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The Society for Research into Higher Education

Monthly Archives: April 2024

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Higher education as a politicians’ playground

by Rob Cuthbert

Higher education has always been something of a playground for junior politicians; HE ministers usually serve only short terms, and many are practising for bigger jobs. (Liz Truss and Boris Johnson were both briefly shadow HE ministers.) The Coalition period was an exception, with David Willetts serving for four years and evidently deeply engaged and interested in HE. Since he left in 2014 the political game-playing has sadly degenerated, becoming ever more disconnected from the real issues facing the HE sector.

In 2024 fifty or more universities have declared or are likely to declare redundancies, as their funding position becomes ever more perilous. Student fees have been frozen at £9250 for a decade, and their real value has declined to the extent that they are now worth no more than the £6000 which applied in 2012 before the fee went to £9000. According to Mark Corver of DataHE: “… universities have lost, in real terms, around a third of their income since 2012. Most of that has happened recently. Universities have lost the equivalent of almost £3 billion from their annual UG teaching funding in just the past 18 months.”

The long-running dispute in half the sector over changes to the Universities Superannuation Scheme might have recently been resolved, but there are now major concerns about the cost of the Teachers’ Pension Scheme in the other half. UUK chief executive Vivienne Stern and UCEA chief executive Raj Jethwa wrote to Minister Robert Halfon on 18 March 2024 asking for more flexibility in whether post-92 universities must offer TPS membership to their staff, noting that 27% of post-92s had declared redundancies in 2022-2023 and 46% had done so since August 2023. TPS contributions rose sharply on 1 April 2024 as Tom Williams reported for Times Higher Education on 18 March 2024.

Pay disputes have led to repeated strikes and action short of strikes, especially marking and assessment boycotts, affecting the whole sector. This, coupled with Covid, has meant increased workloads for academic and professional staff in major and repeated reconstruction of teaching programmes, with many universities relying increasingly on a precariat of staff on short-term contracts. Negotiations between employers and staff are inevitably complicated by the wide range of institutional fortunes, which makes affordable resolution for everyone difficult to achieve. Covid and employment disputes have brought massive disruption for students, with class actions for compensation continuing as an additional looming threat to HE budgets. Problems with student mental health have reached epidemic proportions, affected not only by the pandemic and loan-driven student debt but also the spiralling cost of university and private student accommodation, which is in short supply in many places.

In 2024 we do expect a general election, but we don’t expect the massive problems for UK HE to be an election issue. Voters mostly care much more about cost of living, the energy crisis, climate change, wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the NHS … and even within education, universities rank well behind schools and nursery places as topics for political debate. As Tom Williams reported for Times Higher Education on 16 May 2023, HE Minister Robert Halfon declared that “… the sector was in a “fairly strong” position – compared with much of the economy given the current financial difficulties – and implied management may be to blame at universities faring badly, rather than his government’s funding system.” Halfon resigned unexpectedly on 26 March 2024, so after 14 years of Coalition and  Conservative government we have our ninth new HE Minister, Luke Hall. It is the eleventh such appointment, since both Jo Johnson and Chris Skidmore served twice, and only four of the 11 appointments lasted for more than a year. There is a striking contrast with appointments as Schools Minister, the role in which Nick Gibb has served for most of the last 14 years, despite being sacked and reappointed by successive prime ministers.

For most of the Coalition period the Universities Minister was David (now Lord) Willetts, who was perhaps the main architect of the Higher Education and Research Act (HERA) 2017, eventually steered into law by Jo (now Lord) Johnson. HERA legislated for the HE ‘market’ and created a new regulator, the Office for Students (OfS). The policy sought to drive up quality through competition, with an influx of new ‘alternative’ providers; the Act made extensive provision for failing HE institutions to go out of business. Willetts’ special adviser, Nick Hillman, later became an effective Director of HEPI, but his HEPI blog of 14 February 2024 asked ‘Whatever happened to all those alternative providers?’,  while still defending the policy to which he contributed. A more plausible view is that the HERA version of the ‘market’ in HE had been tried and comprehensively failed. Against the success of a few new providers like the Dyson Institute there have been many more seeking to provide mostly lower-level courses, mostly in business, mostly in London. Operating an HE institution is a complex, difficult and long-term activity, and after relaxing requirements for entry to the higher education ‘market’, government was forced to crack down on the more egregious excesses of some of the new alternative providers. ‘Driving up quality through competition’ has been shown up as a fantasy; what always worked much better was relying on the intrinsic motivation of people in HE to do the best for their students, in what has always been vigorous competition with other institutions. Self-regulation is of course inadequate: HE institutions need external quality assurance and control, but the OfS chose to do away with the QAA, the designated quality body, by setting conditions which jeopardised QAA’s international credibility and forcing QAA to step down. Instead the OfS has set up its own quality arrangements in an apparently long-term plan which goes against all the expectations when HERA was enacted. 

That was the good news. A new government was entitled to try a new policy for HE, as it did. It didn’t work, so what happened next? Not repeal, of course, but neither was it, as we might have hoped, adaptation of the new policy to make it work better. In the chaos and increasingly rapid turnover of the post-Brexit administrations, politicians in the DfE and elsewhere became obsessed with culture wars. They brought forward a major new piece of legislation which had nothing to do with HE finance, staffing issues, student problems, or even the supposed focus of ‘levelling up’. Obsessed by immigration numbers, government even doubled down on HE’s financial problems with visa restrictions seriously affecting international student recruitment, especially for postgraduate recruitment which for many years had underpinned the viability of STEM disciplines. It was convenient for government that the OfS continued to give reassurances about HE finance, but it was hardly surprising, since government had installed a Conservative peer as the OfS chair.

The new legislation was the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023, education’s contribution to armaments in the culture wars. There were, of course, problems in some, perhaps even many, HE institutions over what might and might not be said in different contexts. A HEPI blog by Josh Freeman on 13 October 2022 argued that there was a problem with self-censorship and ‘quiet’ no-platforming. In the US some prominent university presidents lost their jobs arguing with politicians about the need to protect diversity in HE debate. The war on woke has not perhaps reached that pitch in the UK yet. But the Act required OfS to appoint a free speech ‘tsar’, as it did, and OfS issued proposals on 14 December 2023 on how the free speech regime will operate, launching a consultation on 26 March 2024. The results are unconvincing to those on the ground in the institutions. Jim Dickinson blogged for Wonkhe on 6 March 2024 about the shambles which government has created with its free speech legislation: “We are literally less than six months away from OfS opening a complaints scheme under which one group of students will say another’s actions amount to antisemitism, while the other will say they are threatening their right to express legally protected anti-Zionist beliefs – both saying their free speech is threatened as a result, both arguing they are being harassed, and both reasonable in asserting that they were assured their free speech and protection from harassment was assured.” The Act may even rival the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 for its unworkability in practice.

The principal cheerleader for the new Act was Education Minister (and for two chaotic days in the fall of Boris Johnson, Secretary of State for Education) Michele Donelan, who continued to champion it even as she moved to become Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology in the Sunak administration. Donelan relied on a press release from right wing think tank Policy Exchange to pick a fight with UKRI about the members of its Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Committee. The release was written by Donelan’s former special adviser Iain Mansfield. UKRI suspended its Committee and their membership pending an inquiry, which exonerated the members, one of whom sued Donelan for libel and won £15000 damages, as Faye Brown reported for Sky News on 12 March 2024. The damages were paid by the government, prompting widespread disbelief; Leader of the House Penny Mordaunt even suggested that we should cut Donelan some slack because she had not taken the £16000 redundancy payment to which she was entitled  from her two days as Secretary of State for Education. It would all be deeply embarrassing, if government ministers were still capable of feeling shame.

The playground urgently needs more grown-ups, to do higher education policy as if higher education mattered.

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


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Graduate outcomes: Beyond numbers, towards quality?

by Tej Nathwani and Ghislaine Dell

with a foreword and afterword by SRHE Network Convenors Tracy Scurry and Daria Luchinskaya

Foreword

As many of us working with graduate employment statistics will know, it’s difficult to find up-to-date large-scale data of graduates’ experiences of work. In the SRHE event Exploring graduate outcomes: Do we need to look beyond earnings and occupation?, Tej Nathwani (HESA) introduced a new graduate outcomes measure capturing subjective aspects of job quality, while Ghislaine Dell (Head of Careers at Bath University and member of the AGCAS Research and Knowledge Committee) reflected on the implications from a practitioner perspective. In this follow-up blog, Tej and Ghislaine comment on the issues in capturing subjective graduate outcomes and outline directions for future research. HESA is keen to get your feedback on its measures: see the end of the blog for how to get in touch.

Capturing job quality in HESA’s Graduate Outcomes survey

Tej Nathwani

Since the financial crisis, there has been a fundamental rethink about the way we measure economic and societal progress, with greater attention now given to subjective forms of data. At the individual or micro level, this has resulted in growing international interest in the quality of work – essentially those parts of our employment that correlate with our wellbeing. From a UK perspective, Scotland led the way in bringing this matter to the forefront with the formation of the Fair Work Convention. Not long after, we saw the Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices published, which recommended the dissemination of regular data on eighteen job quality indicators covering seven broad dimensions.

Graduate outcomes in the UK have historically been assessed solely on the basis of earnings and whether individuals find themselves working in professional or managerial occupations. Yet, research examining the aspirations of higher education students indicates that they want a career that uses their skills, aligns with their ambitions and that can enable them to make impact. Under the Fair Work Convention framework, these aspects embody fulfilling employment. Furthermore, funding and regulatory bodies also want to see all graduates find such work.

With no data currently available on this matter, this clearly represents an information gap in graduate labour market statistics. As an organisation that adheres to the Code of Practice for Statistics, HESA have therefore started to conduct research to fill this space. This has involved using three questions in the Graduate Outcomes questionnaire relating to these features of employment to form a single composite measure that captures fulfilment (or the ‘job design and nature of work’ as it is also commonly referred to). Our ambition is to introduce this into our official statistics/open data in forthcoming years.

Indeed, with the importance of job quality set to grow, one pathway we are currently exploring for the future development of the Graduate Outcomes survey is the addition of new questions on other elements of decent work, as identified by the Measuring Job Quality Working Group.    

Ghislaine Dell

Students make career decisions for very personal and subjective reasons. Recent research from Cibyl shows us that the most frequently looked for qualities in students’ career choices are interesting work, career progression, good work-life balance, and training & development. This matches very well to the proposed new job quality indicator. The Government’s continued emphasis on degrees offering good return on investment is at odds with what the workforce of the future are seeking. Notably, Tej’s analysis showed that, after about £25,000, higher salary does not increase graduates’ reported wellbeing, but more fulfilling work, as captured by the new measures, does. From a governmental and individual perspective, then, knowing what jobs are ‘good jobs’ is important for a thriving society. An indicator which focuses on fulfilment could enable students to make a more informed choice between possible career directions.

However, there is a potential issue around the way in which we can capture this. For example, if we take ‘I am utilising what I learnt in my studies in my work’. Many graduate jobs are discipline-agnostic, and so a chemist, for example, would not be using ‘what they learnt’ in terms of Chemistry, in a financial services job. HESA’s cognitive testing of its survey questions provides a starting point for understanding how respondents are likely to approach these statements. However, further development of the phrasing of these questions is arguably necessary to ensure that the explanation of ‘skills mismatch’ isn’t simply attributable to graduates working in a field different to the one they studied.

 A key challenge will be to work on improving response rates so that each provider can report on this new measure with confidence. Currently, the subjective “graduate voice” questions in Graduate Outcomes are not compulsory, they rarely form part of the official narrative and minimal time is devoted to analysing and understanding the responses. If we are truly to maximise the potential of this measure, these issues need to be addressed.

The new measure both fills an information gap and provides a lever for inclusion of job quality into official statistics augmenting its importance for governments and providers.

Afterword

The lively discussion that followed this SRHE event, organised by the Employability, Enterprise and Work-based Learning Network, reflects the genuine interest and excitement in being able to gather job quality statistics at scale for the first time. HESA is plugging the long-standing information gap, enabling new research directions to take off in practitioner, academic and policy communities and providing better careers information, advice and guidance to students and graduates. There is still work to be done to improve the measures and scope to expand the coverage of job quality indicators in particular extending understanding of how students interpret and understand these questions. Your feedback, whether based on experience or research, can help in the future development of this measure.

Feedback on the types of statistics users would like to see incorporated into HESA open data based on the new measure are most welcome, as are views on potential amendments/additions to the Graduate Outcomes survey. Please send your thoughts to official.statistics@hesa.ac.uk.

For more information about the Employability, Enterprise and Work-based Learning Network and future events please see: Employability, Enterprise and Work-based Learning | SRHE

For more information about AGCAS and the Research and Knowledge Committee please see: Research and Knowledge from AGCAS

Contributors

Tej Nathwani is a Principal Researcher (Economist) at HESA, which is now part of Jisc.

Ghislaine Dell is Head of Careers, University of Bath and member of AGCAS’ Research and Knowledge Committee.

SRHE Network Convenors: Dr Daria Luchinskaya is a Lecturer at the University of Strathclyde Business School and Professor Tracy Scurry is a Professor of Work and Employment at Newcastle University Business School.


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The importance of academic mental health

by Roz Collings

It was University Mental Health day on Thursday 14th March 2024. This is a national UK project organised by Student Minds and University Mental Health Advisory Network, aiming to start a conversation to ensure university wide mental health is a priority.  I continue to be an advocate for whole institution wellbeing, enhancing focus on academics in policies and practice, as well as increasing impactful research regarding academic mental health so it was pleasing to see university staff being given a spotlight..

The mental health of students has long been a topic of interest with decades of primary research, systematic reviews and meta-analyses, alongside cross cultural comparisons, highlighting the poor mental health of University Students in comparison to the general public (Brown, 2018; Campbell et al, 2022; Macaskill, 2013). The COVID pandemic created a further influx of concentrated efforts in finding supportive solutions for the student mental health crisis (Chen and Lucock, 2022; Copeland et al, 2021). It is also well evidenced that poor mental health of students is strongly related to poor academic outcomes such as achievement and retention (Pascoe et al, 2019; Thomas et al, 2021).

But what do we know about academic mental health? Historically academic staff mental health has received minimal attention. Although investment in the area is growing, a recent systematic review highlighted the stressful academic environment and higher levels of burnout within the industry compared to other jobs (Urbina-Garcia, 2020). Increased workloads, pressures of research funding, lack of work-life balance and lack of management support are universal trends globally (Kinman and Jones, 2008) leading to many university academics leaving the profession (Heffernan et al, 2019; Ligibel et al, 2023). Dr Zoe Ayres created a poster of common stressors for academics for part of the mental health series (see Figure 1) which highlights the multiple facets and identities an academic contends with within their working life. Academia has changed substantially even within the 23 years I have been working. Centralisation and reduction of academic administrative staff moves much of the work onto the academics. With the increased focus on student mental health has come an increased reliance on academics for pastoral support. In addition performance indicators such as retention, satisfaction etc have become important outcome measures for all staff appraisals, no matter the level.

Figure 1

UK university Equity/ Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) initiatives developed from the Athena SWAN (Scientific Women’s Academic Network) Charter through Advance HE and focused initially on gender equality. Since then Advance HE has also developed the “race charter”. However, by 2021 there remained little engagement in disability equality and the intersectionality of disabled people with other EDI groups (Wolbring and Lillywhite, 2021). The University of Wolverhampton has a disability charter and is showing meaningful positive shifts towards inclusivity when it considers all the protected characteristics. However, I sit on university and national disability boards and the conversations around mental health (dis) abilities seem forced and an afterthought. My own recent research has shown high levels of stigma associated with disclosing of mental ill health and a fear of how that information would be used. Staff were concerned that they would not be taken seriously in their roles, that they would be unable to progress in their career and that their colleagues would see them as a “weak link” (Collings, 2023). I personally didn’t disclose mental ill health to my line managers until I was 15 years into my academic career and there remain concerns of how it may impact my progression.

It is time for some significant changes to happen in our profession. All of my team are deeply passionate about supporting our students with understanding and a great deal of knowledge. We should show the same level of compassion towards ourselves and our colleagues.  The culture of the university needs to change rapidly to destigmatise mental ill health disclosure and provide meaningful interventions and support. But “it seems likely that the peculiar nature of higher education actively encourages particular kinds of bullying” (Tight, 2023, p123) and research continues to highlight that bullying in UK and international HE remains rife (Tight, 2023).

What can universities do?

Universities need a fundamental shift to consider wellbeing as an institutional whole. Academic staff wellbeing is just as important as, if not more important than, student mental health. As Richard Branson once wrote “if you look after your staff they’ll look after your customers. It’s that simple”. It is that simple, and this mentality should be applied to staff and students. Academic staff who are well and focused will offer the best support, guidance and teaching to your students. Therefore, I argue that whole university mental health, with academic and professional services included, should be to the fore in university policies and higher management discussions. Higher management should be role modelling work-life balance and self-care, so it can trickle down and change the message from presenteeism and overworking to maintaining a correct sustainable balance of work and life. Developing disability equality charters enables institutions to consider their own policies in relation to institutional culture, dignity at work, grievance policies, absence policies (to incorporate disability sickness), reasonable adjustments and workload modelling. These should not be reactive but more proactive in nature, with meaningful interventions that maintain the interconnection between staff and students (Brewster et al, 2022).

Roz Collings is Associate Professor and Head of Psychology in the School of Psychology in the University of Wolverhampton’s Faculty of Education, Health and Wellbeing. She is the editor of the Research into Higher Education Abstracts journal. Roz is passionate about evidence based practice in Higher Education, raising the quality and impact of Higher Education Research and coaching/ mentoring new researchers in research design and statistical analysis. Her current research is focusing on Academic Wellbeing and she was part of the team writing the Disability Equality Act for the University of Wolverhampton with a role focusing on Mental Health. 

This is an adapted version of a blog first published on the University of Wolverhampton website and is reproduced here with permission.

Reference

Collings, R (2023) Academic Mental Health in Higher Education European Congress of Psychology Brighton, July 2023