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Bringing GTAs into the career development conversation

by Kristyna Campbell and Kaiyun Feng

The 2026 report published with HEPI by Dr Charlotte Fawcett entitled More than academia: Expanding career support for doctoral researchers sheds light on a timely challenge faced by swathes of PhD graduates. Notably, that much of their studies and professional development is shaped on the premise that an academic profession will be the destination for most. Fawcett weighs in on this issue, illustrating that PhD candidates are increasingly applying themselves to professions both across and beyond academia in today’s fierce employment landscape, and goes on to explain that preparation for this reality is made more difficult by the varied availability of resources to PhD candidates, mainly through their supervisors. While the report calls for better collaboration between stakeholders and more opportunities for work experience, we expand Fawcett’s work by offering insight into professional learning and career development experienced by Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) during the doctoral journey.

Fawcett’s report gives the sector something it has lacked for some time: a clear, current picture of how doctoral researchers experience career support, set against a labour market that no longer resembles the one for which doctoral study was originally built. Its central contribution is not simply diagnostic. By tracking change since 2019, and by pairing survey data with the voices of students and careers professionals, Fawcett provides institutions with meaningful evidence to work from, and a set of recommendations for action. It is essential reading for anyone with a stake in doctoral education, and it sets a benchmark for the kind of practical, student-centred research this space needs. 

Our recent study highlights the significance of the GTA role as a site for doctoral employment, within which wide-ranging skills are fostered pertaining to teaching, research and service. Using a model that explores how GTA career trajectories were shaped by expectations and realities of the role, and aspirations beyond graduation (Feng, 2024), qualitative data from eight GTAs from different disciplinary contexts were explored. The intention of our study was to make explicit the connection between GTA professional development and career development, through consideration for how GTAs understand teaching, research and service roles and their implications for identity.

In the GTA role, doctoral candidates are encouraged to ‘try on’ identities, and to undertake dedicated skills training designed to ensure high-quality teaching and assessment practice.  Their capabilities can include interpersonal, leadership, and organisational skills. Our findings indicated that the GTA role remains oriented toward academic careers, despite the various professional pathways taken by today’s doctoral candidates, a point also raised by Fawcett. Building on this understanding, we consider possible internal institutional and experiential opportunities designed to elevate the competence and confidence of doctoral candidates applying for work beyond academic teaching roles. Like Fawcett, we argued that support in recognising and articulating the transferability of knowledge and skills acquired through employment as GTAs is needed and instead suggest that learnt skillsets should be understood as competencies that can be applied across many careers and contexts.

From our study, we sensed that the expected linear academic career trajectory was falling away as graduate numbers rise and post-doctoral positions become fewer. While, as Fawcett reports, an increasing number of career-focused resources are becoming part of supervisory toolkits, we believe the responsibility extends to other members of the institution (including disciplinary experts, careers teams, and education developers) whose tailored care may have implications for preparedness.  

Our data add another perspective to Fawcett’s work regarding a shared understanding of the benefits of GTA-related competencies. Where Fawcett finds that only 27% of PhD students believe their supervisor has useful advice for non-academic careers, a related opportunity for helping supervisors and GTAs to better articulate GTA competencies was found in our data. We asked GTAs to plot their expected, actual, and hoped-for relationships with teaching, research (doctoral studies), and service, and the participants’ responses scattered without forming any discernible cluster. This variation has been attributed to the challenge of communicating tasks, responsibilities, and learnt skills, which may be a disciplinary concern. Helping PhD students to identify and articulate their current work within Feng’s (2024) framework could, in turn, support supervisors and other significant colleagues to help with locating prospective career paths and understand the transferability of competencies developed as GTAs and doctoral researchers. While the GTA lived reality appears varied, individual-level insight now can prepare for career clarity later, pointing to a single intervention with dual benefit rather than two separate problems to solve. 

We also noted a shift in GTAs’ present-tense identities and their imagined post-graduation selves. Participants who located themselves around teaching and service when reflecting on their reality consistently repositioned themselves towards research when projecting beyond their PhD studies. This shows that participants experienced their current role and future career as distinct rather than continuous. This resonates with Fawcett’s finding that, while 82% of students feel prepared for a research career, only 40% feel similarly prepared for non-research careers, and suggests that building this preparedness is partly about how GTAs are supported to narrate their experiences, not only about the information or resources on offer. This speaks to our earlier diagnosis about how aspects of a role are articulated, and how this is translated for work within and beyond academia. One participant’s insistence that they do not ‘identify as teaching staff’, despite teaching being a substantial commitment, points to an opportunity: helping GTAs to recognise the significance of teaching and service to the development of academic identity, rather than as detours from it, complementing the signposting Fawcett recommends.

Our third contribution sits slightly outside Fawcett’s frame but strengthens the recommendations: the emotional and relational labour GTAs absorb, for example, patience, diplomacy, and responsiveness to ‘unexpected situational cases’, is central to how participants experienced the role, even where it goes unnamed in formal role descriptions and training. This matters for career-readiness in a very practical sense. If pastoral and interpersonal skills are what GTAs are actually developing, naming them explicitly, alongside ‘research’ or ‘teaching experience’, would help doctoral candidates translate what they already do into what they can put on a CV. This lends weight to our suggestion of a competencies glossary, and points to a further opportunity that Fawcett’s supervisor-focused recommendations open up: module conveners, disciplinary leads, and GTA programme teams each hold partial knowledge of what a given candidate has developed, and bringing this knowledge together, alongside continued investment in careers advice, could be a valuable and immediately actionable step for institutions. 

Fawcett’s timely report creates an important point of departure for conversations about career readiness and stakeholder provision. It highlights the myriad resources available to doctoral candidates across the academy, whilst gently drawing attention to areas in need of development. Bringing this together with our study of GTAs offers a more holistic view of careers following doctoral study. Together, the studies describe support structures and the opportunity for work experience, thus initiating a conversation about translation and transition. Instead of asking what additional support is needed, we should emphasise supporting doctoral candidates to articulate the capabilities they are developing.

Dr Kristy Campbell is a Lecturer in Education (GTA Development Programme Lead) at King’s Academy, King’s College London, supporting staff with continued professional development through workshops and professional accreditation. She is also Unit Lead for the PGCHE and MA Creative Education courses at Norwich University of the Arts. Kristy completed her PhD at UCL Institute of Education, specialising in Higher Education. Her interests include adult teaching and learning, transition, and identity. Kristy is also Co-Editor-in-Chief of Postgraduate Pedagogies, a developmental journal dedicated to showcasing the experiences of GTAs.

Dr Kaiyun Feng is a Lecturer in Education at King’s College London, specialising in higher education policy, institutional management, academic identities and professionalisation, and impact and evaluation. Previously a Researcher at the University of Cambridge, she analysed access and participation and evaluated widening participation projects. She earned her PhD from UCL Institute of Education, investigating institutional strategies for undergraduate teaching in world-class universities across China, the UK, and Canada. She leads master’s and undergraduate seminars on social policy, higher education management, and research engagement. Her evidence-based teaching is informed by her research into the teaching-research nexus and academic career development.


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The technical turn and what it means for higher education

by Tim Savage

When I began my career as a photography technician in higher education 25 years ago, the distinction between academic and technical work was clear and helpful. Academics were thought of as the ‘master practitioners’ who taught creative and professional practice, while technicians prepared facilities, maintained equipment, and helped students to use specialist resources safely. However, as my career progressed, I observed the boundaries between academic and technical roles and responsibilities becoming increasingly indistinct and porous.

In my most recent role, as Director of Technical Learning at a leading UK arts university, I led a technical team of 130 staff whose remits became deeply involved in teaching and learning; many gained teaching qualifications and sought professional recognition, and it became increasingly common for technicians to transition their careers into academia, particularly in disciplines driven by new and emerging technologies.

Technical duties at my institution evolved informally to include writing and delivering progressively developmental lesson plans aligned to module outcomes, devising innovative and differentiated ways of teaching advanced disciplinary skills, collaborating with students to define and solve complex problems without precedent, contributing to feedback and assessment, and helping students develop both the skills and mindsets to succeed in their studies and to flourish in their lives and careers beyond university.

The scale and impact of pre-planned technician-led teaching was evident in the timetable and in the quality of work presented for assessment, but remained much less visible during periods of self-directed study, when students sought personalised advice and guidance at the point of need, sometimes seeking assistance to realise an idea, or having reached the limits of their knowledge, or wanting to understand why something in their work had failed or resulted in an unanticipated outcome. Anecdotally, and through formal feedback channels, students consistently reported these unstructured exchanges with technicians as being among the most valuable and impactful pedagogies they experienced, both in terms of the quality of their outputs and in their confidence and abilities to enter their chosen careers.

The workforce, it seemed, was changing. Academic roles were becoming increasingly focused on theory, research, and curriculum development, while technicians took on more responsibility for teaching practical skills. In this new model, technicians increasingly found themselves positioned as the new ‘master practitioners’ holding specialist knowledge and occupying the pedagogic spaces their lecturer colleagues had previously held.

From my position within the university executive, I saw this change driven by role creep rather than strategy, and neither the operating model that funded it nor the structures or policies used to describe, manage, and quality-assure it kept pace. Furthermore, despite the clearly transformed roles and responsibilities, it remained problematic for technicians to claim that they teach.

My new book, Technical Teaching in Higher Education: Insights from the Creative Arts, examines and attempts to make sense of this shift, exploring the rich and textured pedagogies involved, and considering how institutions might use that understanding to improve teaching and learning.

Making sense of the technical turn

In my research, I describe the growing educational responsibilities of technicians as a ‘technical turn’. Within creative arts HE, I attribute this evolution to a combination of political, economic, social, and technological factors shaping the sector, accentuated by the incorporation and mergers of art schools and former polytechnics into universities.

Susan Orr theorises this shift in arts education as an ‘academic turn’ in which institutional missions and the hierarchies of knowledge taught and learned changed. Previously essential practical, tacit, and technical knowledge and skills became deprioritised in the curriculum, even as they remained central to student learning, experiences, and graduate outcomes. Jonathan Harwood’s concept of ‘academic drift’ offers a way of understanding these changes, which some critics associate with the loss of the traditional art school.

But neither the technical nor the academic turns, nor the role convergences they have enabled, are new or restricted to the creative arts. In 1997, the National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education identified how the formerly clear distinctions between academic and non-academic roles were becoming increasingly blurred across the sector.

More recently, the UKRI-funded TALENT Commission on which I served provided evidence of the extent of technical involvement in teaching. Its national survey found that 95% of creative arts respondents were involved in teaching activities, compared with 75% of respondents from other disciplines. Subsequent studies have illuminated the scale and breadth of technician teaching across UK universities. These findings show that technical teaching extends across the sector, although how technicians understand and approach this work remains comparatively under-examined.


Five conceptions of technical teaching

My doctoral research addressed a related question: how do visual arts technicians understand and approach their teaching? Using phenomenography, I explored variation in participants’ conceptions of their pedagogies. I interviewed technicians across the UK in different kinds of institutions, spanning art, craft, design, and media disciplines. I examined what participants believed they taught, how they taught it, and why. I identified five approaches: Demonstrator, Instructor, Consultant, Collaborator, and Transformer. Each describes a different way of understanding and approaching teaching, and participants drew on several of these approaches depending on the learner and the context.

Demonstrators see their role as introducing learners to safe and competent practice. Their teaching makes equipment, materials, software, and specialist environments accessible through clear explanations and repeatable processes. They use didactic methods, while prioritising the clear understanding of foundations and conventions from which students can begin to work independently.

Instructors help students acquire, develop and apply skills in unique and personalised ways. Their emphasis moves towards adapting techniques to different purposes and developing the practical judgement needed to use them. Learning how to operate a camera, for example, becomes less about controls and functions, and more about understanding how its use can serve a photographic intention.

Consultants see themselves as subject authorities, whose role is to respond to a learner’s particular problem or ambition. A student may arrive with an unsuccessful process, a technical problem, or an idea they cannot realise. Teaching involves diagnostic assessment, questioning, and advice that help the learner evaluate possible solutions, evaluate risks and benefits, and make informed decisions.

Collaborators work alongside students, sharing in their processes of exploration and discovery. Knowledge develops through dialogue, experimentation, iteration, and encounters with materials or processes. These interactions and exchanges can take both student and technician beyond their existing understanding, supporting unknown and uncertain outcomes.

Transformers focus on changes in how learners understand their practice and themselves as practitioners. Their aim is to challenge and expand what students believe they can do, how they approach their work, and to broaden their ambitions and move beyond perceived limits. Transformative pedagogies were also found to influence curricula, more effectively integrate with academia, and inform institutional approaches to practical learning.

These five qualitatively distinct conceptions span a spectrum from teacher-centred content delivery to student-centred, transformative learning. They describe ways of understanding technical teaching, and an individual may adopt different pedagogies at different times. The range was broadly comparable with that identified in research on academics’ conceptions of teaching.


Putting the framework to use

The taxonomy’s practical value lies in making these different educational approaches and purposes more explicit. For individual technicians and their managers, it can provide language to reflect on practice, discuss teaching with peers, and identify development needs. It can also help educational developers connect teaching qualifications, mentoring, and professional recognition, such as Advance HE Fellowships, using authentic technical teaching and learning scenarios and case studies.

For curriculum teams, the framework can help identify where technical learning can be deployed most effectively within a programme and aligned with learning outcomes and assessment criteria. An equipment induction may prepare students to enter a workshop, but subsequent projects may depend on consultation, experimentation, and feedback.

Quality assurance and enhancement follow the same logic. Peer observation, student feedback, and shared reflection could help teams understand how technical pedagogies contribute to learning and where they need improvement.

For senior leaders, a clearer understanding of who teaches the curriculum and how is essential to linking strategy and operations. The academic/technical polarisation of the workforce is becoming increasingly unsustainable, prompting legitimate but challenging questions about workload planning, staffing structures and cost, and curriculum development. Such debates are likely to become more urgent as universities increasingly describe technician pedagogies as evidence of institutional teaching excellence, prioritise technical expertise and skills teaching, and place both at the centre of graduate outcomes and employability agendas.

The framework offers an evidence-based starting point for these conversations at a sector level; for institutions, it can help improve the integration of academic theory and technical practice within a constructively aligned curriculum, strengthen collaboration and understanding across role boundaries and break down longstanding silos in support of student education, experiences, and outcomes.

Dr Tim Savage is a consultant, author, and trainer specialising in technical learning, technicians, and institutional change in higher education. He previously served as Director of Technical Learning at the University for the Creative Arts and is a Principal Fellow of Advance HE, recognised for sustained strategic leadership in technical learning and teaching. His latest book, based on his doctoral research, is Technical Teaching in Higher Education: Insights from the Creative Arts (Routledge, 2026)


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When assessment goes local, who keeps what students bring back?

by Carlene Kyeremeh

A student sent me a photograph of a handwritten waybill. Dated November 2022, it records a unit price for printed sachet film. It also carries the names of a supplier and a customer and the given name of the person who issued it. The waybill appeared in a term paper on fiscal consolidation as evidence of a cost increase that no statistical series I have found records.

It is in my files. Not the department’s. Mine.

I describe the waybill here but do not reproduce it, identify those named, or give the figure it records. The students who wrote the paper agreed to this account. I have no record that the supplier, the customer or the person named agreed to the document’s retention or wider use, so I have minimised the identifying detail, including the price, which is the most commercially sensitive thing on the page.

I have argued elsewhere that the curriculum can help to thicken a thin documentary record. Ask each student to obtain one item of locally sourced evidence: an interview, a quoted price, a document from a firm or public office, and, over successive cohorts, a course can assemble material that no database previously held. This is no longer only my ambition. Programmes are already redesigning assessment in response to generative AI, and one attractive move is to require evidence a model cannot retrieve: a price obtained in a market, an interview conducted locally, a document held by a firm or public office. That redesign brings third-party material into course files at scale, often without a parallel decision about what should happen to it after assessment.

That is the promise. The waybill in my files is the problem that follows it.

What universities already know how to govern

Research ethics and commercial confidentiality are not routinely ignored in student work. Professionally oriented programmes have long had to decide what an organisation may disclose, who may see it and when it must be returned. For example, McMaster University’s course-based research guidance explicitly covers undergraduate, MBA and graduate courses. The University of Toronto provides both a course-based ethics route and a classroom confidentiality agreement for third-party proprietary information. In the UK, the University of Manchester’s ethics guidance asks researchers to establish first whether an activity is research training conducted as coursework, described as collecting and analysing a small amount of data to gain experience in method, or research proper. These arrangements show that collection, consent, confidentiality and use within a defined project can be governed. My argument is therefore not that universities lack such protections. It begins where a normal project would end.

The problem begins when the course ends

If material is returned, destroyed or retained only with the assessed work, its lifecycle has a clear end. But the design I am proposing depends on the evidence outliving the assignment. A document collected by one student in 2026 should be available to another cohort in 2028 or 2029, alongside prices, interviews and documents gathered in the intervening years. The course is not only assessing students. It is building a local source collection.

That changes the questions. What exactly does the university hold after the assessment period? Who is its custodian? How long may it be retained? May another cohort consult it? What fresh permission is needed if it is later used for research or publication? These procedures can help answer those questions, but not automatically. An agreement that properly confines information to one course may rule out the very reuse on which the proposed archive depends.

The evidence is not the assignment

The student’s analysis is coursework. The material used to produce it is not necessarily the same thing. A waybill may contain personal or commercially sensitive information. Interview notes are harder still: they are neither the source’s own record nor the student’s analysis, but one person’s written account of what another person said, made for an assignment and now held by a lecturer.

Where the activity is classified as teaching rather than research, this third-party material can still raise a lifecycle question: do institutional rules cover its custody, retention and reuse after the assessment for which it was collected? The Manchester distinction is instructive here. A course collection built to outlive its cohorts is not a small amount of data gathered to practise a method, but neither does it fit neatly within research as that definition intends. It is a lifecycle problem created by a particular curricular ambition.

The reuse is the point

Ghana’s Data Protection Act, 2012 (Act 843) requires personal data to be collected for a specific, explicitly defined and lawful purpose, limits retention and requires further processing to be compatible with the original purpose. Material obtained for one student’s term paper and later made available to another cohort may involve further processing. Nothing in the waybill I received establishes permission for it to become part of a standing course collection.

The Act contains provisions for historical, statistical and research uses where the relevant conditions are met. Those provisions offer a governed route, not a retrospective blank cheque. They do not turn a lecturer’s folder into an institutional archive. The underlying principle is not unique to Ghana: UK guidance likewise treats purpose, storage and research-related reuse as connected but distinct questions.

Ordinary assignment governance is adequate for ordinary assignments. The problem appears when coursework is asked to do something additional: to enlarge a locally available documentary record over time.

The archival value and the governance risk arise from the same feature. An archive that cannot be consulted next year is not an archive. A collection that can be consulted next year without the source having been told is not a defensible one.

A small institutional answer

The answer need not be a new bureaucracy. It could begin with a short institutional instrument that separates use in a student’s assessment from retention in a course source collection. Before collection begins, it should state the teaching purpose, what may be collected, who may later consult it, how long it will be kept, which unit is responsible and what choices the source has. Research use or publication should require a separate decision rather than being hidden inside the phrase ‘educational purposes’.

The remaining requirement is custody. What one lecturer can require, only an institution can keep. A named custodian, controlled access, a retention and disposal schedule, and a record of what the course has produced would convert a personal folder into an accountable institutional practice. Existing MBA, ethics and confidentiality processes provide models; the task is to extend their discipline to the intended afterlife of the evidence.

Proportionality matters. If the process becomes heavier than the assessment it supports, colleagues may stop asking students to gather local evidence. But a department unable to provide a clear collection notice, a retention rule and somebody accountable for what returns should not require the fieldwork. Otherwise, institutional risk is transferred to students and to the businesses that agree to speak with them.

Readers can test this in ten minutes. Take your own institution’s course-based ethics route or classroom confidentiality agreement and look for two things: whether either says anything about third-party material after the assessment period, and who is named as responsible for it. If neither appears, ask where else the institution governs the evidence after the assignment ends. If there is no answer, the arrangements may govern the assignment without governing its evidentiary afterlife.

Before we ask for more

The curriculum can enlarge the archive. The qualification is that the archival ambition creates an additional governance obligation. The question is not only whether the evidence was collected ethically and kept confidentially. It is whether its intended custody, retention and reuse were made explicit before collection began.

I have a waybill in my files and no good institutional answer to those questions. That is not an argument against asking students to go and find out. It is an argument for deciding what we will do with what comes back, before we ask them to go.

Dr Carlene Kyeremeh is Associate Professor and Vice President, University Advancement, Recruitment and Research at All Nations University, Koforidua, Ghana. Her research addresses curriculum decolonisation, higher education policy in Africa and the Caribbean, and the political economy of educational technology.This post develops a governance question raised in Issues 14 and 15 of The Decolonized Curriculum, her LinkedIn newsletter.


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Professor Rosemary Deem (January 1949-August 2026)

by Louise Morley

Rosemary Deem was a great feminist scholar, friend, colleague, and mentor, known and respected worldwide for her major contributions to the field of higher education studies, her service in national and international agencies, and her extensive senior management experience at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she was Dean of History/​Social Science (2009–11); Vice-Principal, Education (2011–17); Vice-Principal for Teaching Innovation & Equality/​Diversity (2017–2019); and Doctoral School Dean (2014–19).

Rosemary’s long and extremely productive career in higher education began with her BA in Sociology at the University of Leicester from 1968-72, followed by an MPhil in Education. She was awarded a PhD by the Open University in 1990 for her thesis: Women and Leisure: A Sociological Investigation. During her career she held academic posts at North Staffordshire Polytechnic, Loughborough University, the University of York, the Open University, the University of Lancaster, and the University of Bristol, as well as Royal Holloway. Her first highly influential book in gender studies, Women and Schooling, was published in 1978. She initially researched women and leisure and educational governance and went on to develop significant expertise and experience in equality, diversity and inclusion, doctoral education, higher education management, qualitative research, and the sociology of power and policy in education. Her work on neoliberalism continues to lead the field and her ongoing and relentless commitment to research, scholarship, and peer review resulted in over 100 publications.

Known and respected widely, Rosemary had national and international professional networks. A regular participant in conferences globally, she learned the Portuguese language and became an external adviser to the Centre for Research in Higher Education Policies (CIPES) in 2024 at the Universities of Aveiro and Porto. She supervised and examined many doctoral students in Education, Sociology, Management, and Gender Studies and regularly supported her colleagues and students when they presented conference papers and seminars around the globe. She was a loyal and active participant and speaker in the Centre for Higher Education and Equity Research’s events (CHEER) at the University of Sussex, and always offered incisive and informed feedback.

Rosemary was a formidable influence at national level. She was elected three times to the Research Assessment Exercise panel in 1996, 2001 and 2008. From 2013, she served as co-editor of the journal Higher Education, published by Springer, and was a member of the Peer Review College of the European Science Foundation. She also served as co-convenor of the Higher Education Network of the European Educational Research Association. Between 2015 and 2018, she was the first woman to chair the UK Council for Graduate Education. She also served on the Editorial Boards of Higher Education Quarterly and Studies in Higher Education.

Rosemary at the SRHE Conference, December 2017

Rosemary played a significant role in the Society for Research into Higher Education and embodied the very essence of good citizenship. She was a member of the Governing Council (from 1999), the Research and Development Committee (from 2001), and chair of the Publications Committee (2003-6), leading the negotiation of contracts with publishers which re-established the financial stability of the Society. Rosemary was Vice-Chair of the Society from 2007-9, was elected Fellow of the Society in 2010, and was a keynote speaker at the 2016 SRHE Conference ‘International Contexts and Collaboration: The Implications and Impact of Brexit’. She even found time to deliver several Professional Development Programme sessions for SRHE including Peer Review: How to do it and get it right: Building confidence in your peer reviewing skills (June 2018) and Peer Review – a workshop for newer researchers (March 2015).

Her intellectual generosity meant Rosemary freely shared her substantial knowledge with colleagues and mentees. She was a critical friend on various SRHE funded research projects: in 2011 – Assessing the impact of development in research policy for research on higher education.  An exploratory study by Carole Leathwood (London Metropolitan University) and Barbara Read (Roehampton); in 2023 – Towards a Community-Informed Model for PhD research? A place-based exploration of attitudes to doctoral research programmes in Nottingham by Rachel Handforth (Nottingham Trent University); in 2024 – Navigating Microaggressions and EDI Initiatives: Lived Experiences of Chinese International Academics in England by Ming Cheng  (Sheffield Hallam University).

She was elected as a Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences in 2006. Her extensive services to Higher Education and Social Science were further recognised in 2013 when she was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List.This was celebrated with a wonderful party at Royal Holloway attended by friends and colleagues from across the globe.We all reconvened six years later to celebrate her joyful 70th birthday. Her alma mater, the University of Leicester, recognised her work in the sociology of higher education by awarding her an honorary DLitt in 2014 and the University’s College of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities bestows the annual Rosemary Deem Awards for Social Science Doctoral Researchers in her honour.

Rosemary’s husband since 1985, Professor Kevin Brehony, died in 2013. This was a tremendous loss for Rosemary as they had shared such an intellectually and socially rich life together. I knew Kevin before I knew Rosemary, as we worked together for 10 years at the University of Reading. Kevin was so proud of Rosemary and talked extensively about her and the happy times they shared travelling, cycling, camping, cooking, and of course, debating!

While Rosemary was a serious, committed and abundantly respected professional, she will also be remembered for her tremendous wry sense of fun, her kindness, energy, and joie de vivre. Her wit, wisdom and dry sense of humour could transform any situation into unbridled joy: we always laughed a lot whenever Rosemary was present. She will be hugely missed.

Emerita Professor Louise Morley, University of Sussex

Rosemary and Louise at the European Women Rectors’ Association Conference, Lisbon, May 2018
Image of Rob Cuthbert


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How universities behaving sensibly could destroy access to HE

by Rob Cuthbert

Since the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, national policy for higher education has left HE institutions to the mercies of a market overseen by a regulator, the Office for Students. Each year A-Levels results shine a spotlight on the consequences, which are already visible – major financial difficulties, academic staff redundancies, reductions in course and programme offerings. What everyone knows is that these are the consequences of the wrong kind of competition and a mix of government policies which have combined to slash HEI revenues. These consequences flow from behaviour by students and universities responding rationally, as best they can, to the policy context. But if higher education policy stays the same, the behaviours which seem so rational at institutional level will destroy opportunities for access to the whole higher education sector.

Everyone knew that 2026 would be another ‘highly competitive’ results round – for universities. Applicants, on the other hand, have discovered that there are higher-tariff universities making lower-tariff offers. Increasingly, their ‘insurance’ choices are not insurance against lower grades, but instead simply offer two chances to apply to high-tariff providers. Clearing increasingly offers more flexibility and more chances, if results are not what some had hoped. And things will only get better for applicants over the next five years or more. This is good news for some – the offspring of the mobile middle classes will be experiencing a buyer’s market for some time. But it may be increasingly bad news for others, who just live in the wrong place, may not have much social and financial capital, and can’t move far to go to university or another HE provider.

Everyone also knows what Bahram Bekhradnia pointed out in his recent HEPI Report, Demographic decline and predatory recruitment: the twin threats to English higher education into the 2040s. Population decline means that the number of 18 year olds will be almost 20% lower than at present by the late 2030s. It follows that unless an increasing proportion of young people apply to HE there will be 20% fewer students in English HE in ten years’ time, with a corresponding loss of revenue. However there is no sign of an increase in the proportions applying for HE, which is unsurprising given the intensity of media coverage of student debt and the associated question ‘Is higher education worth it?’. This, of course, is despite the evidence that there is still a ‘graduate premium’ in lifetime earnings, even if it is declining. There is no sign of demand weakening, and students’ satisfaction with their HE experience remains high, even edging higher in the most recent national survey.

Phil Hill in his OnEdTech blog on 13 August 2026 spotted the parallel contradictions in UK and US education policies: “Omar Khan … published a piece at Wonkhe this week arguing that UK policy on graduate earnings contradicts itself. The government wants the graduate earnings premium to rise … It also wants parity of esteem for young people who don’t go to university. Khan calls out the problem: “no amount of rhetorical flourish can make both graduates and non-graduates earn more than the other in their monthly payslips.” … Based on the latest ED [US Education Department] data, 29.0% of undergraduate certificate programs and 6.6% of associate degree programs would fail the earnings premium rules, while just 1.2% of bachelor degree programs would fail. The actual policy is about to put a massive constraint on non-degree student programs. … So which is it? Are we building short-form pathways or auditing them out of existence? The UK can’t decide whether it wants the premium up or the gap closed. The US can’t decide whether it is promoting the alternatives or testing them to death. The earnings premium is not solely an American idea being argued in American terms. Not only is the earnings premium idea bipartisan in the US, it is international and may be growing in scope.”

Phil Hill’s associate Glenda Morgan underlined the parallels between the US and the UK in her On Student Success website. “Two recent reports – one on American public higher education from NCHEMS and another on English universities from the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) – show what this looks like in practice. Higher education systems are, like it or not, stratified by prestige, selectivity, wealth, and recruiting power. That is a description of institutional position, not a judgment about educational quality or public value. But what happens when the number of prospective students stops growing? In a stagnant or shrinking market, institutions cannot all maintain their enrollment by capturing a larger share. Growth becomes increasingly redistributive: one institution’s gain is more likely to produce losses elsewhere. Better-resourced institutions expand into markets traditionally served by other colleges and universities. Institutions with less power in the hierarchy respond by adding programs, recruiting new student populations, or moving into the territory of still more vulnerable institutions. Each decision may be rational for the institution that makes it. Collectively, however, these decisions can leave higher education systems more hierarchical, less stable, and less capable of serving students who depend on affordable and geographically accessible options”

UK government policy restricting applications by foreign students, driven by concerns over immigration, has severely reduced the alternative revenue-generating options for most universities, as recently recognised by the mainstream media. Louise Eccles, Robert Watts and Yennah Smart wrote in The Sunday Times on 8 August 2026, previewing A-level results day: “Foreign student slump forces A* universities to accept BBB grades”. At the same time there are now 700,000 (31%) of UK students, facing the prospect of huge debt from student loans, who choose or are compelled to stay in the family home and become commuters to a university within reach.

Applications from the UK are increasing for STEM and related disciplines, which applicants probably believe will offer better career and financial prospects for graduates. (FFT Education Datalab provides authoritative analyses of trends and variations in patterns of achievement.) Institutions respond by taking a medium or long-term view and reshaping their academic offering in response to changes in application patterns. Rather than making across-the-board reductions. many institutions choose to eliminate entire subjects or fields of study. The British Academy’s recent report, Cold Spots: Mapping Inequality in SHAPE Provision in UK Higher Education, spelt out the danger underlined in the recent SRHE blog by Christopher Playford and colleagues at Exeter: “Some students travel far from home to attend university. But many do not, and many cannot. The rising cost of higher education means that for students from lower-income families, mature students, commuters, carers and those with strong local ties, the possibility of studying close to home can determine whether higher education is realistic at all. Local provision of higher education therefore affects what courses are available to young people.”

UK government policy choices have made things worse for HE, by encouraging the mis-framing of HE as ‘academic’ and FE as ‘vocational’ and putting HE and FE sectors into competition rather than supporting the FE-HE collaboration which is essential, and seems to be appreciated much more in Wales and Scotland than in England. Other policy initiatives have significantly reduced HE revenues, with increased National Insurance charges for employers, a levy on overseas student fees, and changes to student visa requirements reducing demand from overseas applicants. There were media reports on 21 August 2026 that the government might agree to cut overseas fees for EU students as part of its broader attempts at rapprochement with Europe, further reducing revenue for already cash-strapped universities. These reductions have far outweighed the benefit from ending the long-term freeze of undergraduate fee levels. Real-terms institutional income has been reduced to levels not seen since 2010, well below the economic cost of delivering undergraduate education.

Institutions are behaving rationally in their own interests, within the prevailing policy context. Applicants are behaving rationally and consistently in responding to the incentives and opportunities presented to them. It is the policy that needs to change – we urgently need financial incentives or rewards for institutions seeking to maintain opportunities for reasonably local and regional study across the country. Without such changes the HE sector may see the participation rate decline, in sharp contrast to the global trend almost everywhere else. That would be an astonishing response, in one of the UK’s most globally successful sectors, to the UK’s need for economic growth. This is a particularly English problem: different government structures in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland offer more opportunities for intervention. But the market in English HE has failed to protect access, and things will get worse unless the government chooses to intervene. Those earlier policy creations, the University Grants Committee and the Higher Education Funding Council for England, as funding agencies delivering most of the funds for teaching, would have found it feasible, perhaps even comparatively straightforward to address the problem. The question is whether government now wants it to happen, and whether the Office for Students as regulator has the competence and capability to do what needs to be done.

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. X/Twitter @RobCuthbert. Bluesky @robcuthbert22.bsky.social.


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The quiet epiphany: what ‘Stoner’ teaches us about academic life

by Dr Goran Erfani

Over the recent holidays, I finally had a chance to read Stoner by John Williams. This novel has quietly become a cult classic since its original publication in 1965, despite selling almost nothing at the time. It tells the story of William Stoner, who teaches English literature at the University of Missouri (US) for forty years, and whose life, on the surface, is unremarkable: no great triumphs, no dramatic falls, just the long accumulation of an academic career.

And there is as yet very little about it that feels outdated. The perceived career barriers, the departmental politics, the strange intimacy of a life built around a library and a lecture hall all read as though they were written last year, not eighty years ago. Reading the novel raised a few academic-life questions for me: how much of a career is really chosen versus tripped into, how little control academics may have over the wider forces that shape their work, why the office can so easily become a refuge from everything else, and why recognition so often arrives too late to matter.

The epiphany that redirects a life

The protagonist, Stoner, begins his journey as an agriculture student, sent to university by his farming parents to learn better methods for the land he’s expected to inherit. Then, almost by accident, he takes an optional literature module which was not very popular among students from other departments. A single class, a moment his teacher, Archer Sloane, later calls his epiphany, reroutes the entire course of his life. He abandons the farm, and the future his parents assumed for him, to become an academic instead.

This story is a powerful reminder of something many of us recognise from our own paths: academic careers are rarely the exclusive product of a grand plan. More often our careers turn on one unplanned module or a seminar, one conversation, one person who saw something in us before we saw it ourselves. The novel is generous in this sense, and it doesn’t treat Stoner’s choice as either triumphant or tragic, just as the quiet hinge on which everything else swings.

When the wider world intervenes

The novel doesn’t pretend the wider world stays outside academia, although Stoner’s career unfolds almost entirely inside university walls. His two closest friends from graduate school, Dave Masters and Gordon Finch, both go off to fight in the First World War: Masters is killed within months, while Finch survives and later becomes dean of the faculty. Despite the prevailing social disfavour, Stoner stays behind, choosing to finish his PhD rather than enlist. The novel doesn’t treat this decision as cowardice, or even really as a deliberate choice. In fact, Stoner just quietly stays where he was, against a backdrop of events entirely beyond his control. He rarely dwells on it afterwards, but the war reshapes his career as much as his friendships: with so many young men gone to fight, teaching posts open up that might otherwise have taken him years to reach. He ends up moving up faster than he probably would have otherwise, and it’s not something he ever really has to reckon with. The same war that costs his closest friend his life is the one that clears space for Stoner’s.

It’s a useful corrective to how we sometimes talk about academic careers as though they were shaped only by our ambition, ability, and choice. Wars, recessions, pandemics, policy changes, and funding cuts imposed from far outside a department are just as often what redirect them. And as Stoner’s case shows, that redirection isn’t always a loss, since it sometimes opens a door for one person precisely because it closes one for somebody else. The university, however insulated it can feel, has never really been separate from the world beyond it.

Perfunctory interest, and the retreat into work

What struck me most, though, was how Williams describes Stoner’s relationship to everything outside his academic work. His marriage fails early and never really recovers; his daughter drifts from him; and increasingly he treats his own home life with a kind of ‘perfunctory interest’— present, dutiful, but never fully engaged. The office becomes his real home. Long hours grading papers or losing himself in medieval literature aren’t just work; they’re an escape from a domestic life he can’t fix and, eventually, stops trying to.

It’s an uncomfortable thing to recognise, but many academics will know some version of it: the pull of the office as sanctuary, ‘one more hour of reading’ as a fairly acceptable form of avoidance. The pressure to keep publishing more and more doesn’t help either. I’ve caught myself judging a whole day by how much I’d written, not by much else that happened in it. The novel doesn’t moralise about any of this. It just leaves you sitting there with it.

A career recognised too late

Stoner’s professional life follows its own quiet cruelty. A departmental rival, Lomax, pushes him away from the teaching and supervision he loves most and is best at. Recognition, becoming a full professor in more than title, comes only at the very end of his career, at the point of retirement, when it can no longer change anything. It’s a sharp, understated commentary on how academic institutions can delay or withhold recognition until it’s almost beside the point.

This is also a familiar pattern in academic life more broadly. Promotion panels and tenure timelines are often slow to catch up with what someone has actually contributed, and by the time recognition arrives, sometimes years after the work that earned it, the person it’s meant for has usually moved past caring about it.

The balance we still struggle with

Reading it today, it’s hard not to measure how far academic culture has moved on this front, or how little. It also raises a potentially uncomfortable question: would Stoner survive in today’s academic culture? Everything quiet about him, the private choices, the unhurried devotion to reading and writing, is perhaps what current academic life has the least patience for. His love of the discipline was rooted in learning and literature for their own sake, not in being judged primarily by his publication outputs — an orientation that sits awkwardly with how academic worth is now measured by metrics, the REF (Research Excellence Framework), or grant income.

But the main loss may not be the metrics themselves so much as what they’ve gradually displaced: unstructured time to simply read, think, or sit with a text without needing to turn it into a deliverable output. Stoner’s long hours in the library produced nothing that would count on a REF return, and that, more than any single policy, is what makes his kind of academic life hard to imagine now.

Even so, higher education institutions (in the UK and beyond) now talk openly about work-life balance, wellbeing, and boundaries in a way Stoner’s generation never could, and most of us have absorbed at least the language of it (I catch myself using it in meetings I attend). Yet the pull he feels towards the office, the sense that there’s always something else waiting to grade, read, or write, will still be familiar to plenty of academics negotiating where work ends and home and social life begin. We have the vocabulary now to name the imbalance Stoner never thought to question. I’m not sure we’re any better at actually living with it.

Why it still resonates

Stoner isn’t a true story, but it captures something true about academic life all the same: the ongoing tension between institutional demands and personal passion, the way one small decision can redirect a life, and the cost of retreating into work instead of confronting what’s difficult at home. It’s a quietly unsentimental book. It doesn’t romanticise academic life or condemn it. It simply shows it in full and trusts the reader to feel the weight of it. Reading it now, in a very different era of higher education, I find it less a period piece than a mirror.

Reference: Williams, J (1965) Stoner. New York: Viking Press. Currently available through NYRB Classics (US) and Vintage Classics (UK).

Dr Goran Erfani, FHEA, is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Healthcare and Nursing Sciences at Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne. His research interests include people-place-health dynamics, public health, digital inclusion, and health equity. Email: goran.erfani@northumbria.ac.uk. X/Twitter: @GoranErfani.


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A narrator Is not a witness: what AI got right — and wrong — across three Ghanaian MBA classrooms

by Carlene Kyeremeh

It was late, and I was building slides on fiscal policy for a class of twenty, most of whom had never taken economics before. I asked an AI tool for a worked example of expansionary policy — something concrete enough to anchor the mechanism. It answered in seconds: a government cuts taxes and raises infrastructure spending; roads get built; contractors hire; demand rises. Clean. Usable. American. The mechanism travelled, but the roads were interstate highways, and the government spending the money was not one my students would ever petition. The example had arrived so quickly, and so confidently, that I nearly pasted it in. For a moment, convenience almost became curriculum.

Then, in the same session, the same tool did something I could not have done as well alone. I asked it to scaffold the vocabulary — a glossary that assumed nothing and met students who did not yet have the words. It was patient in a way I am not always patient at that hour. It found analogies; it sequenced the terms so that each rested on the one before. That slide was better for the machine’s help.

Within a single sitting, the tool had lowered the barrier for my students and quietly imported the exact default my work exists to help people notice. Across three MBA courses this term, I began to see the same pattern: the tool improved many aspects of how I prepared to teach, and became least dependable where the teaching required local knowledge, current evidence or an institution named correctly. The help landed on form. The failures landed on specificity.

In my international trade finance course, I extend a running case — Adom Naturals Ltd, a Kumasi agribusiness I built so that trade finance stops being abstract and acquires a location, a product and a currency exposure. I asked the tool to situate the firm against current conditions: what the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) changes for a business like this, and where COCOBOD now sits in the picture. It answered in assured paragraphs and told the familiar story: Ghana grows some of the world’s finest cocoa, ships much of it out with limited processing, and watches the greater share of value accrue downstream. Fluent, orderly, and a season out of date.

The confident narrator

It missed what I happened to be holding in a government source that week: in February 2026, Cabinet directed that, from the 2026/27 crop season, a minimum of 50 per cent of Ghana’s cocoa beans should be processed locally. For Adom Naturals, that reform changes the opportunity set. Cocoa liquor, butter, cake and other processed products can retain more value within Ghana and may qualify for preferential treatment in African markets where the relevant AfCFTA rules of origin and tariff requirements are satisfied. The tool had narrated the extractive arrangement in the present tense and missed the policy intended to change it.

Nothing marked the claim as stale. The tool warns that it can make mistakes, in a line printed beneath every answer, but a caveat attached equally to everything is not calibration; it is the absence of it, dressed as candour. A colleague says: I am sure of this; check me on that. The tool says it might be wrong about anything, then says everything in the same even voice. The danger was never that it made mistakes. Every source makes mistakes. The danger was that it sounded exactly as certain when it was wrong as when it was right.

The wrong institution

Financial regulation showed me the problem from another angle. Ask a general-purpose tool about capital adequacy, disclosure or market conduct and it is fluent, because the published record is thick with Basel standards, US and UK regimes, and decades of commentary. Ask it to route the same questions through Ghana’s regulatory architecture and the fluency thins.

When I asked which body supervises an insurer in Ghana, and then which oversees a securities offering, it reached both times, confidently, for the Bank of Ghana. The answer was plausible because the central bank is prominent in Ghana’s financial system. It was nevertheless wrong. Insurance supervision belongs to the National Insurance Commission under the Insurance Act, 2021; securities-market regulation belongs to the Securities and Exchange Commission under the Securities Industry Act, 2016, as amended. When I named the specific commissions, the tool corrected itself at once. The information was retrievable; it was not the default.

Three defaults, one voice

Set the three moments side by side and a more complicated pattern emerges. The fiscal-policy example exposed a geographical default; the cocoa case, a temporal one; and the regulation case, an institutional one. These were different failures, but they arrived in the same confident voice.

I cannot inspect the tool’s training archive, so I cannot attribute every error to missing data alone. A stale policy claim may reflect a knowledge cut-off or the absence of live search. A regulatory error may reflect weak retrieval, poor weighting or the greater prominence of a general institution over a specialised one. What I can observe is an asymmetry of retrieval: general and North Atlantic formulations arrived unprompted, while Ghanaian specificity had to be named, sourced and verified into view.

That asymmetry belongs in the larger conversation about AI and epistemic justice — about whose knowledge is dense enough, accessible enough and prominent enough to be retrieved fluently, and whose is thin enough to be flattened, displaced or missed. The tool did not invent the hierarchy of whose knowledge counts. It inherited a record shaped by that hierarchy and can reproduce it at scale, in fluent prose. Better models may reduce some errors, but model improvement alone cannot repair knowledge that remains absent, inaccessible or systematically underrepresented.

I develop that argument more formally elsewhere, in work currently under review. Here, I want only to report what it looks like from inside three classrooms, at the point where defaults become examples and examples become curriculum.

Verification is the work

I use these tools daily and they earn their place, so let me be honest about the difficulty. The answer is not refusal; refusing the help is not a decolonial act, only less help. The answer is the discipline I have argued for all along, now turned on the machine: no sentence enters the curriculum until it points to a source I can hold. Verification is not the friction that slows the tool down. With a tool like this, verification is the work.

I have also begun turning that work into a learning activity. I place selected AI outputs beside the relevant primary or institutional sources and ask students to identify what the model has generalised, dated or assigned to the wrong body. Verification becomes not only my quality-control procedure but part of the curriculum itself.

Perhaps that is the graduate skill this moment now asks for. Not simply how to find information, the tool is generous with information, but how to test information whose presentation gives no sign whether it has earned our trust. The scarce skill is no longer retrieval. It is discernment. Teaching has always required two kinds of expertise: explaining ideas well, and knowing where they belong. The tool is becoming remarkably good at the first; the second is still ours. It narrates beautifully — but a narrator is not a witness, and decolonising the curriculum now includes learning to interrogate the archive that speaks back.

If your tool has ever been confidently wrong about your own institution, your own regulator or your own country’s data, I would like to know what it got wrong — and whether a student would have caught it.

Dr Carlene Kyeremeh is an Associate Professor and Vice President, University Advancement, Recruitment & Research, at All Nations University, Ghana, where she teaches managerial economics and international trade and finance on the MBA programme. Her research examines decolonial curriculum reform, gender equity and academic mobility in African higher education, with the African Continental Free Trade Area as a recurring empirical anchor. She is currently researching the reintegration of diaspora-return faculty in Ghanaian universities. She writes The Decolonized Curriculum, a newsletter on curriculum decolonisation in African higher education. 

LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7412983304175534080]

Author’s note: This article is adapted and substantially expanded from Issue 13 of The Decolonized Curriculum.


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Capability for special, adult, and further education

by Gavin Moodie and Leesa Wheelahan

The capabilities approach focuses on human flourishing rather than augmenting productive capacities, although the latter may be necessary for the former. It is also concerned with the potential of people to achieve or become, rather than maximising happiness or the sum total of utilities that individuals have. It is concerned with the real freedoms people have rather than economic resources, as it recognises that different individuals, communities and societies need different types and different levels of resources to live dignified lives.

Students with special educational needs and disabilities

The capabilities approach provides the basis for understanding and addressing multiple and overlapping forms of disadvantage. Tikly explained that the capabilities approach ‘implies a focus on the institutional and cultural barriers that prevent inclusion of different groups’. It has implications for resourcing because it recognises that some groups will need more resources to achieve comparable capabilities as the basis for exercising choice in their lives. This is one reason why the capabilities approach was first drawn upon by the those fighting for the human rights and dignity for those with disabilities. Terzi argued that the capabilities approach ‘is innovative with respect to the centrality of human diversity in assessing inequality’. It offers another theory to guide the development of students with special educational needs and disabilities in further and higher education. This has implications for policy, funding and governance. As capabilities are embedded in their social context and manifest differently in different contexts, they require local engagement with social partners, educational institutions and a nuanced understanding of the different needs of different students.

Education for adults and part time students

The SRHE Blog has noted the under-provision of education for adults and its editor Rob Cuthbert observed that ‘Part-time students are vanishing from the system, as funding regimes repeatedly ignore their different needs and discourage institutions from providing for them.’ Capabilities theory offers a further argument for improving provision for adult and part-time students, if one is needed.

Further education

Tikly argued that the capabilities approach ‘allows for an expanded view of the purpose of [Technical and Vocational Education and Training] as supporting the development of human capabilities and functionings that individuals, communities and society at large have reason to value’. He applied the capabilities approach to understanding the broad purposes of vocational education and the role it can play in society, and also to issues of funding and governance.

We apply human capabilities to vocational education by considering what people are able to ‘be and do’ at work and through work to realise themselves and their goals. We understand capabilities to refer to the resources and arrangements of work and the broad knowledge, skills and attributes that individuals need to be productive at work, to progress in their careers, and to participate in decision-making about work, and in their life. Vocational education students need to understand how their field of practice fits within their communities and societies, and they require the capacity to be ‘citizens’ within their field, so they can help shape its future.

We argue that vocational education develops students’ capabilities in two ways. It develops students’ understanding of the world and their capacity to act in the world. And its educational processes facilitate students making decisions about their education and how they undertake it, even within strongly framed programs.

To do this vocational education should prepare students for a broad field of practice rather than a narrowly defined occupation, or worse, narrowly defined skills aligned with work-place tasks and roles. Vocational education should also contribute to and benefit from helping students develop the building blocks of these broader capabilities.

Strong institutions

The development of capabilities is underpinned by institutional frameworks and social partnerships. This points to the importance of strong public vocational education institutions in mediating the development of capabilities and in mediating links between students and other social partners. And, this requires strong public vocational education institutions to participate in discussions and debates about the nature of capabilities, and to support their development.

Sen explained that we live and operate in a world of institutions, and that ‘Our opportunities and prospects depend crucially on what institutions exist and how they function’. He explained that institutions must be evaluated by the extent to which they contribute to capabilities and to freedom. Winch said that a vocational education framework needs stability:

“… so that it can evolve along pathways familiar to participants, and so that routes and qualifications are recognized by all stakeholders … Governments must resist the temptation to change TVET structures for short-term political benefit, and should plan for robust and long-term stable structures. Last, but not least, qualifications should contain substantial theoretical content to facilitate permeability and broad occupational capabilities.”

Capabilities provide the conceptual basis of vocational education and its qualifications, but the specific focus and content of teaching and learning and curriculum requires deep understandings of the contexts for which students are being prepared, engagement with local communities of interest, and negotiation over the outcomes. For example, the capabilities that electricians need will differ from those of childcare workers.

The extent to which individuals can realise their capabilities at work is partly related to the extent to which a workplace facilitates their agency in work, the level of autonomy and support they are offered, and where they are situated in organisational structures. Hierarchical and managerial workplaces restrict agency, whereas a more expansive approach may provide opportunities for development and growth. It is particularly salient for vocational education that workers’ capabilities as workers depends crucially on the capabilities of their work unit. Work groups have been studied extensively since the Hawthorne studies of the 1920s which identified considerable variation in the effectiveness of different work groups. A work unit that supports and encourages its members to develop their knowledge and skills develops its members’ work capabilities more than others, and according to Senge, learning organisations have competitive advantages over other organisations.

Caveats in using the capabilities approach

There are important caveats in understanding the way in which the capabilities approach can be used. Tikly explained that ‘the capability approach should not be seen as providing ready-made answers to the policy issues and challenges facing the TVET sector today’. He argued that it ‘should be seen as a way of framing issues and as a starting point for evaluating policy choices’.

The second caveat is that while the capabilities approach provides a normative framework for evaluating, assessing and providing the conditions for individual well-being and social arrangements, it does not provide explanations about the causes of ‘capability deprivation’. The capabilities approach cannot be applied in the absence of theorising about social relations of power and domination.

The third caveat is that while the capabilities approach could help renovate vocational education so that it is more holistic and developmental, it cannot on its own ‘fix’ the problems of the labour market. To do this would require a focus on the labour market itself, and not just vocational education qualifications. For example, while vocational education may provide education that helps students develop capabilities, these capabilities may not be able to be realised in workplaces that resist change, are discriminatory, or provide few opportunities for discretionary learning or for the develop­ment of autonomous practice.

The fourth, crucial, caveat, is that capabilities cannot be considered in the abstract. Capabilities are not just an individual attribute: they include the resources available to a person and their personal, social and environmental circumstances that make it possible for them to realise what they reasonably value. A problem in some of the literature is that it considers capabilities in the abstract to generate idealised lists of individuals’ attributes such as general skills, employability skills and graduate attributes. However, since these are detached from the requirements of occupations and the circumstances in which they are practised they don’t advance analysis beyond other lists of general skills and attributes.

Dr Gavin Moodie is Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Department of Education

Leesa Wheelahan is Professor Emerita and William G. Davis Chair in Community College Leadership Emerita at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Department of Education.


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Capability for higher education

by Gavin Moodie and Leesa Wheelahan

The developers of the capabilities approach Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum argued that education is fundamental to expanding peoples’ capacity to understand and act in the world and thus lead the kind of lives they value and have reason to value.

Capability for education is the freedom to choose a curriculum or a course one has reason to value, that will support students to develop their emerging conceptions of how they want to live their lives, and provide them with the educational foundation that is necessary to do so. This offers higher education an alternative rationale to human capital theory that has dominated post-secondary education since the Robbins Report of 1963, but which has been losing its appeal as the return on investment in higher education has been plateauing.

Moreover, the value of and confidence in qualifications, particularly higher education qualifications, has been diminishing because they are perceived to no longer deliver on the promise of a good job with good career prospects. If the value of higher education qualifications (and indeed, all educational qualifications) are evaluated only by the extent to which they ‘deliver’ on labour market outcomes, then their value will be questioned. However, qualifications have multiple purposes which, of course, include, but cannot be limited to, labour market outcomes.

Students’ capabilities are advanced by higher education with multiple complementary values, and this helps us to consider the enduring value of and importance of qualifications. Qualifications have intrinsic value for students to realise their self to ‘be’ in the world and to live a life they have reason to value. Qualifications have educational value for accessing the knowledge needed for students to participate in debates and controversies in society and in their field of practice and to proceed to higher levels of education.

Qualifications have use value as a necessary foundation for an occupation and an occupational identity, and exchange value to access the labour market and contribute to an occupational identity. Qualifications also have social value for democratic, socially inclusive communities and society. These different forms of value lead us to posit that qualifications for the capability approach have four purposes, while recognising that different types of qualifications will fulfil these purposes in different ways:

  1. Individual, to develop individuals’ agency to live lives they have reason to value, and to contribute to their families, communities, society, and occupation;
  2. Educational, to develop graduates’ and society’s understanding of theoretical, abstract knowledge;
  3. Occupational, to develop graduates’ individual and work groups’ collective productive capacity; and
  4. Social, to advance society, and social justice and inclusion.

Education should include students’ capability for voice – the capacity to express their wishes, expectations, desires, and concerns, and to have them count when decisions concerning themselves are made. Bonvin related the capability for voice to Appadurai’s ‘capacity to aspire’ or ‘to project oneself in the future’. A capacity to aspire is important because people adapt their preferences according to what they perceive to be achievable. In contrast, education should take account of students’ different capacities and aim to develop their capacity to transform themselves, to increase their agency, to expand their choices about how they wish to live. Thus, ‘the development of capabilities requires the ability to construct one’s preferences (capacity to aspire), to voice them and make them count (capability for voice)’.

Post-secondary education should seek to develop students’ voice in their education, work and wider society. Education should extend its application of these principles to the workplaces where students undertake work integrated or work-based learning. However, trainees may have less scope to exercise their voice at work than on campus.

Collective capabilities

Sen argued that ‘[T]he basic building blocks’ of the capabilities approach is ‘the freedoms of individuals’. Sen is interested in expanding individual liberties and he called his book developing his capabilities approach Development as freedom. But individuals’ freedoms and capabilities are constituted not just by their individual circumstances, but by their membership of social institutions which themselves have varying capabilities. Most basically, the social institution of the family greatly affects members’ capabilities, and reproduces not only people, but differentiated capabilities of successive generations of family members.

Yet families have their own capabilities depending, for example, on their literacy and levels of education, which in turn provides different resources upon which family members can draw. Families have unequal levels of economic, social and cultural capital, which is shaped by relations of class, gender and race and other dimensions of power. Education is collective in three ways, through peers, occupations, and social change. The peer effect is a social multiplier, whereby adults share knowledge with their neighbours and those with whom they interact, developing their peers’ knowledge. This educative role is also collective in building social institutions such as schooling, participating in post-secondary education, and credentialing, although some have argued credentialing has been excessively institutionalised. Education’s educative role is also collective in developing educational organisations such as libraries, educative websites, public lectures, and community education, all of which play a particularly important role in education for adult working learners and other members of the community.

Universities are strongly institutionalised – the idea of a university, of an undergraduate, a lecturer, and a degree are widely understood and reinforced by norms and expectations, despite local variations and changes over time. Universities have strong roles in building and extending social institutions of education and related institutions for the advancement of knowledge and promotion of rational inquiry. Postsecondary education organisations and their staff and students also contribute to the educational, social and cultural leadership of their communities by participating formally and informally in local associations, committees and boards. This develops ‘networks of civic engagement’, which develops communities’ capacity for collective action. Through this post-secondary education institutions anchor their communities by developing knowledge and skills within their region; establishing links and exchanges outside the region; contributing to civic, political, cultural, and social activities and networks in their region; developing facilities and amenities used by the community; and, contributing to their region’s economic activity. Gertler and Vinodrai add that universities foster tolerance, openness and social inclusion:

“First, the university plays an important role in shaping the quality of place and fostering openness and tolerance in the community. Crucial to this process is the ability of the university to create a social environment that is open to dialogue and debate, tolerant of different viewpoints, and accessible to many different social, ethnic, and cultural groups (locally, nationally, and internationally). In other words, the university has a role in reducing ‘barriers to entry’ and working towards social inclusion.”

Capability for higher education at three levels

Thus, higher education develops capabilities at three levels: 1) the individual, 2) social and work groups, and 3) society. Most attention has been given to higher education’s contributions to individuals, and to society. More recently higher education has given attention to teamwork but much of this has been about individuals’ capacity to work in teams rather than the development of the capabilities of groups. The capabilities approach is also strongly applicable to adult, further, and special education, which is the subject of the next in our SRHE Blog series, and of our open access book.

Dr Gavin Moodie is Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Department of Education

Leesa Wheelahan is Professor Emerita and William G. Davis Chair in Community College Leadership Emerita at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Department of Education.


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Introducing the capabilities approach

by Gavin Moodie and Leesa Wheelahan

In 2015 in a blog for SRHE, Rajani Naidoo mentioned, almost in passing, the potential of the capability or capabilities approach to complement the wellbeing framework, which was the approach she advocated.  However, she did not elaborate the approach. Yet the capabilities approach is important for educational and general public policy, and has the potential to transform peoples’ agency. It has become increasingly important in the scholarly literature in all sectors of education.

The capabilities approach was developed by the economics Nobel laureate Amartya Sen and by the distinguished USA philosopher Martha Nussbaum. Sen argued that the aim of public policy should be ‘the expansion of the “capabilities” of persons to lead the kind of lives they value—and have reason to value’. Sen’s argument is that human capability is an alternative to utilitarianism, rights theories of justice, and to human capital theory. While the aim of human capital theory is to increase economic output which may benefit humans, the aim of capabilities is to increase peoples’ freedom, which requires economic resources, but importantly also other arrangements –

“At the risk of some oversimplification, it can be said that the literature on human capital tends to concentrate on the agency of human beings in augmenting production possibilities. The perspective of human capability focuses, on the other hand, on the ability — the substantive freedom — of people to lead the lives they have reason to value and to enhance the real choices they have. The two perspectives cannot be but related, since both are concerned with the role of human beings, and in particular with the actual abilities that they achieve and acquire.

But the yardstick of assessment concentrates on different achievements.”

As Belgian philosopher Ingrid Robeyns explained, the capability approach is a broad normative framework for evaluating and assessing individuals’ well-being and social arrangements, the design of policies, and proposals about social change in society. The capabilities approach is therefore not a list of desirable attributes that people may have, as is suggested by reductive and distorted presentations of the approach. It is not another term for competencies or for skills. It refers to the real freedom individuals have to pursue the things that matter to them, and to live a life they have reason to value, and to the social, economic, political, and the environmental resources and conditions that are needed to realise these opportunities. It is at its core, a relational approach that links individuals, their families and communities, with their society and asks about the social arrangements that are needed to support individuals to realise their aspirations.

Capabilities and functionings

The capabilities approach distinguishes between capabilities and functionings. Capabilities are people’s capacity to act, while functionings are the outcomes from people using their capabilities to achieve a particular goal. A complex set of capabilities provides individuals with the basis for making choices in their lives, whereas functionings are the outcomes they achieve when they exercise choice. A particular set of capabilities can produce any number of outcomes. Walker and Unterhalter explained that: “The difference between a capability and  functioning is one between an opportunity to achieve and the actual achievement, between potential and outcome”. Two people with similar capability sets may make choices that result in different functionings or outcomes. Capabilities cannot be regarded as isolated attributes or resources. Rather, they need to be understood as a ‘set’ or ensemble of interlocking capacities or potentials for action that allows people to make choices.

Agency

In addition to capabilities and functionings, a third key concept in the capabilities approach is agency. Agency is a person’s ability to pursue and realise goals that they value and have reason to value. People need agency to identify, value, and prioritise capabilities. For this Sen emphasised transparent scrutiny, general social discussion, and continued public reasoning. For Sen, capabilities are contingent on circumstances specific to their context and the purpose for which they are identified, and reflect the particular reality that any particular society faces.

The capabilities approach emphasises the importance of agency and distinguishes between different forms of agency, particularly between ensuring people have the freedom to choose how they will pursue their goals (process freedom) and the opportunities that are needed to realise their goals (opportunity freedom). However, it does not develop a full conception of the human agent, leaving this to different ‘capability theories’ and the uses towards which it is being put in different contexts.

We use the work of capability theorists, Bonvin and Laruffa, to think about human agency. They  draw on anthropology to argue that at the core of the capability approach is a conception of people as receivers (of support for vulnerable people, as we all are at different times of our lives), as doers (who are actors able to contribute to society), and as judges (who are political beings with aspirations, values and desires). Living a life that one has reason to value needs to incorporate all these aspects of our being, and allow us to fulfil multiple aspirations.

We also draw on the work of the late British sociologist and leading critical realist scholar Margaret Archer, who distinguished between individuals and social structures, arguing that each is different and irreducible to the other. She explained, for example, that individuals have the capacity for reflection and introspection, whereas societies have social structures and institutions. Archer argued that the self must simultaneously exist in the natural world, the practical world (for example, engaging in activities at work or at home) and the social world.

Archer argued that the way we mediate and navigate our way in each world is through our ‘internal conversation’, wherein we reflect, consider, make decisions, change our minds and so forth. She argued that the self is defined by the things that matter to us, including who and how we choose to love, and issues, problems or concerns such as these cannot always be reduced to self-interest. We build a social identity through our relational engagement with others and not just because of individual effort, even though our agency helps to shape the nature of this engagement.

This provides a foundation for considering human rights, the obligation that all of us have to each other and the social conditions that underpin civil and political life, which includes work, occupations, and the labour market. It also provides a basis for thinking about the purposes of education and the ways in which it can support human agency.

Conversion factors

Robeyns pointed out that a person’s capacity to convert resources into capabilities and thence functionings depends on three types of conversion factors: personal, social, and environmental.

Personal conversion factors may be relatively unchangeable such as being blind, or they may be more changeable such as not being able to read. Both of these conversion factors affect a person’s capability to read unless they are mediated in some way, such as braille or a text to voice conversion application for the person who is visually impaired, or literacy classes for the person who is not yet literate.

Thus, we see that personal conversion factors may be mediated by social conversion factors. These examples also illustrate that social policies should reflect people’s diversity to ensure that everyone has access to the social resources they need to participate fully in society and to achieve their aspirations. People’s capabilities are also influenced by other social conversion factors such as ‘public policies, social norms, discriminating practises, gender roles, societal hierarchies, power relations’.

The third type of conversion factors is environmental, such as geography, infrastructure, and climate. While most discussion is of the capabilities of individuals, we argue that it is also necessary to consider the capabilities of groups and the collective capability of society.

Broader resources

Capabilities therefore rest upon broader social, economic, cultural and technological resources. For example, people need to have the language, literacy and mathematical skills for engaging and progressing in study and work. They need to have access to the social and economic resources that facilitate their participation in study and work, such as the necessary housing, healthcare, transport and childcare, and enable their participation in civic society and in their communities.

People also need to have the knowledge, skills and attributes required to navigate, negotiate and engage in these aspects of life and in work as the capacity to be skillful in both emerges from broader knowledge, skills and attributes.

Application to education

As Sen and Nussbaum elaborated, clearly education is fundamental to expanding peoples’ capacity to understand and act in the world and thus lead the kind of lives they value and have reason to value. The capabilities approach has therefore been applied to education, and more recently to vocational education, as we elaborated in our open access book and as is explored briefly in our subsequent SRHE Blogs.

Dr Gavin Moodie is Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Department of Education

Leesa Wheelahan is Professor Emerita and William G. Davis Chair in Community College Leadership Emerita at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Department of Education.