This seminar demonstrated that the neo-liberal
policy and metrics of TEF (Teaching Excellence Framework) were not consonant
with excellent teaching as usually understood.
Michael Tomlinson’s presentation was packed
with analyses of the underlying policies of TEF. Tanya Lubicz-Nawrocka considered
the theme of students’ perceptions of
excellent teaching. Her research demonstrated clearly that students’ views of
excellent teaching were very different from those of TEF. Stephen Jones
provided a vibrant analysis of public discourses. He pointed to the pre-TEF
attacks on universities and staff by major conservative politicians and their
supporters. These were to convince students and their parents that Government
action was needed. TEF was born and with it the advent of US-style
neo-liberalism and its consequences. His final slide suggested ways of
combating TEF including promoting the broad purposes of HE teaching. Sal Jarvis
succinctly summarised the seminar and took up the theme of purposes. Personal
development and civic good were important purposes but were omitted from the
TEF framework and metrics.
Like all good seminars, this seminar prompted
memories, thoughts and questions during and after the seminar. A few of mine
are listed below. Others may wish to add to them.
None of the research evidence supports the
policies and metrics of TEF (eg
Gibbs, 2018). The indictment of TEF by the Royal Statistics Society is still
relevant (RSS, 2018). The chairman of the TEF panel is reported to have said
“TEF was not supposed to be a
“direct measure of teaching” but rather “a measure based on some [my italics] of the outcomes of
teaching” On the continuum of neo-liberalism and collegiality, TEF is very
close to the pole of neo-liberalism whereas student perspectives are nearer the
pole of collegiality which embraces collaboration between staff and between
staff and students. Collaboration will advance excellence in teaching: TEF will
not. Collegiality has been shown to increase morale and reinforce academic
values in staff and students (Bolden et
al, 2012). Analyses of the underlying values of a metric are important because
values shape policy, strategies and metrics. ‘Big data’ analysts need to
consider ways of incorporating qualitative data. With regard to TEF policy and
its metrics, the cautionary note attributed to Einstein is apposite: “Not everything that counts can be counted
and not everything that is counted counts.”
SRHE member George Brown was Head of an Education Department in a College of Education and Senior Lecturer in Social Psychology of Education in the University of Ulster before becoming Professor of Higher Education at the University of Nottingham. His 250 articles, reports and texts are mostly in Higher and Medical Education, with other work in primary and secondary education. He was senior author of Effective Teaching in Higher Education and Assessing Student Learning in Higher Education and co-founder of the British Education Research Journal, to which he was an early contributor and reviewer. He was the National Co-ordinator of Academic Staff Development for the Committee of Vice Chancellors and Principals (now Universities UK) and has served on SRHE Council.
In
a recent publication, Mariana Mazzucato1. pushes the reader to
engage with a key dilemma related to modern day capitalist economics. ‘Value
extraction’ often occurs after a government has valued work upfront through
state investment and accountability regimes. The original investment was a
result of the collective possibilities afforded by a mature taxation system and
an understanding that accountability can drive positive social and economic outcomes
(as well as perverse ones). The value that is extracted is then distributed to
those already with both financial and social capital rather than redistributed
back into the systems which produced the initial work via support from the
state in the first place. This means that the social contract between the State
and its workers (at all levels) effectively has the State pump prime activity,
only to watch the fruits of these labours be inequitably shared.
I find this to be
a useful, powerful and troubling argument when considering the current
relationship between State funded activity and the governance of UK HE. As a
recipient of multiple grants from bodies such as the Higher Education Academy
(now AdvanceHE) and the Quality Assurance Agency (now a co-regulatory body in a
landscape dominated by the Office for Students), I have observed a similar
pattern of activity. What this means is that after a period of state funding
(ie taxpayers’ money), these agencies are forced through a change in funding
models to assess the value of their pre-existing assets. The change in funding
models is normally a result of a political shift in how they are valued by the various
governments that established and maintained them. The pre-existing assets are research
and policy outputs and activities undertaken in good faith for the purposes of
open source communication to ensure the widest possible dissemination and
discussion, with an attendant build up in expertise. After valuing these
assets, necessary rebranding may obscure the value of this state-funded work
behind impenetrable websites in which multiple prior outputs (tangible assets)
are pulled into one pdf. Simultaneously,
the agencies offer intangible assets based on relationships and expertise
networks back to membership subscribers through gateways – paywalls. This looks
like the unregulated conversion of a value network established through the
collaboration of state and higher education into a revenue generating system, restricting
access to those able to pay.2. If so, it represents a form of value
extraction which is limited in how and where it redistributes what was once a
part of the common weal.
Scottish HE has
attempted to avoid this aspect of changes in the regulatory framework in two
ways:
Firstly, by maintaining its Quality
Enhancement Framework (QEF) in a recognisable form.3. Thus: the
state continues to oversee the funding of domiciled Scottish student places;
the Scottish Funding Council remains an arms-length funding and policy agency
which commissions the relevant quality assurance agency; Universities Scotland
continues as a lobbying ‘influencer’ that mediates the worst excesses of
external interventions; and the pesky Office for Students is held back at the
border, whilst we all trundle away trying to second guess what role metrics
will play in the quality assurance of an enhancement-led sector over the next
five to ten years. Strategic cooperation and value co-creation remain core
principles. And all of this with Brexit uncertainty.
Secondly, by refocusing the discussion
around higher educational enhancement in the light of a skills agenda
predicated not on unfettered economic growth, but on inclusive and sustainable
economic growth.4.
Two recent outputs from this context
demonstrate the value of this approach: The Creative Disciplines Collaborative
Cluster’s Toolkit for Measuring Impact
and the Intangibles Collaborative Cluster’s recent publication.5.
Both of these projects were valued for the opportunity they provided of
collaborative problem solving across Scottish HEIs. Their outputs recognise it is
now more important than ever to demonstrate the impact of what we do. Technological
advances in rapid, annualised data generation is driving demands to assess
the value of our higher education. The
prospect of this demand requiring disciplinary engagement means academics
leading their subjects (not just Heads of Quality, DVCs Student Experience, VPs
Learning and Teaching) need to be more aware of frameworks of accountability
than before. Underneath the production of these outputs has remained a belief
in the value of cooperation over the values of competition.
However, none of this
means that those of us trying to maintain a narrative of higher education as the
widest possible state good can rest on our laurels. If we are to seize this
particular moment there are some crucial tensions to problematise and, where
appropriate, resolve. We need formal discussion around the following:
What is to be valued through State influence in Scottish HE? How does the ‘what
is to be valued’ question relate to the values
and value of this education socially,
culturally and economically?
How are these values and value to be valued through the accountability
framework for higher education in Scotland?
What will the disruptions created by a
new regulatory framework in England (based on a particular understanding of
value and values) mean for how Scottish institutions continue to engage with
the QEF, when they will probably also have to respond to a framework that would
like to see itself as UK-wide?
How can we protect years of
enhancement work from asset stripping and value extraction? How can we continue
with an enhancement framework with social, cultural, and economic benefits for
Scotland and its wider relationship with the world, at the same time as
supporting reinvestment into the enhancement of Scotland’s higher education?
There is a push to revalue ‘success’ as
simple economic outcomes, away from inter-relational outcomes that capture
intangible but nonetheless critical aspects of that education – social
coherence, wellbeing, cultural confidence and vitality, collective expertise,
innovation, responsible prosperity. That path of value extraction may result in
more not less inequality: how can we mitigate it?
How can all of this be done without
merely retreating to the local? Bruno Latour has noted how locality is a
cultural player in the current political inability to engage effectively with
the planetary issue of the day: climate crisis.6. He notes the sense
of security in the local’s boundaries and a perception across Europe that we
somehow abandoned the local in the push to be global. The local is important.
Yet, he clarifies, climate regime change means withdrawal into the local in terms
of value and values – without interaction across political boundaries at a
global level – is tantamount to wilful recklessness. How we can enable higher
education to secure the local and the global simultaneously is surely the big
question with which we are grappling. How
can Scotland’s HE leaders engage to ensure the value and values we embody
through our accountability regime do not get mired in local growth agendas
unable to measure the impact of that growth within a global ecology?
Sitting within a
creative arts small specialist institution, these questions seem both
overwhelmingly large (how can a minnow lead such a conversation, surely only a
BIG university can do this?) and absolutely essential. In the creative arts our
students are, in their own frames of reference, already challenging us on the
questions of value, values, environmental sustainability and inequality through
their artistry, designerly ethics, and architectural wisdoms. I am, however,
yet to hear such a recognisable conversation occurring coherently across the
various players (political, policy, institutional) in the wider sector, except
in activities related to the localities of cultural policy, the creative
economy, and HEI community engagement.7.
Perhaps it is
time for sector leaders, social, cultural, and economic policy-makers, and
student representatives to work together to identify the parameters of these
questions and how we can move forward to resolve them responsibly.
SRHE member Professor Vicky Gunn is Head of Learning and Teaching at
Glasgow School of Art.
Notes
Mazzucato, M (2018) The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy, Penguin, p xv
Allee, V (2008) ‘Value network analysis and value conversion of tangible and intangible assets’, Journal of Intellectual Capital, 9 (1): 5-25.
Latour, B (2018) Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime Polity Press, p 26
Gilmore, A and Comunian, R (2016) ‘Beyond
the campus: Higher education, cultural policy and the creative economy’, International Journal of Cultural Policy,
22: 1-9
Higher Education teaching policy is a devolved matter in Scotland, yet the TEF has amplified the paradoxes created by the jurisdictional plurality that currently exists in the UK. Given the accountability role it plays for Whitehall, TEF’s UK-wide scope suggests an uncomfortable political geography. This is being accentuated as the Higher Education and Research Bill (at Westminster) establishes the new research funding contours across the UK. To understand how jurisdictional plurality plays out, one needs to consider that Higher Education in Scotland is simultaneously subject to:
Scottish government higher educational policy, led by the Minister for Further Education, Higher Education and Science, Shirley-Anne Somerville (SNP), and managed through the Scottish Funding Council (or whatever emerges out of the recent decisions from ScotGov regarding Enterprise and Innovation), which in turn aligns with Scottish domestic social, cultural, and economic policies. The main HE teaching policy steers, as suggested by recent legislation and commissions, have been to maintain the assurance and enhancement focus (established in the Further & Higher Education (Scotland) Act, 2005) and tighten links between social mobility (Commission for Widening Access 2015) and the relationships between the economic value of graduates and skills’ development (Enterprise and Skills Review 2016).
Non-devolved Westminster legislation (especially relating to Home Office and immigration matters). In addition to this is the rapidly moving legislative context that governs how higher education protects its students and staff for health and safety and social inclusion purposes as well as preventing illegal activity (Consumer Protection, Counter-terrorism etc.).
