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The Society for Research into Higher Education

Monthly Archives: September 2017

Vicky Gunn


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Notes from North of the Tweed: Do we need a new way of designing Scottish higher education policy?

By Vicky Gunn

The Brexit vote seems to have somewhat taken the wind out of the sails of higher education policy in Scotland. The Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF2) crossed the border in a small foray. Five institutions (St Andrews, Dundee, Abertay, Heriot Watt and RGU)[i] popped themselves into the Whitehall metrics melee and the SFC sent an encyclical reminding the sector that the Quality Enhancement Framework (QEF) was still the Scottish Government’s preferred (and legally required) approach to quality. Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO)[ii] emerged as the new dataset to appraise and the Vice Principals Learning & Teaching had to turn their minds to what it means for Scottish sector to have one, three, and five year details of income, tax, pensions, and type of work, at a disciplinary level. Thus, after a little lion rampant, Universities Scotland TEF working group settled back into business as usual, facing the Department of Education with the now normalised questions regarding devolved metrics’ divergences. We have yet to discuss the grade inflation metric[iii], but planners everywhere will be running analytics to see what increases in the top levels of degrees Scotland has seen since 2010.

The same sense of ‘new normal’ becalm cannot be said of Scotland’s approach to its cultural policy, however, and it is to this that I briefly reach. The current round of cultural policy creation Continue reading →

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The Future of Global HE: more (than) research is needed

By Rob Cuthbert

A high-level Symposium on the Future of Global HE in London on 7 September offered much food for thought, but only those with elitist tastes would have come away completely satisfied. The Symposium assembled a stellar cast, but the narrow HE perspective of most contributors made for a well-meaning dialogue contained within and between some of the world’s self-styled elite universities, which account for only a small proportion of the rapidly expanding global student population.

There were many fine words about the need to respect teaching as well as research, the need to ensure service to society at all levels from local to global, to promote universities’ key role in protecting freedom of expression and the integrity of ideas, and to rethink higher education’s core business as digital technologies continue to transform possibilities for learning. So far, so good. Continue reading →


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Student voice in UK Higher Education politics: NSS, TEF and boycotts

by Camille Kandiko-Howson

Higher education policy is increasingly becoming metrics-oriented, with rafts of self-declared ‘wonks’ joining researchers, academics, policy officers and journalists. Although national quantitative datasets have been  running for over a decade, relatively little research has come from them, particularly compared with the thousands of publications using the US National Survey of Student Engagement. However, as metrics have risen in importance, the national datasets are gaining prominence in policy and research. The UK National Student Survey (NSS) dominates because of its use in national league tables, and from 2016, its inclusion in the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). On the plus side, many institutions have used the data for improving the student experience, but it is also decried for driving a consumer-approach to higher education.

Boycotts Continue reading →