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Monthly Archives: January 2020

Marcia Devlin


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Reimagining the lecture

By Marcia Devlin

The research around university learning and teaching shows that didactic teaching and passive reception do not result in deep, lasting or meaningful learning for most students. It is curious, then, that despite knowing this, we persist with lecturing at students in large groups in most universities. Worse, one of the most common lecturing practices is to ‘stand and deliver’ notes and/or PowerPoint slides.

It is important to acknowledge that lectures probably worked as a form of teaching for many academics – who were, as students, particularly intellectually able, intrinsically motivated and keenly focused and clear on their educational and vocational goals, that is, to continue to pursue knowledge throughout their career through research and teaching. But it is equally important to acknowledge that this approach is not effective for the majority of students, who go on to fill other roles and pursuits outside of academia. The challenge is that the lecture persists and is assumed to be the basis of effective teaching practice when it may or may not be, depending on the student and context.

If you doubt my argument, take the time to stand at the back of a typical lecture theatre (if many – or any – students have turned up at all past Week 5) and scan the students’ screens. You’ll see Facebook, Messenger and other social media channels getting a good workout, along with search engines and search terms that may or may not be related to the lecture topic. That kind of workout happens much less often in smaller classes where the teaching is interactive and the students are co-creating their learning through being engaged and active.

It should be said that not all lecturing is bad. A lecture hall can be led by a gifted, enthusiastic, well organised teacher with outstanding communication skills, who builds and maintains rapport, shows respect for students and their learning, engages all present in activities and critical thinking, enables collaborative approaches to problem solving within the class, provides stimulus for deep thinking during and after the lecture, makes concepts come alive through examples and the use of various media, provides ‘aha’ moments for those in the room, and so on.

The challenge is that the vast majority of lecturing is not like that, which is why students generally don’t bother coming and instead either watch it online (at double speed – ask a current student) or skip the class altogether.

At Victoria University (VU) in Melbourne, Australia, we are acutely aware of the massification of higher education, the worldwide widening participation movement and the increased student diversity that this brings. We know that students’ lives are increasingly characterised by multiple and competing priorities in a distracting and at times overwhelming digital context. We understand that students want personalised, flexible learning opportunities that enable them to manage their multiple work, family, social and other commitments outside of university, while getting the most out of the financial and time investments they have made in study.

With all of this in mind, VU has radically and successfully reimagined our approach to learning and teaching by drawing on the evidence base of what works. We have, therefore, done away with large, passive lectures in first and second year and will do the same in third year in 2020. We have replaced semester-long units of study with a structure where students focus on and study one unit at a time over an intensive four-week period, in small classes of no more than 30 students, and through active, engaged, collaborative and deep learning with their teacher and fellow students. This is supplemented by both high quality online materials and wrap around, just in time, study and learning support. We call this The VU Way.

The focus is on the individual learner and their success. The impact has been extraordinary, with pass rates, grade distributions and retention dramatically improving in the units where this model has been introduced in both first and second year. This approach helps us address both our promise to be the University of Opportunity and Success, and the increasing accountability inherent in measurements of teaching and learning and in performance-based funding being introduced in Australian higher education. We hope that this approach and its extraordinary successes in terms of learning will continue to help us be competitive in a global tertiary education marketplace where transnational and globalised approaches to education are growing.

As the Australian economy moves, albeit very slowly, from a reliance on mining and manufacturing, to a new era in which new knowledge and ideas are precious commodities, universities have a critical role to play. Internationally, the role of universities is even more important as innovation, the transformation of businesses, technology and access to knowledge and education take place amid prevailing inequalities, political tensions, environmental challenges and huge economic changes.

While we tend to revere research that creates new knowledge in universities – and there is good reason to do so – we are significantly less enthusiastic about sharing that new (and existing) knowledge through our other core business of teaching. We need to be cognisant of the tendency to chase the prestige of research at the cost of effort and resource being put into university teaching quality and into university teachers.

Sharing knowledge more effectively

Many universities will be hesitant to move away from traditional modes of learning and teaching. Institutional culture, an undervaluing of teaching compared to research and the effort and the volume and breadth of the resources required to make a major transformational change in learning and teaching all probably play a part in the sector’s reluctance to significantly change teaching practices.

Of course, there are many alternatives to didactic, PowerPoint-driven stand-and-deliver lecturing that are currently used across the sector to great effect by individual teachers and teaching teams, including:

  • Blended learning, incorporating the integration of modern and interactive eLearning;
  • Flipped classrooms;
  • Problem-based learning;
  • Work-integrated and work-based learning of a wide range of types;
  • Simulations and other opportunities to develop practical skills; and
  • Collaborative approaches to constructing and sharing knowledge, incorporating multidisciplinary contributions from: internal colleagues (‘peeragogy’); external MOOCs; industry educational offerings; and formal recognition of prior and concurrent student real-life learning outside the classroom.

Much of what I have listed in this incomplete list will be familiar to many. There is, of course, significant innovation and outstanding teaching practice going on in pockets of the sector by individuals and small and larger teams. However, VU is the only tertiary institution in Australia to completely throw out the old way – including lectures – and truly transform university teaching and learning.

The VU Way won’t suit all institutions, and for those who would benefit from using it, the change may simply be too hard (it is certainly very hard). What is important is that the approaches to teaching used in universities must align and keep pace with the disrupted and changing contexts in which university education takes place and with the changing needs and preferences of students.

The lecture has never been recognised as the best way for the modern university student cohorts to learn. As the global, digital and societal upheavals we are experiencing continue, and we begin to see more examples of ‘the student-free lecture’ where no-one but the well-meaning, well-prepared lecturer turns up, the lecture as the staple approach to university teaching should probably start to go the way of the once ubiquitous handwritten overhead transparency. Both have probably had their day.

Professor Marcia Devlin is Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor at Victoria University, Australia and a Fellow of SRHE.  An earlier version of this article appeared in Campus Review in September, 2019.

Ian Mc Nay


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A period of reflection

By Ian McNay

At the beginning of what some people mistakenly think of as the beginning of a new decade – who counts to ten by starting at zero and finishing at nine? – the pressure is to reflect on the past and project for the future. I am going to mainly eschew the former, but do have concerns for the next five or ten years. In other countries where a populist government has been elected, and moved to authoritarianism, such as Hungary, Turkey, or even the USA, the auguries are not good for higher education. I am not claiming that the new UK administration is as extreme as those examples, but the indications are there about its attitude to dissenting voices – the BBC and Channel 4 coverage of the election, elected parliamentarians defying the party whip, and even the supreme court, to whose rulings the government has twice had to conform, reluctantly, in the interests of constitutional democracy. The manifesto commitment to reviewing the organs of government and the judiciary has been seen by some as ominous.

Whatever the politics, there are other reasons to be concerned for HE. The eight years since fees were last tripled, to £9,000, have been fairly comfortable, financially, for most universities, if not their staff at the sharp end of operations. Marginal costs per student will often be low, especially in non-STEM subjects, so surpluses expand with every expansion of numbers. The Augar Report recommendations, if accepted, may lower fees with little guarantee that government will cover the loss of income. The cost of student loans, some of which now comes within current public spending, will increase dramatically with the demographic bulge in 18-year-olds, starting now, unless the cap on numbers in England is re-imposed, as seems likely, given views on ‘useless’ degrees, unnecessary experts, and pressure to prefer apprenticeships and FE recovery over investing in people who, on graduation, are less likely to vote Conservative than those without a university education. Graduates move to cities where there are jobs, leaving their home communities to an ageing population with different political predilections, made evident in December, and considerable resentment against what they see as graduate elitists in Westminster disregarding their needs and views. That may then convert to resentment against the universities that produce them and whose students affect the availability of property to rent and ‘studentify’ sections of a community. If the low rate of HE access of white working class males, and ‘over-representation’ of British BAME students is added to the mix, there is a base for Powellite stirring in a search for somebody to blame.

HE will not, then, be a high priority among competing, vote-winning, initiatives. Savings from not having to give EU students access to UK loans may not be re-invested. Even for research, where specific protective commitments have been made, the loss of EU funding and the greater difficulty in recruiting and partnering internationally because of visa restrictions, the prospects are not good. UK universities have already begun to drop down international league tables, and there is little reason to believe that that trend will stop. If income becomes tight, consider where funds might come from and the political risks of dependence on Chinese students and partnerships, or grants from oil rich regimes in the Middle East, or big pharma to a greater extent than now. Governors and senior managers will be faced with moral issues, testing the robustness of asserted values.

If universities are to overcome being seen as part of the problem, what has to change? Over the end of year break, I have been reading a collection of essays arising from an event 50 years after Chomsky published ‘The responsibility of intellectuals’. . That is the book’s title; it is edited by Nicholas Allott, Chris Knight, and Neil Smith, published by UCL Press. For us, as individuals who might be regarded as intellectuals, the three responsibilities set out by Chomsky remain: ‘to speak truth and expose lies; to provide historical context, and to lift the veil of ideology’ (Allott et al, 2019:7). The context has changed in 50 years: we ‘speak’, as do others, on social media, where regulation is lax; truth must be told to the powerless as well as the powerful, needing a different level of discourse; there is recognition that ‘the elite need to have an accurate idea of what is going on’ (p10) which means listening to others’ legitimate and valid truths derived from an experience, a background and axioms that differ from those of the people in power; and there is need for active engagement with that alternative reality, not just commentary from a distance, however sympathetic. This may lead to a better informed and value-oriented set of intellectuals.

At institutional level, that applies within universities, too. The gap between the governors, including the senior managers, and the governed is dysfunctional – can you name, say, three lay governors? When did you last speak with one? Some years ago, I reviewed the work of the Greenwich governing body, as recommended in the Dearing Report. It was clear that there was no communication with the governed, either up or down, no communication with ‘constituencies’, since governors could not identify their constituency. There was only an oral report on Academic Board meetings, by the VC, with all other information for the governors coming from the SMT, sometimes incomplete, at times misleading. SMT/staff communication has improved, but is still poor and unsystematic, avoiding anything that might highlight negatives.

As with many modern universities, there are two seats on Academic Board for professors elected by and from the professoriate; this year, as too often in the past, there were no nominations, nobody willing to stand, for a body that has no power beyond ‘advising’ the CEO and where the 1988/92 laws require there to be a majority of people with management responsibilities … on an academic board. My work with staff in many universities suggests that disengagement is widespread: academics have reverted to being what Hoyle labelled ‘restricted professionals’ – classroom based and classroom bound, by choice, since there is a fear of repercussions/reprisals if there is any expression of dissent. So compliance produces conformity, not the creative diversity essential to a healthy academic community. That may also develop at corporate level with the increasingly intrusive regulation by the Office for Students. Interviewing vice chancellors some years ago, even then there was a fear of speaking against ministerial policy, which might result in financial discrimination against their university. There might also be targeted supplementary ‘regulation’ (=control) from the Office for Students. Only in England, of course, which already has more surveillance from government and its agencies than other parts of the UK, as shown by Michael Shattock and Aniko Horvath in their 2019 book The Governance of British Higher Education. Possibly as a factor of size, but only partly, I suspect, transferring Chomsky’s concern over ideology to this context, there is also – Shattock and Horvath, again – less solidarity among the different mission groups, who act like ideological factions in a political party. Perhaps some reflections on common values (echoing urgings in one such party) might bring them together. I recommend reading chapter 5 of the Dearing Report as a basis for a period of reflection on values in an academic (and political) community.

I wish you a good new year, with hope that my concerns prove to be unfounded.

SRHE Fellow Ian McNay is emeritus professor at the University of Greenwich

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Happy New Year? If I were you, I wouldn’t start from here

By Rob Cuthbert

As the new year begins there is news of balloting for more industrial action by university staff. The continuing dispute between university staff and their employers is deep-rooted and deeply worrying. It may not be like previous disputes, and the employers may not be well-equipped to resolve it, for two reasons. First, because the roots of the dispute are in the marketisation of HE, the result of political initiatives which university employers cannot easily remedy. And second, because too many university employers have done too little to ameliorate the precarity and increased workload which quasi-markets encourage.

Staff at 60 universities across the UK announced in early November their intention to stage an eight-day strike at the end of November over pensions, pay and conditions. Universities UK and UCEA, the employers’ association, wrote an open letter to all staff on 19 November 2019 setting out their arguments, headed ‘letter to staff impacted by the UCU pensions and pay disputes’. The heading blaming UCU (begging the question: ‘who started it?’) may be a misjudgment, but is perhaps only what one side of the disputants would say. Jo Grady, UCU general secretary, wrote for The Guardian on 7 November 2019 that “University staff don’t want to strike for fair pensions and pay, but we’re being forced to”, a statement which the employers objected to. Both sides accuse the other of refusing to come to the table to negotiate. So far, so completely normal in any employment dispute. But then …

“Universities accused of using ‘strong-arm tactics’ to undermine strike action”, wrote Sally Weale and David Batty for The Guardian on 24 November 2019. Cheche Spencer, Students’ Union Women’s Officer at Liverpool University, on 22 November 2019 tweeted her disgust at the University’s message to students, which said it was ‘unlawful’ for students to join pickets. The message said the university would make no allowances for non-attendance when it comes to assessment, and warned international students that failure to attend might jeopardise their visa status. This went well beyond the more measured USS employers’ advice to students during the strike.

Sheffield Hallam University invited students to complete a form stating which of their classes had been disrupted and naming the member of staff concerned. After a student backlash the university removed the section asking for staff names. Students condemned the move as ‘a surveillance tool’ – perhaps a misunderstanding, since the identities of the strikers are hardly a secret, but symptomatic of a misguided managerial mindset. It is also reported that universities have warned staff not to speak to students about the dispute.

These things tend to happen in any dispute: excesses of local zeal going beyond a difficult-to-maintain national party line. But Liverpool and Sheffield Hallam have VCs whom some might regard as members of the sensible tendency, in Janet Beer and Chris Husbands. Beer, as a former chair of UUK, might  be expected to be impeccable in holding the line. Husbands is a leading figure in the hardly popular TEF, but has nevertheless seemed able to sustain reasoned debate and argue the case for improvement from within the TEF regime. If these are the zealots, what is going on? It seems as if the employers are deliberately taking a hard line.

The current dispute brings together two arguments, one about pensions and one about pay and conditions. But there is really only one grievance, and that is the growing alienation of staff, increasingly fixed-term, part-time and precarious, in an excessively marketised and too often managerialist higher education regime. As Liz Morrish observed in her blog after the Spring 2018 dispute on 8 June 2018: “The pensions issue seemed to be a conductor for a whole host of other grievances about marketization, financialization, audit culture, management by metrics and the distortions of league tables and concern with university ‘reputation’.” The UCEA/UUK letter said: “While the collective employers’ view is that a fair and realistic outcome has been reached on pay, they acknowledge however that UCU pursued its campaign on three other themes around workload, gender pay/equality and casual employment arrangements, and that these are important matters that their members, and indeed other colleagues, feel strongly about.”

The earlier dispute over USS benefits saw increased militancy and unionisation among many staff who had previously eschewed industrial action; the action succeeded in overturning the threat to move away from a defined-benefits scheme. (Meanwhile a change to TPS employers’ contributions raised the rate to 23.68% from September 2019, which was said to be enough to give UCU what they are asking for from USS employers.) Since the first dispute the UCU-nominated USS trustee Jane Hutton (Warwick) has been dismissed by the USS Board for “breaches of her duties as a director under company law and contract”. An independent investigation led to a report which USS relied on for her removal, but this has not been published in full despite Hutton’s request that it should be. Hutton, a professor of medical statistics and long-term critic of mistakes in USS calculations, had become a whistleblower writing to the Pensions Regulator. She had been denied data by USS executives and could not persuade the USS board to budge from what the Pensions Regulator called a mistake in its earlier controversial valuation. Clearly not everyone is convinced that USS does what it claims:

As the UCEA/UUK letter said, there has been some movement and learning by the employers since the earlier dispute. But not enough for UCU, and in particular nothing offering hope of enough change in the regime which exploits the goodwill of too many committed staff. Some universities (eg the University of Reading) are planning to withhold up to 100% of pay for ‘action short of a strike’ (ASOS), which involves working for contracted hours without the normal unpaid overtime – the irony of which seems to be lost on the universities concerned.

In normal times everyone might regard the hours stated in contracts as an acceptable fiction, knowing that professionally committed staff will do what is needed for a proper job, and professional leaders will not exploit their commitment. But these are not normal times. Marketisation in HE goes hand in hand with attempts at deprofessionalisation and growing workloads. In HE, just as in schools and in the health service, employers are discovering that contractualisation of what was once seen as professional obligation means that less of it gets done, and/or it ends up costing more. UCEA/UUK may complain that “The focus of the negotiations was almost entirely on the pay uplift”, but this is common in disputes, and market regimes drive that focus. What makes it much worse for UCEA is that in any pay dispute the employers’ position is fatally undermined. That UCEA/UUK letter might in different times have been more persuasive, but the credibility of vice-chancellors themselves has vanished as for too many years their own pay rises outstripped those of their staff, and universities relied increasingly on lower-paid, part-time, fixed term staff .

The employers are between a rock they did not create and a hard place which they have brought on themselves. The hard place is the deep concerns of many staff about their workload and working conditions, the precarity of their employment, their pay and pensions. (The results of a UCU survey on ‘Counting the costs of casualisation in higher education’ were published by UCU in June 2019.) The rock is the certainty that students collectively will begin to seek compensation from universities for disruption to their studies, even though many, perhaps most, students will at the same time sympathise with and support staff in their campaign. That compensation might turn out to be ruinously expensive and trigger a downward spiral for all concerned.

The UCEA/UUK letter no doubt aimed to win the hearts and minds of staff, perhaps encouraged by the failure of strike ballots in some institutions to cross the threshold needed for authorised action, but the signs are not good and the tactics seem misjudged. Universities need also to win the hearts and minds of students, but using threats about students’ assessment and international students’ visa status is an odd way to go about it. Some university employers in a hole are still digging: Liverpool UCU tweeted on 5 December 2019: “Here we go. @livuni have today asked staff to “recover” (‘make good’!) missed teaching asap. We will not “recover” work we’re not being paid for and our refusal is lawful under ASOS. With yet another intimidating email, the Uni has withdrawn its goodwill. We have withdrawn ours.” It may be that a few overzealous or overexposed institutions are undermining the employers’ argument, but in any dispute the employers’ side will be a coalition reflecting a wide range of opinion: now is the time for the moderates to assert themselves. Anna McKie for Times Higher Education reported on 25 November 2019 that: “At the University of Bristol … the vice-chancellor Hugh Brady … was seen on the picket line. It could be a further sign of university leaders starting to break ranks, after Anthony Forster, vice-chancellor of the University of Essex, said last week that his institution would be willing to pay more into pensions.”

After the long-running press furore over VCs’ pay the Office for Students has begun to survey and report on pay levels, although the Times Higher Education has gathered and published such data for many years. The OfS said on 19 February 2019: “where pay is out of kilter, or salary increases at the top outstrip pay awards to other staff, vice-chancellors should be prepared to answer tough questions from their staff, student bodies and the public. It is good to see signs of pay restraint at some universities, with some vice-chancellors refusing a salary increase. A number of governing bodies have reduced the basic pay of their vice-chancellor, though we acknowledge that it can be difficult to revisit contractual obligations while a vice-chancellor is in post. We expect to see further progress next year.”

Perhaps it is time for a different kind of leadership, and a different kind of leadership pay. The Committee for University Chairs (CUC) published The Higher Education Staff Remuneration Code in June 2018, full of worthy sentiment and careful drafting, but the only potential limit on pay was this: “Institutions must publish the multiple of the remuneration of the Head of Institution and the median earnings of the institution’s whole workforce annually. This should be accompanied by sufficient explanation and context to enable useful comparison.” Salaries are decided by Remuneration Committees, too often full of people whose yardsticks are drawn from the private sector. In the current dispute, as always, UUK has trotted out the line about needing to pay the best to attract the best talent in a global market, an argument that seems to apply in every case to the field marshals, but much less frequently to the poor bloody infantry. And the VC population is not noticeably more global than the staff themselves. We need a different kind of leadership from governors too. A national formula to guide VCs’ pay may be impracticable, even though it has been achieved for other groups of staff. But putting a staff member of the governing body on the Search/Remuneration Committee for VC appointments would be more straightforward. Such staff governors would naturally be obliged to maintain strict confidentiality, as with so many other issues for all governors. Advertise an explicit salary range for every vacancy of VCs and perhaps others in the senior management team, and apply the same annual uplift as the weighted mean of the uplift for all staff in the university. Allow those presently overpaid to continue to the end of their hopefully fixed terms, then reboot. Then institutional leaders might be able to restore some credibility as leaders in discussions about pay and conditions. The UCU has its own difficulties in seeking to swing its diverse set of members behind any effective collective action. In the present dispute the employers are making it easy for UCU, by appearing to ignore or deny the realities that their highly committed, intelligent, articulate and analytical staff confront every day.

Rob Cuthbert is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Management, University of the West of England and Joint Managing Partner, Practical Academics


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Yes, but what about the academic research?

by Steven Jones

Review of Influencing Higher Education Policy: A Professional Guide to Making an Impact, edited by Ant Bagshaw and Debbie McVitty (London: Routledge, 2020)

“The existence of Wonkhe won’t save us,” suggests Debbie McVitty (p13), “but it could be a good place to start.”

And so the tone is set for a new Routledge collection about HE ‘wonkery’, a relatively recent phenomenon that has doubtless changed the way in which the sector operates. Wonks are policy analysts, planners and strategists, and HE is blessed with more than its fair share. New policy development? Expect multiple ‘hot takes’ straight to your inbox. HE story in the mainstream media? Expect a range of insider perspectives that allow every possible angle to be explored. No more waiting for trade publications to drop through the letterbox, let alone for academic critiques to satisfy a journal’s peer review process. Thanks mostly to Wonkhe, we now have real-time analysis of everything that ever happens in HE.

In such a context, a book that explores the sector’s influence on policy is timely. Important questions need to be confronted. How can universities maintain integrity in an increasingly hostile regulatory and media environment? What does meaningful policy ‘impact’ look like? Which individuals or groups are most legitimately entitled to advocate on behalf of the sector? And, crucially, how can academic research evidence be communicated to those who most need to engage with it?

This collection, edited by Ant Bagshaw (Nous) and Debbie McVitty (Wonkhe) takes on some of these questions. It’s at its best when mapping legislative processes and regulatory frameworks, as William Hammonds and Chris Hale (both Universities UK) do, or comparing policy contexts, as Cathy Mitchell (Scottish Funding Council) does in relation to performance measurement. Anna Bradshaw (British Academy) and Megan Dunn (Greater London Authority) theorise the relationship between evidence and policy in valuable new ways, while Adam Wright (British Academy) and Rille Raaper (Durham University) perceptively characterise students’ framing within HE policy. Clare Randerson (University of Lincoln) enlightens readers on the OECD’s under-acknowledged role in HE policy-making, while Diane Beech’s (University of Warwick) chapter offers a useful guide to think-tanks, until spiralling into an advert for the Higher Education Policy Institute.

However, many questions remain unanswered. Partly, this is because some of the book’s contributors spend more time celebrating their own influence than critically evaluating the assumptions that underpin their proposed solutions. Indeed, many university staff will feel perplexed by McVitty’s opening assertion. Who is the ‘us’ that the existence of Wonkhe won’t save? What then makes Wonkhe a good place to start? And why does the ‘us’ need saving anyway?

This is not the sort of detail on which the book’s contributors tend to dwell. Rather, the style is choppy and pacey. In many chapters, soundbites are favoured over deeper reflection. Blunt recommendations (often bullet pointed and emboldened) are ubiquitous, generally urging ‘us’ to do things differently.

As usual in HE wonk discourses, academics hold a strange and curious place. Often we’re problematised. Sometimes we’re patronised. But mostly we’re just ignored. Rarely is it acknowledged that academic research might actually have anything useful to contribute. Universities are assumed to be desperately in need of some wonk savviness to overcome their policy naivety. Why would any institution turn to its own academic expertise when it can commission all-knowing external consultants? Scholarship isn’t part of the solution. If anything, it’s part of the problem.

Take Iain Mansfield’s (Policy Exchange) list of the “additional constraints” (p87) that he argues make policy influence tougher in HE than in other sectors. Among the subheadings presented is ‘left-leaning’. Here, academics and students are homogenised as anti-consumer, anti-rankings and generally difficult. There’s even a censorious mention of “cultural attitudes to issues such as class, race and gender” (p88). Another of Mansfield’s subheadings is ‘non-independence of research’. Here, the focus is academics’ perceived partiality. With so few scholarly sources cited, it is difficult to know on what evidence suspicion rests. However, the implication is clear: academics can’t be trusted to research themselves or their professional environment with objectivity. “Although any sector is subject to vested interests and unconscious bias,” Mansfield snipes, “only in HE are those same people writing the research” (p90).

Elsewhere in the collection, Josie Cluer (EYNews) and Sean Byrne (Ealing, Hammersmith and West London College) make the case that “only by understanding, predicting, and being ready for the Politics – with a capital P – will [wonks] be able to influence the policies that will support the sector to thrive.” Among the few examples offered is that of vice-chancellors’ pay. Here the implication is that the sector should have better managed recent negative media coverage that resulted in “a series of uncomfortable moments” (p22). While brand management matters greatly, and while the authors are right to suggest that some universities are suboptimal when it comes to shielding their reputation, the issue of senior pay is surely more nuanced than the single-paragraph analysis suggests. Being ‘ready for the Politics’ (with or without a capital P) requires universities to develop carefully thought-out internal policies, consistent with their claimed civic role and open to public scrutiny. The message implied by this book, in places, is that HE can continue its merry march toward the market, just so long as it remembers to buy in the right kind of spin.

Granted, the editors pre-empt some of these criticisms, emphasising that engagement with academic literature is not their priority, and that the collection essentially functions as a “professional guide” (p xvii). However, the analysis presented is often alarmingly thin. The first of Colette Fletcher’s (University of Winchester) five ‘lessons’ on how to influence policy – “have the confidence to be yourself” (p134) – captures something of the book’s tendency to drift into feelgood self-help rhetoric where close-up, critical analysis might be more appropriate.

Nonetheless, contributors are clearly satisfied that they have what it takes to save the sector. Everyone should get behind the wonks’ solutions, not least us pesky, prejudiced academics. Indeed, what Influencing Higher Education Policy arguably does best is highlight the growing challenge to the ways in which scholarly work is undertaken and disseminated. Wonkhe’s central role in bringing multiple perspectives to HE debates, usually in super-fast time, should be welcomed. But in such an environment, the book reminds us how easily academics and their research can be marginalised.

Without question, the UK HE sector needs to become better at influencing policy. Bagshaw is right to say we’ve relied on “benign amateurism” (p169) for too long. And without question, this collection includes several chapters’ worth of considered reflections and constructive recommendations. But elsewhere the book lapses into glib strategising where it could be reconnecting with universities’ core purpose. The best way to improve the sector’s standing is to ensure that it operates according to the highest possible ethical standards, and makes policy recommendations firmly grounded in empirical evidence.

One of the book’s contributors quotes Richard Branson to illustrates a policy point: “it’s amazing what doors can open if you reach out to people with a smile” (p139). But who knows, perhaps it’s even more amazing what doors can open if you reach out to people with rigorous academic research?

SRHE member Steven Jones is a Professor of Higher Education at the Manchester Institute of Education. His research focuses on equity issues around students’ access, experiences and outcomes. Steven is a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and he teaches on the University of Manchester’s PGCert in Higher Education. The views expressed here are his own.


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How are the Office for Students and the sector bodies getting along?

by GR Evans

An article in Times Higher Education on 5 December 2019 quoted an unpublished report by Universities UK and the Association of Heads of University Administration. The THE says the report is ‘highly critical’ of the way the Office for Students is working with providers. UUK (the Vice-Chancellors) and AHUA (the Registrars) are both UK-wide organisations so it would be helpful to know how the gathering of information for this report  on the England-only OfS  was done, the methodology designed and the conclusions drawn.

Universities UK and AHUA are composed respectively of the Vice-Chancellors and the Registrars of only a modest proportion of the 389 providers admitted to the OfS Register by early December 2019.  UUK lists a scattering of alternative providers amongst mainly traditional universities.  AHUA says it has 190 members though one must be a member to see who they are.   It is not clear whether other bodies with an interest were involved in the consultation, for example GuildHE with its array of English alternative providers among its 50 published membership. 

Most notable among the bodies apparently not involved in the consultation which produced this report is the Committee of University Chairs, another UK-wide body, but of supreme importance in that these Chairs represent the governing bodies of their member institutions.  The CUC publishes its membership list of 135 including ‘a small number of alternative providers’.

The CUC revised its Higher Education Code of Governance in 2014, providing guidelines strongly endorsed by HEFCE. The CUC is now consulting on a proposed review. Its consultation questions, seeking to address changes of expectation in the sector since 2014, are online. It notes some points emphasised by OfS:

The OfS has also given renewed emphasis to the importance of robust academic governance and the relationship between Board and Academic Board/Senate. There has also been increasing media attention to academic standards and the use of unconditional offers. CUC guidance in this area is set out in Illustrative Practice Note 3: Academic Governance .

The OfS has drawn up its own guidance.

More transparency and some rethinking of the best way to pool expectations must surely be in the interests of OfS and the ‘sector bodies’ if they are to learn to work together for the common good as the UUK/AHUA report apparently desires. There is of course always a case for allowing sensitive consultations to take place in sufficient privacy to permit free and frank discussion.  But there comes a time when the public interest in publication is strong enough to demand transparency. 

The THE says UUK explained that the report was: ‘not published formally, but we did share it with our members to support the development of their own processes and practices under the new approach’. Presumably AHUA’s members got a copy too? THE suggests the UUK/AHUA report has been ‘seen within Government’. Does this mean by the Secretary of State, the Minister for Higher Education, civil servants and advisors? If it had been published that might be less of a puzzle.

And did OfS itself get a copy? At the time of writing the OfS website does not seem to have anything to say about the UUK/AHUA report though perhaps future Board papers will fill that gap. The papers from the 26 September meeting mention a paper from the National Audit Office ‘setting out the key observations and recommendations arising from their audit of the OfS’s financial statements for 2018-19’. Those included a request for ‘more information on the impact of the OfS’s work as a regulator in the 2019-20 performance report’, on which the UUK/AHUA report will clearly be relevant. For the UUK/AHUA report appears to be concerned chiefly with the working relationship OfS is establishing with the providers for whose registration is it responsible.

From HEFCE buffer to OfS Regulator: the transition

For the most part HEFCE took seriously its role as a ‘Haldane’ buffer between universities and Government. Its normal response to the emergence of a serious problem in a provider’s conduct of its affairs was to seek to support the institution to mend matters. This is did informally and constructively, offering guidance to autonomous institutions. It favoured a ‘light touch’. Its operation of conditions of grant sanctions proved to be vanishingly rare. 

OfS has begun its working life with some fierce and threatening  statements and the repeated assertion that failing providers must simply be allowed to collapse. The setting for this heavier ‘touch’ will have to be adjusted to get it right,  and this UUK/AHUA Report could form a useful starting-point for consideration.

If so, there must be a case for publication of the UUK/AHUA report. But what of the performance of UUK, AHUA and other sector bodies in reviewing their own performance in response? Keeping their cards close to their chests would not be a good look at a time when the performance of UUK, AHUA and other sector bodies, statutory (like OfS) or in the form of ‘clubs’ (such as UUK itself) or semi-professional bodies (AHUA?) is also a proper concern. An objective assessment of the performance and very approach of the OfS surely demands a similar transparency about the way the various sector bodies are responding to it. 

Wales is engaged in a review of its own arrangements ahead of new legislation of its own. It retained its own Funding Council in the Higher Education (Wales) Act of 2015 but times and expectations have changed and it is now expected that Wales may move towards a new structure closer to that which allows more active Government control of policy and practice in England  through direction of the OfS as a Regulator through increasingly frequent letters of guidance from the Secretary of State.

It may be too much to hope that any Government will join with the sector bodies and OfS in a dispassionate review if that is for the best for higher education. Too much political investment went into the creation of OfS for such fearlessness to be likely. But at least let the documents in the discussion come out in the open for everyone to read.

SRHE member GR Evans is Emerita Professor of Medieval Theology and Intellectual History in the University of Cambridge, and CEO of the former Independent Dispute Resolution Advisory Service for HE (www.idras.ac.uk).