their research agenda alongside their teaching offer. Post-1992 institutions (granted university status through the Further and Higher Education Act 1992) have traditionally recruited more pracademics (Obembe, 2023) and are increasingly focused on strengthening their research alongside their teaching provision (Guthrie and Neumann, 2007). Through an online survey completed by forty-five pracademics working in post-1992 universities, we intended to build an initial picture of pracademics’ experiences by exploring understandings of research culture, confidence in engaging in research, and professional identity, which helped identify key issues for further exploration.

The survey results highlighted no single understanding or definition of what research culture meant and participants consistently described it as much more than simply undertaking research. Factors perceived to support engagement with research culture included: supportive colleagues, mentoring, collaboration, opportunities for informal knowledge exchange and access to research development opportunities. In contrast, competing workload demands, limited time, unclear pathways into research, unfamiliar academic processes, and a lack of confidence seem to inhibit engagement.

Based on the survey outcomes, we explored further pracademics’ professional identity, how they navigate research culture, what they value in research, and how they experience the changing expectations of higher education in focus groups. Focus groups’ participants were from a range of disciplines including education, business, law, social work and policy. The focus group discussions were analysed using Reflexive Thematic Analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006), and four interconnected themes emerged that capture pracademics’ journey and transition, starting with their professional identities, making sense of research culture, practitioners’ values, and how these values and experiences sit within a changing higher education landscape.

Theme 1: “It’s the synergy between the two”. Constructing a pracademic identity

Who am I becoming as a pracademic? Across the focus groups, we noted a recurring theme of professional identities, bringing established professional knowledge, values and experience into HE, drawing upon different aspects of themselves depending on the context. For many, their practitioner and academic identities were not experienced as separate or competing, but as closely connected. This is captured well in the words of one of the focus groups participants: “it’s the synergy between the two that makes it really interesting”, explaining that “sometimes it’s the practice that’s doing the heavy lifting and sometimes it’s the academic bit that’s doing the heavy lifting.”

Theme 2: “Learning the rules of a different game”. Navigating the hidden cultures of higher education

How do I learn to navigate the academic world? Although the research participants entered HE with substantial professional expertise, many reported feeling unexpectedly like novices when trying to grasp research culture. Research culture was described differently across the focus groups. Some participants described it as the environment in which research happens, whilst others reflected on arriving in HE with little understanding of where to begin “a little bit daunting on arrival”.These discussions suggest that engaging with research culture involves much more than learning research skills; it involves learning the language, expectations and culture of HE itself.

Theme 3: “Working with people rather than on people”. Practitioner values shaping research

What values do pracademics bring? Participants described research through the values they brought with them from professional practice. Research was described as most valuable when it remained connected to the communities and professions it sought to serve. Across the focus groups, participants consistently described their practitioner experience as shaping not only the research they wanted to undertake, but also how they understood impact. Research was valued for its ability to improve practice, support students and contribute to professional communities, research is not as an activity separate from practice, but as an extension of it.

Theme 4: When pracademic values meet institutional realities. Negotiating value within contemporary HE

What happens when those values encounter the realities of contemporary higher education? Whilst there was a strong commitment to research across the focus groups, participants also described becoming increasingly aware of what appeared to be recognised, rewarded and made visible within contemporary universities. Research outputs, funding applications and academic progression were often interpreted as indicators of what institutions value. A recurring thread throughout these discussions was participants’ growing awareness that research culture is changing, has research culture become “an empty signifier for ‘how many articles are you getting published in four-star journals?'”, whilst also asking where professional expertise, leadership and knowledge exchange fitted within this changing landscape.

Navigating research culture in a changing HE landscape

Overall, our study has shone a light on how pracademics navigate research culture within a changing HE landscape. Beyond simply identifying barriers to engagement, we explored how they establish professional identities and shape participants’ understandings of meaningful research, academic identity and the changing expectations of contemporary universities. The findings from the project suggest that these pracademics do not experience becoming academics as leaving their practitioner identities behind. They consistently describe building upon their professional knowledge, skills and values. Their practitioner identities remain central to how they understand themselves and the contribution they make within HE.

It is apparent that pracademics move between practitioner and academic perspectives depending on the context in which they are working. This flexibility strengthens their teaching, shapes the research questions they ask, and enables them to connect with students, colleagues and professional communities reflecting both worlds. Given the richness of contributions that pracademics can make in research and practice in universities, we hope that these findings might inform a broad range of stakeholders, including: policymakers, HE-related charities, senior university leadership, human resources and organisational development, research development, those who self-identify as pracademics, and those who have taken more traditional career paths.

Monika Foster is Professor of Business Education and Associate Pro Vice-Chancellor International and Educational Partnerships at Northumbria University, National Teaching Fellow and PFHEA, her research interests include leadership and change management, cross-cultural management and social capital development.

Jill Dickinson is Professor of Law and Professional Development at Leeds Law School, Leeds Beckett University, PFHEA, an Executive Coach (L7) and Solicitor (non-practising), and her research draws on creative methods to explore professional development and place-making.

Debbie Rigby is a PhD researcher at Leeds Beckett University and a former secondary school science teacher, Assistant Headteacher and teacher educator with a particular interest in research culture and professional identity in higher education.


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Do we know how many Black professors there are in UK higher education?

by Zarus Cenac

UK higher education is known to have too few Black professors (eg Hubbard, 2026). The presence of Black professors can be thought about by looking at 1) the number of Black professors or 2) the percentage of professors who are Black (Adisa et al, 2025; Gibney, 2024). The number/percentage has been referred to, for instance, in journal articles (Adisa et al, 2025; Arday, 2022), the media (Coughlan, 2021), and in the House of Lords (House of Lords, 2025). We can keep an eye on the number, or the percentage, to have an idea about if the situation is improving (Gibney, 2024; Nowell, 2025). So, is it not vital that we have accurate numbers and percentages? In a recent post on SRHE Blog, I considered how to statistically analyse the representation of Black professors in different ways –analyses showed that Black professors are underrepresented (Cenac, 2026a). In the present blog post, I discuss issues with the apparent number of Black professors and the apparent percentage of professors who are Black – this blog post asks if we actually know the number and the percentage (Figure 1), and this blog post considers if we really should say that Black people are underrepresented in the professoriate.

Figure 1: Factors Which May Affect Our Measurement of the Black Presence in the Professoriate

Note. Figure 1 is based on the literature/data (Dembosky et al, 2019; HESA, 2026; Gibney, 2022). See the main text for full explanations. HESA is the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA, nd-a).

The number of Black professors

When people wish to say how many Black professors there are, a source they can use is the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) (eg Essilfie-Quaye et al, 2025; Gibney, 2024) who “are the experts in UK higher education data” (HESA, nd-a, para 1). However, there are two points to consider: firstly, we should be mindful of how HESA categorises an academic as a professor (HESA, nd-b), and, secondly, ethnicity is unknown for a proportion of professors in the HESA data (HESA, 2026). Those two points are discussed next.

Professors in HESA data

In the HESA data, a professor may be classified as a professor (HESA, 2026, nd-c). Alternatively, a professor can be categorised into a different senior group for academics, for example, if the professor’s role is managerial (HESA, 2026; nd-c). So, there is a good chance that the HESA professor category shows us fewer professors than there truly are, and HESA are open about this (HESA, 2026) – see Figure 2. The different senior group is not limited to professors (HESA, 2026, nd-b); from looking through the HESA website (HESA, nd-b; 2024, 2026), HESA seem not to have data which specifies how many professors there are in the different senior group (eg overall or for Black professors).

Going by HESA data (HESA, 2024; 2026) and literature on the presence of Black professors, we can see instance after instance where the number of Black professors (eg Arday, 2022; Essilfie-Quaye et al, 2025; Gibney, 2024; Nowell, 2025) seems to have been derived from the HESA professor category, and (to my knowledge) without mentioning the issue that the HESA professor category may not include all professors because some professors are potentially being put into the different senior group. If awareness of this issue is not as good as it should be, perhaps HESA should consider if the issue could be communicated more obviously, for example, referring to it just before/after the table in HESA (2024) or HESA (2026) which breaks down the HESA professor category by ethnic group.

Figure 2: Black Female Professors

Note. Figure 2 refers to WHEN Equality (2026) and uses data from HESA (nd-d).

Unknown ethnicity

Ethnicity is not known for all academics in the HESA professor category (HESA, 2026). For example, ethnicity it is not known for 2,210 of those professors in the 2024–25 academic year (HESA, 2026). Because of this, we really should expect the number given for Black professors in the HESA professor category to be fewer than the true number of Black professors.

The percentage (proportion) of professors who are Black

If we want to see how well Black professors are represented, we can look to the percentage or proportion of people in the HESA professor category who are Black (eg Adisa et al, 2025; Cenac, 2026a; Essilfie-Quaye et al, 2025). For instance, statistical analyses (of people whose ethnicity is known) indicate that Black people are substantially less represented in the HESA professor category than they are in 1) the UK working-age population overall (Cenac, 2026a), and 2) an older section of the UK working-age population (Cenac, 2026b). Next, we will consider (in two ways) if percentages (proportions) from the HESA professor category actually are useful for looking into the representation of Black academics.

Professors in the HESA data

As covered earlier in this blog post, in the HESA data, professors can be in the professor category or the different senior group (HESA, 2026). We do not know if the percentage of professors who are Black would be different in the HESA professor category than it is for professors in the HESA different senior group. In the HESA data, professors with (at least) a certain level of seniority will not be categorised as professors, instead being put into the different senior group (HESA, 2026). Black representation is known to decrease the higher up people are in the academic hierarchy, from undergraduate student to professor (eg Gibney, 2022). So, it would not be surprising if Black representation is greater amongst the HESA professor category than amongst professors in the different senior group. Therefore, the percentage of Black people in the HESA professor category could be higher than the true percentage of professors who are Black. This means that the notable underrepresentation of Black people in the HESA professor category (Cenac, 2026a) would likely be found even if analysis included professors from the different senior group.

On the other hand, out of people whose ethnicity is known, Black people are 1.13% of the HESA professor category in 2024–25 (Cenac, 2026a), but 1.69% of the different senior group in the HESA (2026) data for 2024–25. So, it might not be the case that Black people are represented worse in the HESA professor category than they are amongst professors in the different senior group.

In the HESA (2026) data for 2024–25, there are nearly four times as many people in the professor category than in the different senior group. Therefore, findings with the HESA professor category are likely to be representative of what is happening with professors in general. So, it does seem useful to use percentages from the HESA professor category if we wish to know about the representation of Black professors.

Unknown ethnicity

Ethnicity is not known for some academics in the HESA data (HESA, 2026). When it comes to people giving their racial or ethnic background in a survey, some people refrain from giving their background (Dembosky et al, 2019). This refraining is suggested to not be the same across different backgrounds, with results indicating that Black people refrain the most whilst the group who refrain the least are White people who are other than Hispanic (Dembosky et al, 2019). If Black professors hold back on declaring their background more than other groups of professors, that could make it seem like the percentage of professors who are Black is lower than it truly is. However, the difference in the rate at which Black people and non-Hispanic White people refrain from giving their background (in a survey) is suggested to not even be 4% (Dembosky et al, 2019) – a difference in rates would probably not be an issue when it comes to using the HESA professor category for looking into the representation of Black professors.

Conclusion

The HESA professor category probably does not show us how many Black professors there really are, giving us a number which is lower than the true number of Black professors (eg Figure 2). Although HESA are forthcoming about how professors can be partitioned between the HESA professor category and the different senior group (eg HESA, 2026), HESA should consider if they can convey this better. Even if there truly are more Black professors than the HESA professor category suggests, this blog post is not implying that Black academics are well represented in the professoriate. Overall, the percentage (proportion) of Black professors in the HESA professor category shows a marked underrepresentation (Cenac, 2026a), and, as discussed above, that percentage should give us a good indication of the true representation (the underrepresentation) of Black professors despite factors which may somewhat affect how good the percentage is at indicating how the situation really is (Figure 1). So, when the HESA professor category is used to explore the presence of Black professors, far more emphasis should be put on the percentage or proportion of professors who are Black rather than the number of Black professors.

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