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Higher education’s postcode lottery: How geography and disadvantage shape university access in England

by Frances Sit and Graeme Atherton

Across the world, access to higher education is often shaped as much by geography as by ability or aspiration. For many students, this can be starkly literal: the distance to a campus, the availability of local courses, and the time, travel, and financial costs of attending university determine whether learners can study close to home, work, care for family, or take the first steps toward the careers and social mobility that higher education uniquely enables.

In England, this reality is recently brought into sharp focus when the University of Essex announced the closure of its campus in the coastal city of Southend-on-Sea. By August 2026, the nearest routes into higher education for local students will be further away, harder to reach, and more costly. What will disappear is not just a campus, but a locally anchored gateway to opportunity.

The story of Southend matters because it reflects a broader national pattern. Across England, learners from coastal areas like Southend, smaller towns, rural communities or other ‘cold spots’ are facing similar barriers, making them systematically less likely to progress to higher education than their peers in cities or more well-served regions. Our report Coast and Country: Access to Higher Education Cold Spots in England lays bare the scale of these disparities, highlighting how geography continues to shape opportunity – and what must be done to address it.

A national picture that hides local realities

Drawing on ‘Widening Participation in Higher Education’ data published annually by the Department for Education, our report examines the differences in higher education participation by age 19 for state-funded pupils living in different types of places in England. We focus specifically on learners eligible for free school meals (FSM), who are among the most disadvantaged in the education system and a critical group for understanding equity in higher education.

At a national level, higher education participation for FSM learners stood at 29% in 2022/23. But this headline figure masks stark geographical variation. Excluding London areas, which account for only 16% of England’s population, the average progression rate outside the capital fell to just 23%. London’s strong performance is obscuring a far more challenging situation across much of the rest of the country.

Disparities become sharper as places become smaller. In 2022/23, the average higher education progression rate for FSM learners fell steadily from 42% in core cities to just 19% in villages and rural areas. Coastal communities see notably lower progression as well. Their average higher education progression rate for FSM learners in 2022/23 was 11 percentage points lower than in inland areas, with pupils in many coastal areas having less than a one-in-five chance of going on to higher education.   

All in all, as depicted in Diagram 1, it is in rural villages where FSM learners had the least chance of progressing to higher education. Coastal locations also tend to have lower participation rates compared to their inland counterparts, even when the areas are similar in size and settlement type.

Diagram 1: Average FSM higher education participation rates in different area types in 2022/23

Explaining the gaps – and why place matters

It is often argued that disparities in HE progression are largely explained by attainment in schools, and for a number of years increasing attainment was the priority where widening access work was concerned for the Office for Students. In the report, we mapped GCSE attainment at the area level against FSM higher education progression rates in 2022/23 and we indeed found a strong correlation (𝑟=0.9001). However, that relationship between prior attainment and FSM higher education participation becomes much weaker when it comes to rural villages and coastal areas (𝑟=0.4181 for rural villages; 𝑟=0.4733 for coastal areas). In these communities, improving attainment alone does not fully address low higher education participation.

The presence of a higher education provider can also be a decisive factor in participation. In our report, we mapped the distribution of universities and colleges in England. HE providers are heavily concentrated in core cities, and 39 of the 42 core city areas are situated inland. London alone is home to over 40 universities and HE institutions, plus numerous smaller providers, while half of the 18 rural villages in our study have only one or two universities – and the other half have none. This uneven distribution underscores how profoundly that where you live can shape whether higher education feels accessible. That said, it is not possible to say the extent to which the level of higher education provision or its supply affects the demand for it.

The limits of attainment and provider distribution in explaining disparities in HE participation underline the need for education policy that truly takes place into account. Effective approaches must go beyond national and regional averages, and at times operate at a finer level of granularity than broad place labels like ‘rural’ or ‘coastal’ can capture. Low participation is not confined neatly to rural villages or seaside towns, nor does urban location in itself guarantee access. In 2022/23, for example, the local authority area with the second lowest FSM higher education progression rate nationally was South Gloucestershire, an urban core city area. Places that appear to have similar characteristics can also experience vastly different outcomes: for instance, Oldham and Blackpool are both large towns located just over 50 miles apart, yet FSM progression rates stood at 36.2 percent in Oldham compared to just 16.2 percent in Blackpool.

These contrasts highlight why widening participation policy and efforts must engage with local conditions in a more nuanced way. Factors such as transport connectivity, the availability of part-time or flexible study, alignment with local labour markets, cultural expectations around higher education, and the strength of local support networks all shape whether HE feels achievable. It is the combination of structural, logistical and social factors that shape whether HE is genuinely within reach. Without attention to these finer-grained dynamics, place-based policy risks remaining too blunt to reach the communities most in need.

Breaking the postcode lottery

Since our report was published, the latest ‘Widening Participation in Higher Education’ data, covering up to 2023/24, have become available. Patterns of disparities in FSM higher education participation between different types of places in England have remained unchanged. And as shown in Diagram 2, gaps between different types of places have continued to grow over the past decade, under a widening participation approach that emphasises individual institutions over the collaborative, place-based, cross-sector strategy previously used.

Diagram 2: Gaps in average FSM higher education participation rates between different types of places in 2013/14 and 2023/24

It is therefore welcome that the government has begun to acknowledge these challenges. Its Post-16 Education and Skills White Paper commits to addressing higher education cold spots, improving understanding of local supply and demand, and tackling systemic barriers faced by disadvantaged learners. The creation of a Higher Education Access and Participation Task and Finish Group focused on tackling regional gaps and barriers across the student journey is a positive step in this direction, and one of our report’s authors, Professor Graeme Atherton, is sitting on the group.

However, recognition must translate into delivery. Our report sets out key recommendations, including setting local education participation targets as part of the government’s devolution strategy, auditing post-16 provision by place, and shifting the focus of widening access strategy from individual providers’ approach to local participation outcomes.

The evidence is clear: without a place-sensitive approach, existing gaps in HE participation will continue to widen. The closure of the University of Essex’s Southend campus illustrates what is at stake. If place continues to dictate access to higher education, individuals and the communities they call home risk being shut out, not just from higher education, but from the opportunities, skills and futures it makes possible.

Frances Sit is Research and Policy Officer at the Ruskin Institute for Social Equity (RISE), which produces policy-relevant research related to inequality in the UK and focuses particularly on place-based inequality, education and skills, work/labour market and the role of business. Frances supports RISE’s policy and research initiatives and coordinates the planning, promotion and delivery of its events. Previously, she served as the Policy and Communications Officer at the National Education Opportunities Network (NEON), the UK’s professional organisation supporting those involved in widening access to higher education. Before that, Frances worked as a journalist, reporting on education, politics, social movements.

Professor Graeme Atherton is Associate Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Regional Engagement at the University of West London, Vice-Principal of Ruskin College, Oxford and the Director of the World Access to Higher Education Network (WAHEN). He studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Trinity College Oxford and has been working in the field of education research and management since 1995. An international leader and researcher in access to higher education and social mobility, Graeme has produced over 200 conference papers and publications, led regional, national and international initiatives to increase opportunity in higher education and frequently comments on social mobility and education in the UK and internationally. He founded AccessHE and the National Education Opportunities Network (NEON), and now leads the Ruskin Institute for Social Equity (RISE).


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The Tao of plagiarism: when chi achieves enlightenment without you

by a mildly surprised emeritus professor

Academics are taught many things over the years. How to write grant applications in a tone of sober optimism. How to disagree politely while eviscerating an argument. How to pretend that Reviewer 2’s comments are ‘helpful’. But we are rarely prepared for the moment when our own work achieves enlightenment and returns to the world under a different name.

It began, as these things often do, with Google Scholar. Browsing innocently, I discovered that a paper I had written many years ago, first author with two colleagues, had been reborn. Here it was miraculously renewed: Freeing the chi of change: The Higher Education Academy and enhancing teaching and learning in higher education. Same title. Same argument. Same metaphors. Different authors. Different journal. Different universe.

This was not mere influence. Nor was it scholarly dialogue. This was something more metaphysical. The article had apparently passed through the cycle of samsara, shedding its original authorship like an old skin, and had re-emerged – serene, confident, and wholly unburdened by attribution.

Opening the paper produced a strange sense of déjà vu. Paragraphs unfolded exactly as I remembered writing them. The argument progressed through familiar analytical levels. The meso level was, once again, mysteriously absent. And there it was: the metaphor of chi – blocked, stagnant, yearning to be freed – flowing unimpeded across two decades and several thousand miles.

One could not help but admire the fidelity. This was not slapdash copying. This was careful stewardship. A lightly paraphrased abstract here, a synonym substituted there. “Examines” had matured into “takes a look at”. “Work intensification” had achieved inner peace as “an increase in workload”. The original prose had been gently guided toward a simpler, more mindful state.

The production values added to the sense of cosmic theatre. Running headers attributed the article to someone else entirely, suggesting either deep enlightenment or mild confusion. Words occasionally developed spontaneous internal spacing, or none at all, as if even the typography were observing a vow of non-attachment. Peer review, meanwhile, appeared to have transcended physical form altogether.

At moments like this, one is tempted to ask philosophical questions. What is authorship, really? If an argument is copied perfectly, does it still belong to its original creator? If a journal publishes without editors in the room to hear it, does it still make a sound? If a metaphor about blocked chi appears in the forest of academic publishing, does anyone notice?

And then there is Google Scholar, calmly indexing it all, like a Zen monk sweeping leaves while entire epistemologies collapse around him.

The emotional journey is predictable. Surprise gives way to irritation, which in turn yields to a kind of exhausted amusement. After all, it is not every day one gets to read one’s own work as if it were new – especially when it has been thoughtfully simplified for contemporary consumption.

Correspondence followed. Screenshots were taken. Appendices multiplied. Examples of verbatim overlap were laid out with the careful precision of a tea ceremony. The original article was cited. The reincarnated article was cited. Karma, it seemed, was being documented.

What lingers after the initial absurdity is not just concern about misconduct, but about the ecosystems that allow such reincarnations to flourish. Journals without editors. Publishers without addresses. Ethics policies without enforcement. A publishing landscape in which the appearance of scholarship is often sufficient, and coherence is optional.

Perhaps this is the true lesson of Eastern philosophy for higher education. When systems lose balance, chi stagnates. When oversight weakens, energies flow in unexpected directions. When scholarly publishing detaches from accountability, articles achieve nirvana without the inconvenience of authorship.

The good news is that the chi remains remarkably resilient. Even when blocked, it finds a way. It circulates. It reincarnates. It reappears – sometimes with better spacing, sometimes with worse.

As for me, I have learned a valuable lesson. Should I ever wish to republish my earlier work, there are evidently paths that require no revision, no peer review, and very little effort. I will not be taking them. But it is oddly comforting to know that my chi, at least, is doing well.

SRHE Fellow Paul Trowler is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education at Lancaster University. His work focuses on teaching, learning, and organisational change, with a long-standing interest in how academic practices operate in everyday settings. More recently, he has been working on doctoral education and the practical use of AI within learning architectures that support research and learning. He continues to write and develop tools that emphasise dialogic, theory-informed approaches rather than transmission-led models.


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Understanding complex ambiguous problems through the lens of Soft Systems Methodology

by Joy Garfield and Amrik Singh

As the future leaders of a society that is increasingly complex and challenging higher education students need a good grasp of social, political, economic and environmental issues and need to feel equipped to propose reasonable recommendations. This can seem a daunting prospect for anyone, let alone higher education students who may have little or no prior experience of working in these areas. Students need to understand the world view of the stakeholders and the what, how and whys of the situation being explored. What is the problem situation, how will we understand it, and why are we trying to understand it? Here we describe an approach successfully used in our postgraduate teaching at Aston Business School, UK.

Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) (Checkland, 1986) has been successfully used in many different contexts for complex problem-solving. With its seven-stage structure it provides a framework for structuring/framing wicked problems by initially thinking about what is happening in the real world from the point of view of different stakeholders. An idealised world without any constraints is then explored from different stakeholder perspectives so that different wants/needs for a new system can be considered. Students are encouraged to use empathetic discourse to understand the multiple perspectives of the stakeholders in the problem situation. The comparison between the real world and idealised worlds allows for an eventual accommodation of future ways forward.

Soft Systems Methodology is currently used to teach complex problem solving to postgraduate students at Aston. The module team have developed a group-based approach that has been found to produce a deeper understanding of concepts and yield better overall results, particularly given that students are mostly international postgraduate students. For most of the students their first language is not English, and they are new to complex problem-solving.

Teaching sessions are structured around the different stages of the Soft Systems Methodology. Group work is used so that students support one another in their learning of the concepts and then apply these individually to their chosen assessment topic. The UK criminal justice system is taken as an in-class example and students are asked to think about a particular complex area to focus on, eg overcrowding in prisons in a particular city. Terminology can be particularly complex and hard to grasp if your first language is not native English, so the language used to explain concepts is kept simple and a number of areas of scaffolding are used to help to support the learning.

The first task related to SSM involves students identifying the stakeholders and their power/interest in the complex situation. Students are then taught the concepts of a rich picture and they draw a rich picture as a group for their chosen problem situation using white board paper (example below). The rich picture itself enables students to understand the real world, stakeholder issues, conflicts, and relationships together with who interacts with the problem from outside of its boundary.  Students present their rich pictures to the wider group for formative feedback.

This helps with constructive feedback and a deeper understanding of the complex issue. The rich pictures may seem simple, but simplifying a complex problem is complex in itself! This helps students to understand and tease apart the complexities of the problem situation. The rich picture depicts the problem situation better than just making notes alone.

For the realisation of the idealised world, students put themselves in the shoes of the stakeholder.  This involves empathetic discourse whereby students interview one another about what they would want for a system, without taking into consideration any constraints from different stakeholder perspectives. Students are then able to expand these statements as a group to take into consideration the different aspects. From this, students construct a model which helps depict the transformation activities that the stakeholders wish to conduct to reach their desired output.

By gaining a better understanding of the real world from drawing the rich picture and thinking about an idealised world and possible transformation activities, students can then gain an understanding for the changes going forward.

Topics chosen by students for their assessment have included: housing refugees in the UK; online exams or in person exams at university; homelessness; impact of the pandemic on tourism; child marriages in India; a start up in France to reduce plastic packaging; finding the appropriate route for a railway between two cities in Germany. These are all complex and ambiguous problems that need to be understood before any potential solutions are made.

During the module students develop confidence in the application of SSM and come to a true understanding of the process of accommodating different stakeholder perspectives – especially when consensus is not always possible. What we understand from this journey is that there is no ‘one shoe fits all’ solution when understanding complex ambiguous problems.

Empathy enriches the SSM process by ensuring the human side of systems is as important as the technical side. It helps to create solutions that work not just in theory but in real, messy, human-centric environments. Empathetic discourse is very valuable to understand the voice of the stakeholders. What we have learned from the delivery of the module is that when complex ambiguous problems are human centric, then the solutions are human centric also.

Checkland, P (1986) Systems thinking, systems practice Chichester: Wiley

Dr Joy Garfield is a Senior Teaching Fellow and Director of Learning and Teaching for an academic department at Aston Business School, Aston University, UK.  Her subject discipline area is information systems, particularly systems modelling and complex problem solving. With just over 20 years of experience in academia, she has worked at a number of UK universities. Joy is a Senior Fellow of Advance HE and is currently an external examiner at Sheffield Hallam University and the University of Westminster. 

Dr Amrik Singh is a Senior Teaching Fellow at Aston University, UK. He has over 15 years of academic experience in Higher Education. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Advance HE, SFHEA. His teaching areas includes operations management, effective management consultancy, and business operations excellence. 

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The Society for Research into Higher Education in 2015

by Rob Cuthbert

In SRHE News and Blog a series of posts is chronicling, decade by decade, the progress of SRHE since its foundation 60 years ago in 1965. As always, our memories are supported by some music of the times. This is the last of the series.

2015 was a troubled year, as wars and terrorist outrages proliferated. Russia had invaded Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014 and a supposedly agreed ceasefire in 2015 broke down within days, as had a previous agreement in 2014. The war in Iraq involving Islamic State, which had started in 2013, would not end until 2017. Islamic State were also involved in the Syrian civil war, drawing in more and more major powers on opposite sides. It would continue until the Assad regime was overthrown in 2024, but elsewhere the Arab Spring popular uprisings had mostly faded. Massacres in Nigeria by Boko Haram killed more than 2,000 people. Al Qaeda gunmen killed 12 people and injured 11 more in Paris at the offices of newspaper Charlie Hebdo. Al-Shabaab killed 148 people, mostly students, at the Garissa University College in Kenya. A terrorist bomb probably brought down Metrojet Flight 9268, an Airbus A321 airliner which crashed in Sinai, killing 224 passengers and crew. Another Airbus was deliberately crashed by its first officer in the French Alps, killing all 150 people on board. An earthquake in Nepal killed 9000 people, and at least 2200 people died in a stampede at the Hajj pilgrimage in Mecca.

Xi Jinping had been leader of China since 2012, as had François Hollande in France; Angela Merkel was in her tenth year as German Chancellor and Barack Obama was halfway through his second term as US President. The UK general election in 2015 was won by the Conservatives under David Cameron; their former coalition partners the Liberal Democrats suffered their worst result in recent history, paying for their betrayal of Nick Clegg’s “pledge” before the 2010 election to abolish HE tuition fees, even though they almost said sorry. The Labour Party elected Jeremy Corbyn as leader. Queen Elizabeth II became the longest-serving British monarch. The Paris Agreement at COP 21 saw countries agreeing to “do their best” to keep global warming to “well below 2 degrees C” and Greece became the first advanced economy ever to default on a payment to the International Monetary Fund.

Australia beat New Zealand to win the Cricket World Cup, jointly hosted by Australia and New Zealand. The Rugby World Cup was held in England but the hosts flopped as New Zealand beat Australia in the final. Microsoft launched Windows 10, and a new startup called OpenAI was founded.

Higher education in 2015

In 2015 the dominant theme in higher education was internationalisation. A 2016 book by Paul Zeleza (Case Western Reserve University, US), The Transformation of Global Higher Education 1945-2015 argued that “Internationalization emerged as one of the defining features of higher education, which engendered new modes, rationales, and practices of collaboration, competition, comparison, and commercialization. External and internal pressures for accountability and higher education’s value proposition intensified, which fueled struggles over access, affordability, relevance, and outcomes that found expression in the quality assurance movement.”

The Economist leader in March said the world was going to university but: “More and more money is being spent on higher education. Too little is known about whether it is worth it”. Students in Canada, Netherlands, UK and elsewhere were still protesting, trying to hold back the river of commercialisation, but they were just washed away.

Simon Marginson (by then at the UCL Institute of Education) naturally provided the authoritative commentary in his 2016 article in Higher Education: “Worldwide participation in higher education now includes one-third of the age cohort and is growing at an unprecedented rate. The tendency to rapid growth, leading towards high participation systems (HPS), has spread to most middle-income and some low-income countries. Though expansion of higher education requires threshold development of the state and the middle class, it is primarily powered not by economic growth but by the ambitions of families to advance or maintain social position. However, expansion is mostly not accompanied by more equal social access to elite institutions.“

The Going Global conference in 2015 in London had 1000 VCs and others debating “the impact of the greatest global massification of higher education ever experienced”, as NV Varghese, Jinusha Panigrahi and Lynne Heslop reported for University World News on 27 February 2015. Oxford University provided its own report on International Trends, and there was continuing progress towards a common European Higher Education Area, as the 2015 Implementation Report said: ““The European Higher Education Area (EHEA) has evolved towards a more common and much more understandable structure of degrees. There is, however, no single model of first-cycle programmes in the EHEA.” No single model for pop music either, as the Eurovision Song Contest in Vienna was won by Sweden with “Heroes” (no, me neither) and George Ezra’s European tour included Budapest.

UK HE in 2015

In 2015-2016 there were 162 publicly-funded HE providers in the UK; HESA held data on all of them, plus the decreasingly private University of Buckingham. In addition there was HE provision in FE colleges and other places. Of the 2.3million HE students, 60% were full-time undergraduates. 56.5% of all students were female, 43.5% male. Total numbers had been falling since 2011-2012, because the decline in part-time numbers had outstripped the continuing growth of full-time and sandwich student numbers, up by 5.8% over the same period. Business and administrative studies was the most heavily populated at both UG and PG levels, as in previous years; at PG level Education was second. Reflecting the globalisation of HE, UK universities in 2015-2016 had over 700,000 students registered in transnational education.

The 2004 Higher Education Act (2004 c. 8) had established the Arts and Humanities Research Council and provided for the appointment of a Director of Fair Access to Higher Education. It set out arrangements for dealing with students’ complaints about higher education institutions and made provisions on grants and loans for FHE students. Then came the 2005 Education Act (2005 c. 18), which renamed the Teacher Training Agency (established by the 1994 Education Act) as the Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA). The Learning and Skills Council was set up by the 2007 Further Education and Training Act (2007 c. 25) and the 2008 Sale of Student Loans Act (2008 c. 10) allowed the government to sell student loans to private companies. The school leaving age went from 16 to 18 under the 2008 Education and Skills Act (2008 c. 25) and the2009 Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act (2009 c. 22) created a statutory framework for apprenticeships, and established among other things the Young People’s Learning Agency for England (YPLA), the office of Chief Executive of Skills Funding and the Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation (Ofqual).

Labour might have had a head full of dreams, but many of their new structures were dismantled after the coalition government was elected in 2010. There was bad blood between Education Secretary Michael Gove and the teacher unions’ ‘blob’; his 2011 Education Act (2011 c. 21) put an end to the General Teaching Council for England, the Training and Development Agency for Schools, the School Support Staff Negotiating Body, the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency and the Young People’s Learning Agency for England. The Act also ended the diploma entitlement for 16 to 18 year olds and abandoned Labour’s aim of making 18 the upper age limit for participation in education.

The tortuous rise of HE fees for undergraduates was usefully summarised in a 2015 House of Commons Library Briefing Note. The £1000 fee introduced in 1998 had risen to £3000 after 2006, in a move which almost brought down the Labour government. The 2010 election saw the Liberal Democrats renege on their pre-election ‘pledge’ to abolish tuition fees, instead agreeing with their Conservative coalition partners to triple them instead, which had many asking ‘What do you mean?’ The £9000 fees were partly a consequence of the Browne Review, but the government as always cherry-picked the recommendations it liked and ignored the package which was proposed. A 2010 vote set fees at between £6000 and £9000, but as everyone had predicted – except the Universities Minister David Willetts – English universities scrambled en masse to charge £9000, for fear of otherwise being labelled as inferior. The £9000 fees took effect in September 2012, while in other parts of the UK tuition fee arrangements increasingly diverged from England’s world-beating fee levels. The fee rose with inflation to £9250 but was then frozen, fiscal drag which would cost HE many £billions in revenue and lead to today’s widespread financial problems.

In June 2011 the government published the White Paper Higher Education: Students at the Heart of the System, but the anticipated Higher Education Bill did not follow. Minister David Willetts was not letting go; he brought forward a package of reforms to change HE regulation: placing the funding council in an oversight and coordination role; establishing a Register of Higher Education Provision; introducing designation conditions for HEIs, and a new designation system for alternative providers; updating the Financial Memorandum; reforming student number controls, including a system for alternative providers; and creating a Designation Resolution Process. Once again Sue Hubble of the House of Commons Library provided a definitive record in September 2013, noting some commentators’ criticisms that such sweeping changes had been achieved by administrative procedures rather than primary legislation.

In July 2015 DBIS updated the statistics on widening participation, which showed continuing but erratic progress despite too many policy interventions. We had to wait until November 2015 for a Green Paper, Fulfilling Our Potential, which proposed establishing a Teaching Excellence Framework, abolishing the Higher Education Funding Council for England and replacing it with the Office for Students. It would not be until 2017 that the Higher Education Reform Act confirmed and enshrined these changes in statute. HEPI Report 161, edited by SRHE member Helen Carasso (Oxford), looked back on the 20 years since HEPI’s formation in 2022-2023. It included a chapter by SRHE Fellow Michael Shattock (UCL) on how ‘self-governed’ universities (I doubt if we’ll see you again) were forced to say Hello to a ‘regulated’ university system: “The year 2003 can be seen as starting point in a process of systemic governance change in UK higher education.”

SRHE and research into higher education in 2015

By 2015 research into higher education had been noticed even in the furthest corners of academe. A 2012 book chapter by philosopher Andre V Rezaev (St Petersburg State University) was thinking out loud: “… to articulate a possibility for integrating a number of perspectives in studying higher education as a scholarly subject in current social science. We begin with the reasons for such an undertaking and its relevance. We then develop several basic definitions in order to establish a common conceptual basis for discussion. The final section presents new institutionalism as one of the ways to integrate several approaches in understanding higher education. This chapter is rather theoretical and methodological in its outlook. We develop the basic approach that, in many respects, is still a work in progress. We take in this approach a set of arguments that open up new research agenda rather than settled a perception to be accepted uncritically.” Even latecomers were of course welcome.

With due ceremony SRHE staged a 50th Anniversary Colloquium in London on 26 June 2015. The congregation of more than 200 people included almost everyone who had been anyone in HE research in the UK, and many places beyond, gathered in Westminster for discussion and celebration, primed by ‘think pieces’ from SRHE Fellows past and future. The themes encapsulated the scope of research into HE: Learning, Teaching and the Curriculum (Marcia Devlin); Academic Practice, Identity and Careers (Bruce Macfarlane); The Student Experience (Mary Stuart); Transnational Perspectives (Rajani Naidoo); Research on HE Policy (Jeroen Huisman); Going Global (Paul Ashwin); Access and Widening Participation in HE (Penny-Jane Burke); and, Reflective Teaching in HE (Kelly Coate).

The Society had managed to shake off its financial woes and was flourishing in financial and academic terms. The chairs from 2005 were Ron Barnett (UCL), George Gordon (Strathclyde), Yvonne Hillier (Brighton), and Jill Jameson (Greenwich). The successful series of books published by the Open University Press had ended when it was swallowed by McGraw-Hill, but a seamless change led to a new and even more successful series with Routledge from 2012. SRHE News was reimagined and relaunched in February 2010, and the SRHE Blog followed from 2012. The Society’s office moves continued, switching in 2009 from the Institute of Physics in Portland Place to a brief sojourn at Open University offices in 44 Bedford Row, London, before finding a longer-term home on the second floor at 73 Collier Street in London. In 2009 the annual Research Conference was held for the first time at Celtic Manor in Newport, Wales (where François Smit might often have said shut up and dance). It would return every year until 2019, just before Covid disrupted the world, including the world of research into higher education. The Society would however emerge even stronger, having discovered the power of online meeting (if you don’t believe me, just watch) to expand its global reach, as a more prominent complement to the still essential face-to-face meetings in networks and conferences.

Rob Cuthbert is editor of SRHE News and the SRHE Blog, Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Management, University of the West of England and Joint Managing Partner, Practical Academics. Email rob.cuthbert@uwe.ac.uk. Twitter/X @RobCuthbert. Bluesky @robcuthbert22.bsky.social.


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Snakes and Ladders: gamifying educational research to enhance practice

by Lucy Panesar

I write here about an example of higher education research that has been gamified to enhance inclusive practices at the University of Kent. The original game of Snakes and Ladders had its origins in a ritual Indian game of knowledge, evolving to entertainment, and now again to education.

Student Success Snakes and Ladders is a University of Kent staff development game I created with research associate Dr Yetunde Kolajo in 2024, to support colleagues to understand student barriers and identify appropriate solutions. It takes the classic Snakes and Ladders board game and adds cards explaining the reason for a student downfall or advancement. These scenarios were derived from longitudinal research by Hensby, Adewumi and Kolajo (2024) that tracked the higher education journey of 25 students in receipt of the Academic Excellence Scholarship (AES) at Kent. The AES research reveals factors influencing student retention, continuation and attainment along with associated institutional supports.

We adapted Snakes and Ladders to gamify the AES research findings in a way that develops inclusive student support practices. Our version of the game rests on principles of “serious play” (Rieber et al, 1998), in the way that it supports players to understand and respond to the real lives of students with care, respect and a sense of collective responsibility. The classic Snakes and Ladders game we’ve adapted has a rich history in both entertainment and educational contexts, and this encouraged us to adapt it for our purposes.

We have run Student Success Snakes and Ladders with over 200 colleagues now. When we ask who’s played Snakes and Ladders before, nearly everyone says yes, whatever their background, due to the game’s international popularity. And like many popular traditions in British culture, the game made its way to the UK via British colonialism. As a half-Indian Brit, it was a pleasure but no surprise to learn from Wikipedia that Snakes and Ladders originated in ancient India as Moksha Patam and came over to the UK in the 1890s.

The image is a Jain version of Snakes and Ladders called Jnana Bazi or Gyan Bazi from India, 19th century, Gouache on cloth (Wikicommons).

Mehta (cited in Aitken, 2015) explains: “Just as the board game of chess was designed to teach the strategies of war, so Snakes and Ladders was played ritually as Gyanbaji, the Game of Knowledge, a meditation on humanity’s progress toward liberation.” Topsfield (2006) explains how variants have been found across Jain, Hindu and Sufi Muslim sects in India and describes how: “… pilgrim-like, each player progresses fitfully from states of vice, illusion, karmic impediment, or inferior birth at the base of the playing area to ever higher states of virtue, spiritual advancement, the heavenly realms, and (in the ultimate, winning square) liberation (mokṣa) or union with the supreme deity.”

This paints quite a different picture to the fun game of chance most of us played as children. Topsfield outlines how the game developed from its Indian spiritual origins into a more moralistic English children’s game in the late 1800s and then into the modern simplified derivatives familiar to us now.

While the game is still played mainly for fun, it has continued to serve educational purposes across the globe. Snakes and Ladders is used to teach Jawai script in Malaysian primary schools (Shitiq and Mahmud, 2010); to promote moral education learning systems in Nigeria (Ibam et al, 2018); for Covid awareness training (Ariessanti et al, 2020), sex education (Ahmad et al, 2021) and to promote healthy eating in Indonesia (Thaha et al, 2022). An article on Snakes and Ladders being used for anatomy training in Iran concludes that the method “can excite the students, create landmarks for remembering memorizing methods and can improve their team work” (Golchai et al, 2012). In the UK, Snakes and Ladders has been used to facilitate Dignity in Care training by Caerphilly Council (2024).

Inspired by these other examples of ‘serious play’ (Rieber et al, 1998), Yetunde and I adapted the game to develop inclusive student support practices at Kent. We bought existing copies of the board game and added bespoke snake and ladder cards, each with different scenarios from the AES research. When players fall on a snake or ladder, they read a corresponding card to understand the scenario leading to that advance or decline.

Before sliding down any snakes, players can use a blank “Catch” card to propose an intervention to mitigate the snake and allow the student to stay put. This element prompts colleagues to collaborate to enhance inclusive and equitable practices, reinforcing values inscribed in the Advance HE Professional Standards (2023). If players fall on a yellow square, they can pick up a “Campus” card to reveal and discuss an aspect of campus life in relation to student success.

Student Success Snakes and Ladders has been well received by Kent staff, including academics, and has proved to be an effective way of using institutional research to enhance student support practices. Our next step is to embed the game within mandatory training for academic and support staff across the university, to ensure that more students are supported to avoid slippery snakes along their higher education journey.

Dr Lucy Panesar is a UK-based educator and educational developer focused on the development of inclusive and equitable higher education practices. Her first teaching role was at the University for the Creative Arts and her first educational development role was at the University of the Arts London, where she led various projects promoting curriculum decolonization. Since 2022, she has been a Lecturer in Higher Education at the University of Kent, supporting academic and curriculum development across the disciplines.


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One Nation, One Subscription: why it matters for India’s researchers

by Satveer Singh Nehra, Saloni Chaudhary, and Kanchan Nagpal

India’s One Nation, One Subscription (ONOS) scheme is one of the most ambitious initiatives in reshaping global access to scholarly knowledge. Approved as a central scheme in November 2024 and rolled out from January 2025, ONOS promises nationwide access to around 13,000 international journals from 30 major publishers for publicly funded higher education and research institutions. Our study aimed to critically examine the potential of this new scheme in transforming India’s research landscape, alongside the challenges involved in its implementation and the opportunities for global accessibility that lie ahead. This blog post abridges the key findings of our study, published in Policy Reviews in Higher Education and highlights how ONOS can foster inclusive growth and research activities.

While India is among the largest producers of scientific and engineering papers globally, its academic institutions have historically faced significant barriers to accessing high-impact international journals due to restrictive paywalls and exorbitant subscription costs. While premier institutions such as the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) possess the financial capacity to procure these expensive databases, a vast majority of universities and colleges struggle to provide even rudimentary access to cutting-edge research. This groundbreaking policy seeks to bridge the urban-rural knowledge divide, reduce institutional costs, and position India as a global research leader by integrating paywalled content into the country’s academic mainstream.

The ONOS initiative is a central scheme formally approved by the Union Cabinet on November 25, 2024. It is administered under the supervision of the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India (PIB, 2025). Implementation of the first phase commenced on 1 January 2025. The scheme is executed by the Information and Library Network (INFLIBNET), an Inter-University Centre of the University Grants Commission (UGC), which manages the subscriptions via a centralised portal.

The financial commitment to this initiative is substantial, with an allocation of approximately ₹6,000 crore ($715 million) for the calendar years 2025, 2026, and 2027. Additionally, the policy includes a central fund of ₹150 crore ($16.9 million) per annum to support authors in paying Article Processing Charges (APCs) for publishing in selected high-quality Open Access journals, thereby aiding researchers who previously had to pay these high costs themselves.

The scale of ONOS is vast, comprising agreements with 30 leading international publishers, including major entities such as Wiley, Springer Nature, Elsevier ScienceDirect, IEEE, and the American Chemical Society. Through these agreements, approximately 13,000 e-journals across 27 subject categories, ranging from STEM to humanities and social sciences, are made available to institutions. Currently, the initiative encompasses over 6,500 research and development institutes, as well as central and state government universities and colleges. The access mechanism utilises the ONOS portal, where users can access resources on campus via institutional IPs or off campus using the Indian Access Management Federation (INFED) for authentication.

ONOS as a catalyst for NEP 2020

The ONOS initiative is not an isolated measure but a strategic enabler of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, which envisions transforming India into a global knowledge superpower. The NEP 2020 prioritises universal access to quality education and the fostering of a vibrant research ecosystem (Ullah, 2024). By centralising subscriptions and removing paywalls, ONOS directly supports the NEP’s equity mandate, ensuring that students in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities have access to the same prestigious scholarly journals as those in elite institutions.

Furthermore, the NEP emphasises multidisciplinary learning, encouraging students to break existing boundaries between disciplines (Kasturirangan, 2019). ONOS supports this pedagogical shift by providing access to a diverse array of multidisciplinary resources, allowing, for instance, engineering students to access social science literature. This aligns with the establishment of the Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF), which aims to foster an innovative culture across Indian universities and research laboratories through financial assistance. The primary impact of ONOS is the democratisation of information, potentially benefiting nearly 1.8 crore (18 million) students, faculty, and researchers. By negotiating collective licenses, the government aims to resolve accessibility issues while ensuring compliance with copyright laws (Nithila Kovai, 2025).

Prior to ONOS, the country’s collective expenditure on academic journals was estimated at over ₹1,500 crore annually. Through bulk licensing, ONOS aims to reduce these national expenditures on journal access by 30–40% (Chakraborty et al, 2020). By ensuring immediate dissemination of global research to the wider community, the initiative is expected to boost India’s research productivity and citation rates, thereby enhancing the nation’s visibility in the global academic discourse.

Consequently, ONOS is viewed as a well-thought-out investment in India’s research capacities, designed to create a level playing field for innovation nationwide through enhanced digital infrastructure.

Possible roadblocks

Despite its transformative potential, the ONOS initiative faces significant challenges in implementation. A primary concern is the “digital divide” and infrastructure gaps. Over 70% of rural Indian colleges lack reliable internet access, which severely limits the reach of this digital-first scheme. Without robust digital infrastructure and literacy training, the benefits of ONOS may remain concentrated in urban centres, undermining its goal of inclusivity.

Financial sustainability is another critical issue. Unlike global open-access initiatives such as the EU’s “Plan S“, which mandate freely available research, ONOS relies on a recurring subscription model. Critics argue that this perpetuates dependency on commercial publishers and may strain public finances during economic downturns. There is also concern regarding the dominance of Western publishers, whose profit margins can reach 35–40% (Fazackerley, 2023), potentially reinforcing a system where public funds subsidise corporate profits (Olsson et al, 2020). Furthermore, the current focus is predominantly on STEM disciplines, with insufficient coverage for social sciences, humanities, and regional language scholarship.

Institutional eligibility also remains a point of contention. There is ambiguity regarding the inclusion of private higher education institutions, which enrol over half of India’s students. Excluding these institutions would significantly diminish the scheme’s impact and reinforce inequities in scholarly access.

Concluding Remarks

India’s One Nation One Subscription initiative represents a bold paradigm shift in research policy, moving from fragmented, institution-based access to a unified national entitlement. By guaranteeing access to over 13,000 global journals for millions of users, it promises to catalyse a transformation in the country’s research ecosystem and support the ambitious goals of NEP 2020. However, for ONOS to truly democratise knowledge, it must navigate the challenges of digital infrastructure in rural areas, ensure sustainable funding, and eventually evolve towards a hybrid model that strengthens India’s domestic open-access publishing capabilities alongside these international subscriptions. Success will depend on overcoming publisher resistance, ensuring inclusive coverage across all disciplines and institutional types, and integrating this access with robust support for the dissemination of indigenous research.

Satveer Singh Nehra is a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Library and Information Science, Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pune. His doctoral research focuses on Open Research Data and Research Data Management, emphasising the need for a national policy framework to strengthen open science initiatives in India. In addition to his primary research area, he actively explores emerging fields such as Digital Humanities and the application of Artificial Intelligence in library environments.

Dr Saloni Chaudhary is an academic and researcher dedicated to the evolving landscape of Library and Information Science. She currently serves as an Assistant Librarian at the University of Delhi and holds a PhD in Library and Information Science from Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi. Her research interests lie at the intersection of Scientometrics, Digital Literacy, and Digital Humanities, where she explores the impact of digital advancements on knowledge systems.

Dr Kanchan Nagpal is a library and information science professional and works as an Assistant Librarian at the India International Centre.  She holds a PhD degree in Library and Information Science. She is a council member of the Indian Library Association. 


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Changing landscape of international student mobility

by Hans de Wit, Philip G Altbach and Lizhou Wang

In its many diverse forms – including degree study, credit earning, branch campuses, and others – mobility remains a major aspect of international higher education. But mobility patterns are shifting. While the South-North movement remains primary at the world level, new patterns and modes are emerging. This blog describes these new patterns and their rationales. It is based on our chapter ‘International student mobility in a changing global environment: key issues and trends’, in: Simon Marginson, Catherine Montgomery, Alain Courtois and Ravinder Sidhu (eds), The Future of Cross Border Academic Mobilities and Immobilities: Power, Knowledge and Agency, published by Bloomsbury.

Notably, student and scholar mobility has become a mass enterprise, with more than six million students studying outside their countries in 2021 (UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2024). But, although global student mobility is a significant factor and at the core of internationalisation efforts, it is limited to a small and mainly elite sector of the global student population. Six million global students represent a small proportion of the 254 million students pursuing higher education worldwide. Nevertheless, the mobility of learners, teachers, and scholars has always been a key dimension of higher education.

‘Internationally mobile students’ often refers to degree-mobile students who move to a foreign country for educational purposes and receive a foreign tertiary/higher education degree on a student visa. The predominant pattern of degree mobility at the world level has been from the Global South to the Global North, although there is also significant degree mobility within the Global North, in particular within Europe, and from the United States to Europe, as well as the reverse. Initially, the South to North flow consisted largely of small numbers of elites from colonies to the imperial countries. This movement increased significantly after independence, for example, students travelling to the UK and France. This kind of mobility also extended to other key Anglophone countries, including the United States, Canada, and Australia, which have maintained a dominant destination position. On the supply side, the fastest growth in outgoing students has been from Global South countries. From 1995 to 2010, the main sending countries worldwide were China, India, and Malaysia.

Shifting mobility patterns

While South-to-North and, to some extent, North-to-North mobility remain numerically dominant, there is a trend towards multipolarity and intra-regional student mobility. According to Van Mol et al (in E Recchi and M Safi (eds), (2024) Handbook of Human Mobility and Migration (pp 128–47). Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishers), the past fifteen years have witnessed a challenge to the hegemony of the Anglo-Saxon and Western countries, with new educational hubs gaining prominence. A more diverse set of countries now exerts greater relative influence in the overall student mobility network.

In particular, intra-regional mobility is growing in the South, from low-income towards middle-income countries. For China, the top senders are neighbours South Korea, Thailand, and Pakistan. For Russia, the top senders are nearby Kazakhstan, China, and Uzbekistan. Likewise, South Korea and Japan have become top study destinations for students from Vietnam, Indonesia, and Malaysia. For Argentina, all the top sending countries are also from South America: Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Paraguay, and Bolivia. Interestingly, some of the sending countries present themselves as new destinations, for instance, Kazakhstan and Vietnam. What drives these changes?

Macro-level drivers for international mobility

In the dynamic landscape of international higher education, macro-level factors, beyond the control of individual countries, higher education institutions (HEIs), and students, wield significant influence in changing mobility patterns. In many sending countries, the enhancement in higher education quality, along with economic development, plays an important role. For example, in East Asian countries, such as Japan and South Korea, the national higher education systems have now achieved excellent quality and become attractive study destinations for international students. And other countries follow.

Economic and financial considerations

Another global factor shaping the mobility landscape is the increasing commodification of education. Anglophone high-income countries have particularly benefited financially from this market. For example, in the academic year 2022–3, over one million international students at US colleges and universities contributed more than $40 billion to the US economy and supported more than 368,000 jobs (NAFSA, 2023). For the UK, the figure for the total economic contribution was £41.9 billion in the 2021/2 academic year (Higher Education Policy Institute, 2023).

At the same time, high living and tuition costs, coupled with increased xenophobia and visa and other restrictions in the Global North, have driven many students from the South to pursue education in non-Western nations where tuition and living costs are less expensive. These economic pull factors make the emerging study destinations attractive to many international students, especially those from middle-income and lower-income families.

Soft power and cultural influences

Many countries and institutions prioritise international student recruitment as a key target in their strategies for the internationalisation of higher education because of the value they place on securing soft power, cross-border cultural influence, and improved university rankings.

At the national level, countries utilise strategic policies and national agencies to promote international student recruitment and subsidize inbound mobility. Activities and initiatives involve various national actors that aim to build a comprehensive ecosystem in supporting immigration regulation, university cooperation, language training, and scholarships. Examples include the Indian government, which launched the Study in India flagship project in 2018 in collaboration with various government departments to enhance its global identity through international education initiatives. Similarly, the Education Plan in China’s Belt and Road Initiative showcases the political and diplomatic motivations behind its internationalisation strategy and international student recruitment.

Demographic change, labour market, and migration

For many countries in the Global North, significant demographic decline and the need for skilled labour have made it challenging to find sufficient talent domestically. Attracting talented international students, faculty, and professionals, as well as encouraging student retention, are often crucial strategies for higher education in high-income and middle-income countries.

Important in the above-mentioned factors are the many ways in which migration and student mobility cross over. Education functions as a significant migration doorway for a large minority of students moving from the Global South to the Anglophone countries. Tensions and controversies arise regarding international students’ post-study options, labour market needs, and immigration policies.

Complex and multilayered

In the words of Van Mol et al (2024, p141), international student mobility is ‘complex and multilayered’. It is influenced by a variety of changing contexts and related push and pull factors. There is no such archetype as ‘the international student’, as there are different forms of student, stakeholder roles, and motivations for mobility. In degree mobility, one can observe a gradual shift from a predominantly South-North movement towards a more diverse movement, with dominant sending countries, particularly in Asia, increasingly becoming receiving countries.

Revenue generation remains a dominant pull factor in the Anglophone higher education sector. Another key consideration is increasing the stay rate of international students so as to better meet skilled labour needs.

At the same time, geopolitical tensions, national security concerns, and nationalist anti-immigration sentiments and policies are becoming important obstacles to international student mobility. While international students and the revenues they generate are important in a few countries, perhaps more important to the global economy as a whole are patterns of high-skilled immigration related to student mobility. These patterns contribute to inequalities, impact remittances, influence scientific collaboration, and affect many other factors in numerous countries.

As countries navigate these complex dynamics, the strategic management of international student flows and integration of skilled graduates into the labour market will be crucial for maximising the benefits of global education and fostering international collaboration. Ultimately, understanding the evolving nature of international student mobility is essential for policymakers and educators who seek to enhance the internationalisation of higher education and address the broader challenges and opportunities it presents.

Hans de Wit is Emeritus Professor and Distinguished Fellow of the ‘Center for International Higher Education’ (CIHE) at Boston College. He is IAU Senior Fellow in the International Association of Universities (IAU) and Co-Editor of Policy Reviews in Higher Education (SRHE).

Philip G Altbach is Research Professor and Distinguished Fellow at the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College, where from 1994 to 2015 he was the Monan University Professor.

Lizhou Wang is an Assistant Professor at the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study, Waseda University, Japan. Lizhou conducts research on the internationalisation of higher education, including international mobility and research collaboration.


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Consumer rights and complaints in English higher education: a new form of student agency?

by Rille Raaper

A year ago I wrote a blog post inviting the SRHE community to reflect on what it means to be political for today’s students. That piece was a thought experiment exploring political agency beyond traditional notions of student activism or protest. I now want to extend this thinking by considering whether student-as-consumer complaints can also be understood as a form of political agency.

Consumerism has increasingly invaded new sectors of society, including higher education. In the UK, consumer rights and relationships are actively promoted through higher education policy, which frames students as consumers and universities as providers. The Office for Students, the main regulator in England, encourages students to understand their consumer rights with statements such as: ‘Knowing your consumer rights should help you to be protected if things go wrong on your course’. Although the phrase “things going wrong” remains ambiguous, universities must comply with consumer protection law by providing accurate, up-to-date information about their offerings and maintaining internal complaints and appeals processes for students who wish to raise concerns about their experience. These processes are broadly similar across institutions, typically moving from informal resolution to formal complaints, and, if unresolved, escalation to the Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIA) – the body responsible for reviewing unsettled student complaints in England and Wales.

While it may be a ‘chicken and egg’ question as to whether the rise in complaints or the introduction of formal procedures came first, what is clear is that student complaints have grown significantly. Although university-level complaint data is confidential, we know that the Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIA) received 3,613 complaints in 2024 – an increase of over 130% compared to 2016. The financial implications are notable: £677,785 was awarded to students following a “Justified” decision, and an additional £1,809,805 was offered as part of settlements in 2024. It is reasonable to assume that university-managed complaints have experienced a similar surge.

This peak in complaints and related institutional procedures raises an important question: should we view complaints not merely as an inconvenience or evidence of institutional shortcomings, but as a process that activates certain forms of agency within the student experience? Specifically, could this agency represent a new form of political agency in a context where students may be reluctant to engage in traditional activism for fear of jeopardising their academic success and financial investment?

In my broader work, I adopt a wide lens on political agency, drawing on works from Michel Foucault, Sara Ahmed, and Jouni Häkli & Kirsi Pauliina Kallio. From this perspective, political agency encompasses ‘a variety of individual and collective, official and mundane, rational and affective, and human and non-human ways of acting, affecting and impacting politically’. Complaints, while largely individual, can be both rational and affective, making them a compelling example for expanding our understanding of political agency. When considering complaints as political agency, I propose we start by reflecting on the following:

Institutional inequalities

Most student complaints originate – at least from the perspective of those making them – in response to perceived institutional failure or wrongdoing. Complaints are therefore generally directed against some form of injustice. While students can raise concerns about a wide range of issues, the OIA statistics indicate that service-related complaints, eg poor teaching quality, undelivered services, or misleading marketing, account for roughly one third of all cases handled by the OIA.

Courage

Like any form of political action, making a complaint requires considerable courage and perseverance. Sara Ahmed’s work highlights how raising a complaint can make the complainant vulnerable, positioning them as the locus of an institutional problem. Similar ideas resonate with Foucault’s notion of parrhesia – truth-telling as a courageous act that is both risky and potentially transformative for the individual.

Social spillovers

Although a student complaint is typically an individual act, it carries an element of publicness. Complaints can create opportunities for students to engage with their broader social context and advocate for fairness in higher education. This ethical stance may ripple outward, influencing others and contributing to wider institutional change; for example, when a single complaint leads to policy or practice reforms.

While we may debate whether student complaints are a ‘necessary evil’ in market-driven higher education, I invite readers to consider whether raising a complaint might also be a courageous and transformative experience for our students. If we allow ourselves to think this way, complaints could become an important lens for understanding how today’s students exercise their political agency.

For more details, please see my book published as part of the SRHE and Routledge book series Research into Higher Education:

Raaper, R (2024). Student Identity and Political Agency. Activism, Representation and Consumer Rights Oxon: Routledge

Professor Rille Raaper is in the School of Education at Durham University. Rille’s research interests lie in the sociology of higher education with a particular focus on student identity, experience and political agency in a variety of higher education settings. Her research is primarily concerned with how universities organise their work in competitive higher education markets, and the implications market forces have on current and future students. The two particular strands of Rille’s research relate to: a) student identity and experience in consumerist higher education; b) student agency, citizenship and political activism. rille.raaper@durham.ac.uk


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Students in quality assurance – representatives, partners, or even experts?

by Jens Jungblut & Bjørn Stensaker

Throughout Europe, students are often regular members of external quality assurance mandated to perform evaluations and accreditations in higher education. While this role has been secured through the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ESG), we have little knowledge about how students participate in such panels and which roles they take up. In a paper presented at the SRHE conference in Nottingham in December 2025, we addressed this issue – both conceptually and empirically.

One could imagine that there are several roles that students could play as part in an external quality assurance panel. Students are most often seen as representatives of their fellow students. This has implications as to how students are appointed to such panels, as various student interest organizations usually have the power to nominate specific students to the task. More recently, the idea of students being partners has also gained interest, where a key assumption is that students should be involved and participate in all aspect and processes related to their own education – including quality assurance. The initiative “student partnerships in quality Scotland (sparqs)” is a well-known example of this inclusive approach (Varwell, 2021). However, one could argue that students may even take on an expertise-based role in quality assurance. This type of role is not based on experience per se but rather the ability to reflect upon the knowledge possessed and the ability to engage in systematic efforts to learn more – based on these reflections (Ericsson, 2017).

In our paper presented at the SRHE conference we argue that the role of students participating in quality assurance panels (or any other related processes in higher education) may not be static, restricting students to merely one role at a time (see also Stensaker & Matear, 2024). We rather argue – in line with Holen et al (2021) – that the roles students may take on are highly dynamic. A consequence of this would be that students may shift rapidly from one role to another, depending on, for example, the evaluation context, committee setting, or the issue that is being discussed.

To test our assumptions, we conducted a survey targeting students taking part in European quality assurance processes; to be more specific, we targeted the `Quality Assurance Student Experts Pool` within the European Students’ Union. This group was established in 2009 with the aim to improve the contribution of students in quality assurance in Europe. When included in the pool, students undergo training sessions providing them with relevant background knowledge about quality assurance processes and the ESG. The members of the pool are then called upon by quality assurance agencies throughout Europe to act as student representatives on their quality assurance panels at program, institutional, or national level, performing evaluations, accreditations and other forms of assessments. The `Quality Assurance Student Experts Pool` therefore represents a unique entity in Europe, as it is the only European structure that collects and trains students for these roles. 35 students (of a total of 90) responded to our survey.

The students responding have on average been involved in quality assurance for more than four years, and over 60 percent have participated in four or more evaluation or accreditation processes. In line with our expectations, the students indeed report that they are taking on several roles during the evaluation processes, they are representatives of students, they feel they are equal partners within the evaluation panel they are part of, and they also see themselves as experts. In our data, we could not identify a clear hierarchy between the different roles. However, our data suggest that students are often perceived as a partner, while less often as experts. A possible interpretation here is that temporality and experience matter: students may be initially viewed as a representative and as a partner when starting their work within the panel, and through the process of participating in multiple panels over time they might demonstrate expertise which is in turn recognized by their peers in the panels. An interesting feature coming out of the data is also that the students in the `Quality Assurance Student Experts Pool` regularly share knowledge among the members of the pool, and in that way contribute to continuously build the expertise of all members. Expertise is in this way not taken for granted or expected as a prerequisite for being a member, but rather nurtured, systematised and made available to newer and future members.

We want to thank all the students that bothered to respond to our small questionnaire. While our study is exploratory, we do think it provides new insights regarding student involvement and influence in a setting characterized by a high level of expertise and professionalism, and we hope that the findings can help future research to further unpack the dynamic nature of students’ roles in quality assurance panels.

Jens Jungblut is a Professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of Oslo. His main research interests include party politics, policy-making, and public governance in the knowledge policy domain (education & research), organizational change in higher education, agenda-setting research, and the role of (academic) expertise in policy advice.

Bjørn Stensaker is a Professor at the Department of Education at the University of Oslo. He has a special research interest in governance, leadership, and organizational change in higher education – including quality assurance. He has published widely on these topics in a range of journals and book series.


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Teaching students to use AI: from digital competence to a learning outcome

by Concepción González García and Nina Pallarés Cerdà

Debates about generative AI in higher education often start from the same assumption: students need a certain level of digital competence before they can use AI productively. Those who already know how to search, filter and evaluate online information are seen as the ones most likely to benefit from tools such as ChatGPT, while others risk being left further behind.

Recent studies reinforce this view. Students with stronger digital skills in areas like problem‑solving and digital ethics tend to use generative AI more frequently (Caner‑Yıldırım, 2025). In parallel, work using frameworks such as DigComp has mostly focused on measuring gaps in students’ digital skills – often showing that perceived “digital natives” are less uniformly proficient than we might think (Lucas et al, 2022). What we know much less about is the reverse relationship: can carefully designed uses of AI actually develop students’ digital competences – and for whom?

In a recent article, we addressed this question empirically by analysing the impact of a generative AI intervention on university students’ digital competences (García & Pallarés, 2026). Students’ skills were assessed using the European DigComp 2.2 framework (Vuorikari et al, 2022).

Moving beyond static measures of digital competence

Research on students’ digital competences in higher education has expanded rapidly over the past decade. Yet much of this work still treats digital competence as a stable attribute that students bring with them into university, rather than as a dynamic and educable capability that can be shaped through instructional design. The consequence is a field dominated by one-off assessments, surveys and diagnostic tools that map students’ existing skills but tell us little about how those skills develop.

This predominant focus on measurement rather than development has produced a conceptual blind spot: we know far more about how digital competences predict students’ use of emerging technologies than about how educational uses of these technologies might enhance those competences in the first place.

Recent studies reinforce this asymmetry. Students with higher levels of digital competence are more likely to engage with generative AI tools and to display positive attitudes towards their use (Moravec et al, 2024; Saklaki & Gardikiotis, 2024). In this ‘competence-first’ model, digital competence appears as a precondition for productive engagement with AI. Yet this framing obscures a crucial pedagogical question: might AI, when intentionally embedded in learning activities, actually support the growth of the very competences it is presumed to require?

A second limitation compounds this problem: the absence of a standardised framework for analysing and comparing the effects of AI-based interventions on digital competence development. Although DigComp is widely used for diagnostic purposes, few studies employ it systematically to evaluate learning gains or to map changes across specific competence areas. As a result, evidence from different interventions remains fragmented, making it difficult to identify which aspects of digital competence are most responsive to AI-mediated learning.

There is, nevertheless, emerging evidence that AI can do more than simply ‘consume’ digital competence. Studies by Dalgıç et al (2024) and Naamati-Schneider & Alt (2024) suggest that integrating tools such as ChatGPT into structured learning tasks can stimulate information search, analytical reasoning and critical evaluation—provided that students are guided to question and verify AI outputs rather than accept them uncritically. Yet these contributions remain exploratory. We still lack experimental or quasi-experimental evidence that links AI-based instructional designs to measurable improvements in specific DigComp areas, and we know little about whether such benefits accrue equally to all students or disproportionately to those who already possess stronger digital skills.

This gap matters. If digital competences are conceived as malleable rather than fixed, then AI is not merely a technology that demands certain skills but a pedagogical tool through which those skills can be cultivated. This reframing shifts the centre of the debate: away from asking whether students are ready for AI, and towards asking whether our teaching practices are ready to use AI in ways that promote competence development and reduce inequalities in learning.

Our study: teaching students to work with AI, not around it

We designed a randomised controlled trial with 169 undergraduate students enrolled in a Microeconomics course. Students were allocated by class group to either a treatment or a control condition. All students followed the same curriculum and completed the same online quizzes through the institutional virtual campus.

The crucial difference lay in how generative AI was integrated:

  • In the treatment condition, students received an initial workshop on using large language models strategically. They practised:
  • contextualising questions
  • breaking problems into steps
  • iteratively refining prompts
  • and checking their own solutions before turning to the AI.
  • Throughout the course, their online self-assessments included adaptive feedback: instead of simply marking answers as right or wrong, the system offered hints, step-by-step prompts and suggestions on how to use AI tools as a thinking partner.
  • In the control condition, students completed the same quizzes with standard right/wrong feedback, and no training or guidance on AI.

Importantly, the intervention did not encourage students to outsource solutions to AI. Rather, it framed AI as an interactive study partner to support self-explanation, comparison of strategies and self-regulation in problem solving.

We administered pre- and post-course questionnaires aligned with DigComp 2.2, focusing on five competences: information and data literacy, communication and collaboration, safety, and two aspects of problem solving (functional use of digital tools and metacognitive self-regulation). Using a difference-in-differences model with individual fixed effects, we estimated how the probability of reporting the highest level of each competence changed over time for the treatment group relative to the control group.

What changed when AI was taught and used in this way?

At the overall sample level, we found statistically significant improvements in three areas:

  • Information and data literacy – students in the AI-training condition were around 15 percentage points more likely to report the highest level of competence in identifying information needs and carrying out effective digital searches.
  • Problem solving – functional dimension – the probability of reporting the top level in using digital tools (including AI) to solve tasks increased by about 24 percentage points.
  • Problem solving – metacognitive dimension – a similar 24-point gain emerged for recognising what aspects of one’s digital competences need to be updated or improved.

In other words, the AI-integrated teaching design was associated not only with better use of digital tools, but also with stronger awareness of digital strengths and weaknesses – a key ingredient of autonomous learning. Communication and safety competences also showed positive but smaller and more uncertain effects. Here, the pattern becomes clearer when we look at who benefited most.

A compensatory effect: AI as a potential leveller, not just an amplifier

When we distinguished students by their initial level of digital competence, a pattern emerged. For those starting below the median, the intervention produced large and significant gains in all five competences, with improvements between 18 and 38 percentage points depending on the area. For students starting above the median, effects were smaller and, in some cases, non-significant.

This suggests a compensatory effect: students who began the course with weaker digital competences benefited the most from the AI-based teaching design. Rather than widening the digital gap, guided use of AI acted as a levelling mechanism, bringing lower-competence students closer to their more digitally confident peers.

Conceptually, this challenges an implicit assumption in much of the literature – namely, that generative AI will primarily enhance the learning of already advantaged students, because they are the ones with the skills and confidence to exploit it. Our findings show that, when AI is embedded within intentional pedagogy, explicit training and structured feedback, the opposite can happen: those who started with fewer resources can gain the most.

From ‘allow or ban’ to ‘how do we teach with AI?’

For higher education policy and practice, the implications are twofold.

First, we need to stop thinking of digital competence purely as a prerequisite for using AI. Under the right design conditions, AI can be a pedagogical resource to build those competences, especially in information literacy, problem solving and metacognitive self-regulation. That means integrating AI into curricula not as an add-on, but as part of how we teach students to plan, monitor and evaluate their learning.

Second, our results suggest that universities concerned with equity and digital inclusion should focus less on whether students have access to AI tools (many already do) and more on who receives support to learn how to use them well. Providing structured opportunities to practise prompting, to critique AI outputs and to reflect on one’s own digital skills may be particularly valuable for students who enter university with lower levels of digital confidence.

This does not resolve all the ethical and practical concerns around generative AI – far from it. But it shifts the conversation. Instead of treating AI as an external threat to academic integrity that must be tightly controlled, we can start to ask:

  • How can we design tasks where the added value lies in asking good questions, justifying decisions and evaluating evidence, rather than in producing a single ‘correct’ answer?
  • How can we support students to see AI not as a shortcut to avoid thinking, but as a tool to think better and know themselves better as learners?
  • Under what conditions does AI genuinely help to close digital competence gaps, and when might it risk opening new ones?

Answering these questions will require further longitudinal and multi-institutional research, including replication studies and objective performance measures alongside self-reports. Yet the evidence we present offers a cautiously optimistic message: teaching students how to use AI can be part of a strategy to strengthen digital competences and reduce inequalities in higher education, rather than merely another driver of stratification.

Concepción González García is Assistant Professor of Economics at the Faculty of Economics and Business, Catholic University of Murcia (UCAM), Spain, and holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Alicante. Her research interests include macroeconomics, particularly fiscal policy, and education.

Nina Pallarés is Assistant Professor of Economics and Academic Coordinator of the Master’s in Management of Sports Entities at the Faculty of Economics and Business, Catholic University of Murcia (UCAM), Spain. Her research focuses on applied econometrics, with particular emphasis on health, labour, education, and family economics.