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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.


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Navigating research culture(s) in HE: Pracademia and professional identity

by Monika Foster, Jill Dickinson and Debbie Rigby

The intensification of the research agenda across higher education (HE) has sharpened questions about who participates in research, on what terms, and with what support. This is perhaps most prominent in post-1992 institutions whose applied agenda historically called for professionals to join academia to enhance knowledge-practice links, but who are recently experiencing a shift in research intensification. Academics with practitioner experience, commonly referred to as pracademics (Volpe and Chandler, 1999), have the potential to occupy an increasingly significant, yet under-recognised position within this landscape. Entering academia from professional practice, they must simultaneously navigate unfamiliar research cultures, renegotiate their professional identities, and reconcile competing demands from the worlds of practice and scholarship (Huey and Mitchell, 2016).

In this blog, we focus on a British Academy/Leverhulme funded project (Leeds Beckett University, 2026) that explored how pracademics might renegotiate their identities as they operate within, and move between, the different working contexts presented by practice and academia (Johnson and Ellis, 2023; Huey and Mitchell, 2016). We reflect on the findings that highlight the gaps that exist within both the literature and university practices to support pracademics who work within post-1992 institutions in renegotiating their identities as they navigate the research culture within HE.

Understanding research: the practitioner-academic identity and research divide

The literature suggests that pracademics can complement a diverse faculty (Dickinson and Griffiths, 2023) by transgressing boundaries, serving as network brokers between academia and industry, and creating new channels to enhance cooperation and communication across the academic-practitioner divide (Powell et al, 2018; Panda, 2014). However, an emerging pracademic identity may take time to adjust as practitioners might simultaneously hold on to their practitioner identities whilst developing new skills and connections in academia. Institutions and external partners that achieve higher levels of practitioner-academic collaboration are more likely to be more successful (Hughes et al, 2011; Posner, 2009). Organisations with the strongest academic networks and research capacities are likely to produce wider social, community and policy impacts as well as the benefits for business (Nicolaou and Birley, 2003; Siegel et al, 2007).

Against this backdrop, we sought to explore the following three questions: What do pracademics understand by the phrase ‘research within HE’? To what extent do pracademics perceive themselves as able to engage in, and navigate, the research within HE? And What other factors do pracademics perceive as either supporting or inhibiting their potential to contribute to the research within HE?

Practitioner-academic identity and research culture

We have purposively sampled institutions that are likely to employ a significant number of pracademics and that are developing their research agenda alongside their teaching offer. Post-1992 institutions (granted university status through the Further and Higher Education Act 1992) have traditionally recruited more pracademics (Obembe, 2023) and are increasingly focused on strengthening their research alongside their teaching provision (Guthrie and Neumann, 2007). Through an online survey completed by forty-five pracademics working in post-1992 universities, we intended to build an initial picture of pracademics’ experiences by exploring understandings of research culture, confidence in engaging in research, and professional identity, which helped identify key issues for further exploration.

The survey results highlighted no single understanding or definition of what research culture meant and participants consistently described it as much more than simply undertaking research. Factors perceived to support engagement with research culture included: supportive colleagues, mentoring, collaboration, opportunities for informal knowledge exchange and access to research development opportunities. In contrast, competing workload demands, limited time, unclear pathways into research, unfamiliar academic processes, and a lack of confidence seem to inhibit engagement.

Based on the survey outcomes, we explored further pracademics’ professional identity, how they navigate research culture, what they value in research, and how they experience the changing expectations of higher education in focus groups. Focus groups’ participants were from a range of disciplines including education, business, law, social work and policy. The focus group discussions were analysed using Reflexive Thematic Analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006), and four interconnected themes emerged that capture pracademics’ journey and transition, starting with their professional identities, making sense of research culture, practitioners’ values, and how these values and experiences sit within a changing higher education landscape.

Theme 1: “It’s the synergy between the two”. Constructing a pracademic identity

Who am I becoming as a pracademic? Across the focus groups, we noted a recurring theme of professional identities, bringing established professional knowledge, values and experience into HE, drawing upon different aspects of themselves depending on the context. For many, their practitioner and academic identities were not experienced as separate or competing, but as closely connected. This is captured well in the words of one of the focus groups participants: “it’s the synergy between the two that makes it really interesting”, explaining that “sometimes it’s the practice that’s doing the heavy lifting and sometimes it’s the academic bit that’s doing the heavy lifting.”

Theme 2: “Learning the rules of a different game”. Navigating the hidden cultures of higher education

How do I learn to navigate the academic world? Although the research participants entered HE with substantial professional expertise, many reported feeling unexpectedly like novices when trying to grasp research culture. Research culture was described differently across the focus groups. Some participants described it as the environment in which research happens, whilst others reflected on arriving in HE with little understanding of where to begin “a little bit daunting on arrival”.These discussions suggest that engaging with research culture involves much more than learning research skills; it involves learning the language, expectations and culture of HE itself.

Theme 3: “Working with people rather than on people”. Practitioner values shaping research

What values do pracademics bring? Participants described research through the values they brought with them from professional practice. Research was described as most valuable when it remained connected to the communities and professions it sought to serve. Across the focus groups, participants consistently described their practitioner experience as shaping not only the research they wanted to undertake, but also how they understood impact. Research was valued for its ability to improve practice, support students and contribute to professional communities, research is not as an activity separate from practice, but as an extension of it.

Theme 4: When pracademic values meet institutional realities. Negotiating value within contemporary HE

What happens when those values encounter the realities of contemporary higher education? Whilst there was a strong commitment to research across the focus groups, participants also described becoming increasingly aware of what appeared to be recognised, rewarded and made visible within contemporary universities. Research outputs, funding applications and academic progression were often interpreted as indicators of what institutions value. A recurring thread throughout these discussions was participants’ growing awareness that research culture is changing, has research culture become “an empty signifier for ‘how many articles are you getting published in four-star journals?'”, whilst also asking where professional expertise, leadership and knowledge exchange fitted within this changing landscape.

Navigating research culture in a changing HE landscape

Overall, our study has shone a light on how pracademics navigate research culture within a changing HE landscape. Beyond simply identifying barriers to engagement, we explored how they establish professional identities and shape participants’ understandings of meaningful research, academic identity and the changing expectations of contemporary universities. The findings from the project suggest that these pracademics do not experience becoming academics as leaving their practitioner identities behind. They consistently describe building upon their professional knowledge, skills and values. Their practitioner identities remain central to how they understand themselves and the contribution they make within HE.

It is apparent that pracademics move between practitioner and academic perspectives depending on the context in which they are working. This flexibility strengthens their teaching, shapes the research questions they ask, and enables them to connect with students, colleagues and professional communities reflecting both worlds. Given the richness of contributions that pracademics can make in research and practice in universities, we hope that these findings might inform a broad range of stakeholders, including: policymakers, HE-related charities, senior university leadership, human resources and organisational development, research development, those who self-identify as pracademics, and those who have taken more traditional career paths.

Monika Foster is Professor of Business Education and Associate Pro Vice-Chancellor International and Educational Partnerships at Northumbria University, National Teaching Fellow and PFHEA, her research interests include leadership and change management, cross-cultural management and social capital development.

Jill Dickinson is Professor of Law and Professional Development at Leeds Law School, Leeds Beckett University, PFHEA, an Executive Coach (L7) and Solicitor (non-practising), and her research draws on creative methods to explore professional development and place-making.

Debbie Rigby is a PhD researcher at Leeds Beckett University and a former secondary school science teacher, Assistant Headteacher and teacher educator with a particular interest in research culture and professional identity in higher education.


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Do we know how many Black professors there are in UK higher education?

by Zarus Cenac

UK higher education is known to have too few Black professors (eg Hubbard, 2026). The presence of Black professors can be thought about by looking at 1) the number of Black professors or 2) the percentage of professors who are Black (Adisa et al, 2025; Gibney, 2024). The number/percentage has been referred to, for instance, in journal articles (Adisa et al, 2025; Arday, 2022), the media (Coughlan, 2021), and in the House of Lords (House of Lords, 2025). We can keep an eye on the number, or the percentage, to have an idea about if the situation is improving (Gibney, 2024; Nowell, 2025). So, is it not vital that we have accurate numbers and percentages? In a recent post on SRHE Blog, I considered how to statistically analyse the representation of Black professors in different ways –analyses showed that Black professors are underrepresented (Cenac, 2026a). In the present blog post, I discuss issues with the apparent number of Black professors and the apparent percentage of professors who are Black – this blog post asks if we actually know the number and the percentage (Figure 1), and this blog post considers if we really should say that Black people are underrepresented in the professoriate.

Figure 1: Factors Which May Affect Our Measurement of the Black Presence in the Professoriate

Note. Figure 1 is based on the literature/data (Dembosky et al, 2019; HESA, 2026; Gibney, 2022). See the main text for full explanations. HESA is the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA, nd-a).

The number of Black professors

When people wish to say how many Black professors there are, a source they can use is the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) (eg Essilfie-Quaye et al, 2025; Gibney, 2024) who “are the experts in UK higher education data” (HESA, nd-a, para 1). However, there are two points to consider: firstly, we should be mindful of how HESA categorises an academic as a professor (HESA, nd-b), and, secondly, ethnicity is unknown for a proportion of professors in the HESA data (HESA, 2026). Those two points are discussed next.

Professors in HESA data

In the HESA data, a professor may be classified as a professor (HESA, 2026, nd-c). Alternatively, a professor can be categorised into a different senior group for academics, for example, if the professor’s role is managerial (HESA, 2026; nd-c). So, there is a good chance that the HESA professor category shows us fewer professors than there truly are, and HESA are open about this (HESA, 2026) – see Figure 2. The different senior group is not limited to professors (HESA, 2026, nd-b); from looking through the HESA website (HESA, nd-b; 2024, 2026), HESA seem not to have data which specifies how many professors there are in the different senior group (eg overall or for Black professors).

Going by HESA data (HESA, 2024; 2026) and literature on the presence of Black professors, we can see instance after instance where the number of Black professors (eg Arday, 2022; Essilfie-Quaye et al, 2025; Gibney, 2024; Nowell, 2025) seems to have been derived from the HESA professor category, and (to my knowledge) without mentioning the issue that the HESA professor category may not include all professors because some professors are potentially being put into the different senior group. If awareness of this issue is not as good as it should be, perhaps HESA should consider if the issue could be communicated more obviously, for example, referring to it just before/after the table in HESA (2024) or HESA (2026) which breaks down the HESA professor category by ethnic group.

Figure 2: Black Female Professors

Note. Figure 2 refers to WHEN Equality (2026) and uses data from HESA (nd-d).

Unknown ethnicity

Ethnicity is not known for all academics in the HESA professor category (HESA, 2026). For example, ethnicity it is not known for 2,210 of those professors in the 2024–25 academic year (HESA, 2026). Because of this, we really should expect the number given for Black professors in the HESA professor category to be fewer than the true number of Black professors.

The percentage (proportion) of professors who are Black

If we want to see how well Black professors are represented, we can look to the percentage or proportion of people in the HESA professor category who are Black (eg Adisa et al, 2025; Cenac, 2026a; Essilfie-Quaye et al, 2025). For instance, statistical analyses (of people whose ethnicity is known) indicate that Black people are substantially less represented in the HESA professor category than they are in 1) the UK working-age population overall (Cenac, 2026a), and 2) an older section of the UK working-age population (Cenac, 2026b). Next, we will consider (in two ways) if percentages (proportions) from the HESA professor category actually are useful for looking into the representation of Black academics.

Professors in the HESA data

As covered earlier in this blog post, in the HESA data, professors can be in the professor category or the different senior group (HESA, 2026). We do not know if the percentage of professors who are Black would be different in the HESA professor category than it is for professors in the HESA different senior group. In the HESA data, professors with (at least) a certain level of seniority will not be categorised as professors, instead being put into the different senior group (HESA, 2026). Black representation is known to decrease the higher up people are in the academic hierarchy, from undergraduate student to professor (eg Gibney, 2022). So, it would not be surprising if Black representation is greater amongst the HESA professor category than amongst professors in the different senior group. Therefore, the percentage of Black people in the HESA professor category could be higher than the true percentage of professors who are Black. This means that the notable underrepresentation of Black people in the HESA professor category (Cenac, 2026a) would likely be found even if analysis included professors from the different senior group.

On the other hand, out of people whose ethnicity is known, Black people are 1.13% of the HESA professor category in 2024–25 (Cenac, 2026a), but 1.69% of the different senior group in the HESA (2026) data for 2024–25. So, it might not be the case that Black people are represented worse in the HESA professor category than they are amongst professors in the different senior group.

In the HESA (2026) data for 2024–25, there are nearly four times as many people in the professor category than in the different senior group. Therefore, findings with the HESA professor category are likely to be representative of what is happening with professors in general. So, it does seem useful to use percentages from the HESA professor category if we wish to know about the representation of Black professors.

Unknown ethnicity

Ethnicity is not known for some academics in the HESA data (HESA, 2026). When it comes to people giving their racial or ethnic background in a survey, some people refrain from giving their background (Dembosky et al, 2019). This refraining is suggested to not be the same across different backgrounds, with results indicating that Black people refrain the most whilst the group who refrain the least are White people who are other than Hispanic (Dembosky et al, 2019). If Black professors hold back on declaring their background more than other groups of professors, that could make it seem like the percentage of professors who are Black is lower than it truly is. However, the difference in the rate at which Black people and non-Hispanic White people refrain from giving their background (in a survey) is suggested to not even be 4% (Dembosky et al, 2019) – a difference in rates would probably not be an issue when it comes to using the HESA professor category for looking into the representation of Black professors.

Conclusion

The HESA professor category probably does not show us how many Black professors there really are, giving us a number which is lower than the true number of Black professors (eg Figure 2). Although HESA are forthcoming about how professors can be partitioned between the HESA professor category and the different senior group (eg HESA, 2026), HESA should consider if they can convey this better. Even if there truly are more Black professors than the HESA professor category suggests, this blog post is not implying that Black academics are well represented in the professoriate. Overall, the percentage (proportion) of Black professors in the HESA professor category shows a marked underrepresentation (Cenac, 2026a), and, as discussed above, that percentage should give us a good indication of the true representation (the underrepresentation) of Black professors despite factors which may somewhat affect how good the percentage is at indicating how the situation really is (Figure 1). So, when the HESA professor category is used to explore the presence of Black professors, far more emphasis should be put on the percentage or proportion of professors who are Black rather than the number of Black professors.

Zarus Cenac has worked at UK universities, for example, he was a visiting lecturer at City, University of London. He is currently an administrator at UCL. His interests include race and ethnicity from an interdisciplinary perspective.


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Designing together: what co-creation teaches us about human-centred innovation in higher education

By Bo Kelestyn

Lessons from working and publishing with students

In higher education (HE), we often ask students for feedback after the most important decisions have already been made. We ask whether a module worked, whether an event was useful, whether a policy was clear, or whether an initiative landed well. These questions matter. But they also reveal a limitation: students are often invited to evaluate their experience largely designed by others.

Co-creation begins from a different premise. It asks what might happen if students were involved earlier, not only as respondents or representatives, but as people capable of framing problems, imagining alternatives and producing knowledge about HE itself.

Through my work on Designing Together, a student-staff co-creation initiative focused on human-centred educational innovation, I have come to see co-creation not simply as a method for improving student experience, but as a practice of belonging, agency and shared authorship. When students help design, test, refine and communicate ideas, they are not only contributing to better educational provision. They are also experiencing what it means to be taken seriously as members of a learning community.

This matters because belonging is often treated as an outcome: something to be measured, improved or delivered through institutional interventions. But co-creation has taught me that belonging can also happen in the process itself. It can happen in a workshop, around a shared table, in a Padlet comment or Vevox word cloud, in an informal conversation, or in the moment when a student sees their idea shaping a project, publication or decision. Belonging is not only something universities design for students. It is something students and staff can shape together.

Four lessons have stayed with me.

1. Genuinely listen and “keep the door open”

Listening sounds simple, but in practice it requires intentional design. It is not enough to invite students into a room once, ask what they think, and consider the work done. Students need multiple ways to contribute, including ways that are informal, low-pressure and ongoing.

As a Director of Student Experience, I used Padlets and shared Teams spaces that allowed students to offer informal feedback, add ideas asynchronously and build on one another’s thoughts. This is a contrast to the often preferred surveys that make responses invisible once you click ‘submit’. I created a ‘Heard it on the Grapevine’ Padlet, for example, where students could post things they heard from other students and ‘fact check’ information about the programme, marks or policies before they become toxic rumours. As a Course Director, I set up small funds for student-led projects, signalling that ideas could move beyond discussion into action. As a lecturer, I carve out 10-15 minutes of ‘corridor time’ after teaching for informal conversations, creating space for trust, humour, uncertainty and relationship-building, all the things that rarely fit neatly into a student-staff liaison committee agenda, but often make meaningful collaboration possible.

Keeping the door open is important because students do not always know what they want to say at the exact moment we ask them. They may need time to reflect. They may want to see whether staff are genuinely listening before they speak candidly. They may have ideas that emerge only after a workshop, a conversation with peers, or an experience elsewhere in the university. Not to mention a whole spectrum of cultural differences, neurodiversity needs, and life circumstances that shape this too.  

A human-centred approach to co-creation recognises this. It treats listening not as an event, but as an infrastructure: a set of habits, spaces and relationships that make it easier for students to keep contributing.

2. Think joyful and win-win

Co-creation should be serious in purpose, but it does not need to feel heavy. Some of my most generative student-staff work happened when the atmosphere was creative, welcoming and energising. Small details like music, colour, and good food matter. Using pens, cards, prompts and materials that invite people to think with their hands as well as their heads. Or designing activities that feel purposeful (intentionally low tech) but also enjoyable. And, importantly, choices that show we have paid attention. “Pizza for students” has become almost a shorthand for engagement, but it is worth asking students what would actually make a session feel welcoming. The answer may be different from what we assume. In one of the student-led projects, for example, we got crepes and bubble tea, instead of pizza and Coke, and University-branded teddies instead of the usual Amazon/Love2Shop vouchers. This fundamentally reshaped that student-staff dialogue.

Joy is not a superficial add-on. It changes the quality of participation. When students feel relaxed, curious and valued, they are more likely to take creative risks. They are more likely to move beyond complaint into possibility. They are more likely to feel that they have not just given something to the institution but taken something away for themselves.

This is why co-creation should be win-win. Students should leave with more than the feeling of having been consulted. They should develop confidence, language, networks and skills. Applying design thinking to co-creation helps to boost problem-solving, collaboration, communication, teamwork skills, and even sustainability competencies. Staff should also learn, not only about student experience, but also about their own assumptions and biases. Good co-creation is mutually developmental. It creates value for the project, for the students, for staff and for the wider learning community.

3. Asking “what do you need?” is not enough

One of the most important lessons I have learned is that simply asking students what they need, although an important question, does not always produce the most inclusive or imaginative outcomes. The same goes for staff. This is not because we do not know our own experiences. We do. But direct questions can put people on the spot. They can privilege those who are already confident, articulate or familiar with institutional language. They can also lead to familiar answers, repeated frustrations, or what can feel like a “moan fest”. Not because we like being negative, but because the format invites critique without necessarily creating the conditions for reimagining.

Human-centred design-led co-creation is powerful because it changes the nature of the conversation. Rather than asking students to arrive with fully formed solutions, it creates a process through which ideas can emerge. Design thinking and facilitation tools such as scenarios, mapping activities and prototyping exercises help us move from experience to insight, and then from insight to possibility. They also make participation more inclusive: no one has to have the perfect answer immediately, and ideas can be built collectively.

This is where co-creation becomes more than consultation. It allows students and staff to reframe the problem together. What I have observed is that sometimes what first appears to be a request for more information is actually a need for belonging. I learnt this from the work of Professor Radka Newton, who often cites Disney’s ‘What time is the 3 o’clock parade?’ thinking. Sometimes what sounds like a complaint about communication is really about trust. Sometimes the most useful idea appears halfway through an activity, sparked by someone else’s comment, a visual prompt or a moment of shared recognition.

Human-centred innovation depends on this kind of emergence. It does not assume that the problem is already known. It creates the conditions for better questions to surface.

4. Close the feedback loop. Then open it again

One of the quickest ways to damage trust in student-staff partnership is to ask for input and then disappear. Students need to know what happened next. What was changed? What was not changed? Why? What is still being explored? Where did their contributions go?

Closing the feedback loop is a known challenge, but we should not hide from it because it communicates mattering and respect. It shows that student labour has been recognised. It also helps students understand the complexity of institutional change: the constraints, trade-offs and timescales that are often invisible from the outside.

But co-creation should not be imagined as a neat linear process: ask-listen-act-report back-finish. It is better understood as a cycle. Communicate, share, update and ask again. Return to students with prototypes, drafts, early findings or emerging decisions. Invite them to challenge what has been interpreted from their contributions. Make visible where their ideas have shaped the work.

I find this cyclical approach is especially important when working and publishing with students. Authorship is not just about whose name appears on a paper or blog. It is about how ideas are generated, developed, represented and credited. Writing and publishing with students requires explicit conversations about roles, expectations, confidence, time and recognition. It also requires care. Academic writing can be unfamiliar and intimidating, but it can also be a powerful site of belonging when students see that their experiences and interpretations are part of knowledge production.

In this sense, co-creation is not only a way of designing better educational initiatives. It is a way of changing the relationships through which HE understands itself. For me, the central lesson in projects like Designing Together is that students do not only belong in the university as learners, consumers or sources of feedback. They belong as thinkers, makers, collaborators and authors. When we create the conditions for genuine co-creation, we invite students to help shape the educational futures they are part of. If we believe those futures are to serve our students, we should be designing with, not for or to.

From the work of Susie Wise, we know that invitation is a moment of belonging and must be designed with care. It needs open doors, joyful spaces, inclusive methods and honest feedback loops. It needs staff who are willing to listen without defensiveness, share power without abandoning responsibility, and treat student insight as knowledge rather than anecdote, or worse, “a storm in a teacup”.

Co-creation will not solve every challenge in HE. But it can help us practise a more human-centred form of innovation: one rooted in relationship, imagination and shared purpose. Perhaps its greatest promise is not simply that it helps students feel they belong. It is that it invites us all to help make our universities places worth belonging to.

Dr Bo Kelestyn PFHEA FEEUK is an Associate Professor at Warwick Business School, where she teaches and researches at the intersection of design thinking, education, and digital innovation. 


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International students as a national project: how states brand their higher education

by Evelyn Kim, Annette Bamberger and Sazana Jayadeva

From student choice to state strategy

International student mobility is often framed as a story of individual aspiration. Students, it is widely assumed, choose destinations based on rational calculations of what they stand to gain: prestigious degrees, global networks, enhanced career prospects, and immersion in new sociocultural contexts amongst others. This narrative centres students and to a lesser extent institutions, which compete for their patronage. Yet it often obscures the role of the state in shaping where, and how, international education is imagined in the first place (Bamberger & Kim, 2022; Sidhu, 2006).

The recruitment of international students has increasingly become a national project. While established destinations such as the UK have long maintained coordinated campaigns and online platforms to promote their higher education systems, what is particularly noteworthy today is the spread of such initiatives across a wider range of countries. Governments now invest in coordinated branding campaigns, frequently under the moniker “Study in X” websites (such as Study in Hong Kong and Study in Germany), that promote entire higher education systems under the national banner, often accompanied by social media channels such as Facebook and YouTube. These platforms are carefully curated spaces through which states project what they perceive makes their country distinctive and attractive as a study destination.

We argue that this constitutes a form of nation branding: the strategic creation and projection of ‘the nation’ throughhigher education (Kim & Bamberger, 2025; Lomer et al, 2018). These campaigns do not focus solely on academic excellence or global competitiveness. They weave together claims about innovation, economic power, cultural richness, affordability and safety, constructing an integrated narrative in which higher education becomes a gateway to the nation.

The persuasive strategies used in these campaigns vary. Some build credibility through rankings and research metrics, while others appeal to emotion by invoking culture and a sense of belonging. Still others foreground practical considerations such as affordability or post-study employment opportunities. Across these approaches, national higher education branding relies on distinctive “identity markers” to position countries as attractive study destinations Particularly in contexts associated with geopolitical or social tensions, branding efforts may seek to recalibrate external perceptions by foregrounding narratives of excellence and stability, while leaving more contentious political realities out of view.

It is in such contexts that national higher education branding becomes most revealing. As we examine in our recent article, India, Israel and South Korea offer striking examples (Bamberger et al, 2026). These countries embarked on higher education internationalisation at different moments, with Korea taking an early lead in the 2000s, while India and Israel launched major initiatives in the late 2010s. All three have seen notable growth in international student enrolments over the past two decades, even if they still host far fewer students than established Anglo-European destinations. Each is also a relatively young political state with strong ethnonational identities, close ties to diasporic communities, and enduring regional geopolitical tensions. These dynamics shape how the nation is perceived internationally, making higher education branding a particularly strategic tool.

To explore how destinations beyond the established core construct their national higher education brands, we analysed how three government-affiliated websites – Study in Korea, Study in India and Study in Israel – have evolved since their launch, drawing on both archival versions of the websites and their current content. We traced the identity markers these websites create over time: who they claim to be, what they omit, and how they try to persuade prospective international students.

What quickly became clear was that these platforms do far more than market universities. They tell a broader story about the nation itself. Familiar tropes in higher education marketing, such as academic excellence and global competitiveness feature prominently, but so too do promises of cultural experiences, inclusive and vibrant student life, and future career opportunities.

Yet the stories these websites tell are not the same. While several identity markers recur across the campaigns, each country communicates them in strikingly different ways.

Different paths, different priorities

One of the most striking findings from our research is that national higher education brands evolve in markedly different ways. The trajectories of these campaigns reflect shifting national priorities, as well as how each country positions itself within the global higher education landscape.

South Korea’s branding demonstrates the greatest degree of adaptation. Early versions of the Study in Korea platform emphasised the country’s rapid transformation from post-war hardship to global economic success, drawing on emotional and credibility-based appeals. Over time, however, the narrative shifts toward measurable indicators of performance, with global rankings, international assessments such as OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment, and employability becoming central to claims of excellence. These comparisons often highlight how neighbouring countries perform, particularly where they rank lower. In this way, regional comparison becomes evidence of South Korea’s educational strength.

More recently, emotional appeals have re-emerged through international student ambassadors and social media storytelling, alongside a stronger emphasis on post-graduation employment opportunities, reflecting mounting concerns about South Korea’s shrinking workforce.

India’s campaign, by contrast, has followed a trajectory of relative continuity, albeit with subtle shifts. The Study in India website consistently foregrounds civilisational heritage, multiculturalism and the country’s long history as a centre of learning, positioning India as both ancient and globally connected. In early versions of the website, it drew on narratives predominantly associated with Hindu civilisational traditions to position India as an enduring source of knowledge and spiritual heritage. These were complemented by claims about the scale and diversity of India’s contemporary higher education system, as well as portrayals of India as a “pocket-friendly” and accessible destination.

However, more recently, signs of change have begun to emerge. There has been a gradual recalibration in emphasis, with a relative de-emphasis of cultural and civilisational narratives in favour of more pragmatic appeals to affordability, accessibility and global competitiveness. While the overall framing remains stable, these shifts suggest an attempt to reposition India more clearly within an increasingly competitive international education market.

Israel represents yet another trajectory. Since its launch in 2017, the Study in Israel website has changed relatively little despite major geopolitical developments, suggesting that national higher education branding may not always be a sustained policy priority. The campaign continues to project a stable narrative centred on innovation, positioning higher education within the country’s reputation as a “Start-Up Nation”. In this framing, higher education is closely associated with research intensity, technological entrepreneurship and strong links to high-tech industries. The campaign also emphasises academic excellence and draws on representations of Israel’s religious and historical heritage, alongside a tourism-oriented student experience. It further constructs distinct appeals to both international students and the Jewish diaspora.

What the branding leaves unsaid

Notably, the campaigns also reveal what is left unsaid. None of the websites explicitly addresses the longstanding geopolitical tensions surrounding these countries, including regional conflicts such as Israel-Palestine, India-Pakistan, and the Korean peninsula. Instead, these platforms largely sidestep overt political issues and historical disputes, foregrounding alternative narratives that present the nation as stable and welcoming.

Multiculturalism and openness are frequently emphasised, particularly in the cases of India and Israel, where appeals to tolerance and diversity help construct an image of inclusivity. Safety also emerges as a prominent marker in Israel’s campaign, which provides detailed descriptions of security infrastructure while simultaneously presenting an image of harmonious coexistence that downplays more complex social and political realities.

This selectivity, we posit, is not incidental, but the result of deliberate curation in how the nation is represented to external audiences. What is highlighted, and what is omitted, reflects a broader effort to position the country favourably within international student mobility flows, echoing critiques of national education branding as a selective and performative practice (Stein, 2018).

Seen in this light, national higher education branding becomes more than a strategy for attracting students. It is a state-led project through which countries mobilise particular identity markers and, in doing so, position themselves within an increasingly competitive and multipolar global higher education landscape.

Evelyn Min Ji Kim is Lecturer in Education in Asia at the UCL Institute of Education, where she also serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Global Higher Education. Her research centres on student happiness and well-being policies, the global governance of education policymaking, and the internationalisation of higher education.

Annette Bamberger is Lecturer in Higher Education, UCL Institute of Education and Senior Lecturer and Head of Higher Education Track at Faculty of Education, Bar-Ilan University.

Sazana Jayadeva is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Surrey. She is an Associate Editor of the journal Sociology and co-convenes SRHE’s International Research and Researchers’ Network. She is also affiliated with the GIGA Institute of Asian Studies in Germany as an Associate Researcher. Her research revolves around the broad themes of education, migration, and digital and social media.