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Unmasking the complexities of academic work

by Inger Mewburn

Hang out in any tearoom and you will hear complaints about work – that’s if there even is a tea room at the end of your open plan cubicle farm. Yet surprisingly little is known about the mundane, daily realities of academic work itself – despite the best efforts of many SRHE members.

Understanding the source of academic work unhappiness is important: unhappy academics lead to unhappy students and stressed-out administrators. If we know more about academics’ working lives, we are better placed to care for our colleagues and produce the kind of research and teaching our broader communities expect of us.

To understand more about academics’ working lives, we are embarking on an ambitious research project to survey 5000 working academics and would love you to take part.

Who is doing the ‘academic housework’?

Higher education institutions are major employers and substantial contributors to national economies. Yet there is a notable lack of comprehensive research on the practicalities of academic work, particularly with respect to how we bring our ‘whole self’ to work.

Just about everyone in academia is dealing with some aspect of their lives which affects how they do their work. Some are neurodiverse, with neurodiverse teenagers at home. Others may have a disability and are part of an under-represented group. More of us than you would think face financial precariousness and just being a woman can result in being given more of the ‘academic housework’. The impact of these various circumstances can be negative or positive from the employer point of view. For example, we know that neurodivergent academics spend a lot of energy ‘masking’ to make other people’s work lives easier, often at the expense of their own wellbeing (Jones, 2023). But we also know that including neurodiverse people in research groups can increase scientific productivity. At the same time, many neurodivergent people avoid disclosing for fear of stigma (even the word ‘disclose’ suggests that individuals should feel shame for merely being who they are).

Benefits for our employers can come at a great cost for us as individuals. While a body of literature exists on factors that affect student academic performance in university settings, there is no equivalent focus on university staff. The literature on students helps us design appropriate processes and services to try to even out the playing field and help everyone reach their potential. But we do not show this same compassion towards ourselves. The existing discourse on academics as workers tends to revolve around output metrics and shallow performance measures. This narrow focus fails to capture the full spectrum of academic labour and our lived experiences.

Our research aims to fill this gap by exploring how academics experience their work from their own perspectives. We seek to understand how the production of knowledge occurs, how academic work is constructed and experienced through daily practices, with a specific focus on academic productivity and distraction. We want to see how various bio-demographic factors interrelate and impact feelings like overwhelm and exhaustion.

Why this research matters

The importance of this study is multifaceted:

1. Informing Policy and Practice: By gaining a deeper understanding of academic work patterns, institutions can develop more effective policies to support their staff and enhance productivity and wellbeing.

2. Addressing Inequalities: The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted and exacerbated existing inequalities in academia. Our research will explore how factors such as gender, caring responsibilities, and neurodiversity impact academic work experiences.

3. Adapting to Change: As the higher education sector continues to evolve, particularly in the wake of the pandemic and the rise of digital technologies like AI, it’s crucial to understand how these changes affect academic work practices.

4. Supporting Well-being: By examining the interplay between productivity, distraction, and work intensity, we can identify strategies to better support academics’ well-being and job satisfaction.

5. Enhancing Knowledge Production: Ultimately, by understanding and improving the conditions of academic work, we can enhance the quality and quantity of knowledge production in higher education and make better classrooms for everyone.

A comprehensive approach

Our study employs a mixed-methods approach, combining a large-scale survey with follow-up interviews. This methodology allows us to capture both broad trends and individual experiences, providing a nuanced picture of academic work life.

The survey covers a wide range of topics, including:

– Perceptions of academic productivity

– Experiences of distraction and focus

– Work distribution across research, teaching, and administration

– Impact of factors such as neurodiversity, caring responsibilities, and chronic conditions

– Use of technology and AI in academic work

– Feelings of belonging and value within the academic community

We are particularly interested in exploring how these factors intersect and influence each other. For instance, how does neurodiversity impact experiences of productivity and distraction? How do caring responsibilities interact with gender in relation to the number of hours worked and where the work takes place? And who thinks AI is helpful to their work and how are people ‘cognitively offloading’ to machines?

Call for participation

The success of this research hinges on wide participation from across the academic community. We are seeking respondents from all career stages, disciplines, and geographical locations. Whether you’re a seasoned professor or a new PhD student, whether you identify as neurodivergent or not, whether you love academic life or find it challenging – your experiences are valuable and needed.

Moreover, this research provides an opportunity for self-reflection. By engaging with the survey questions, you may gain new insights into your own work practices and experiences, potentially leading to personal growth and improved work strategies.

Looking ahead

The findings from this study will be disseminated through various channels, including academic publications, teaching materials, and potentially, policy recommendations. We are committed to making our results accessible and applicable to the wider academic community.

We stand at a critical juncture in higher education. As the sector faces unprecedented challenges and changes, understanding the nature of academic work has never been more important. By participating in this research, you can play a crucial role in shaping the future of academia.

To participate in the survey or learn more about the study, please visit the survey here: https://anu.au1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_eEeXg1L3RZJJWce.

Professor Inger Mewburn is the Director of Researcher Development at The Australian National University where she oversees professional development workshops and programs for all ANU researchers. Aside from creating new posts on the Thesis Whisperer blog (www.thesiswhisperer.com), she writes scholarly papers and books about research education, with a special interest in post PhD employability, research communications and neurodivergence.

Reference

Jones, S (2023) ‘Advice for autistic people considering a career in academia’ Autism 27(7) pp 2187–2192


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Five challenges for policy research on higher education

by William Locke

Higher education research has grown in recent decades. For example, the number of journal articles published on higher education has increased five-fold in the last twenty years (Seeber, 2023). More is known about higher education than ever before, but there does not seem to be a corresponding growth in higher education policymaking being influenced by this expanding evidence base (Schendel and Knobel, 2024). Indeed, higher education seems to be more or less in crisis – and even under attack – in democratic as well as authoritarian systems, and in rich as well as middle- and low-income countries. Here, I offer five interrelated challenges for policy research on higher education. No doubt, there is more to be said about each of these, and there are other challenges that could be added. Perhaps readers might like to make suggestions in the comments.

1. How to expand international connection and collaboration in an increasingly fragmented and divided world?

Schendel and Knobel (2024) argue for greater collaboration among higher education scholars in different countries and regions, and between researchers and policymakers. They also argue for the translation of knowledge from academic discourse to more accessible forms and between languages, especially to and from the lingua franca of English. They call for connections to be made between different evidence bases, contexts and ways of understanding. These collaborations and connections should not just be among scholars from countries in the ‘West’, but arise from the formation of equitable partnerships between researchers based in the Global South and North, and among those based in expanding and emerging systems. These would allow an exchange of non-Western perspectives and indigenous knowledges within the higher education research and policy communities and “a more global, multi-national, transnational or cosmopolitan optic” (Brooks, 2023, Brooks & Waters, 2022).  Journal editors, for example, should be more sensitive to the location of researchers and the substantive focus of their research (Brooks, 2023).

2. How to place local and national research in regional and international contexts for a potentially global readership?

There is also evidence that higher education research has become more international in scope in recent years (Brooks, 2023; Daenekindt & Huisman, 2020; Kehm, 2015; Kwiek, 2021; Tight, 2021). However, it is important to distinguish between an increasing number of studies of the internationalisation of higher education – often limited to student mobility between nations – and an international or comparative perspective, which may focus on national, or even local, issues but place these within a broader context. Clearly, the collaboration of researchers from different countries and regions already mentioned can help this comparative and contextualised approach, provided there is a well-developed understanding of the differences between the objects of study as well as the similarities. Loosening the dominance of the English language in international higher education research networks will help to achieve this contextualised comparison.

3. How to encourage contributions from a wider range of disciplines and theoretical approaches?

Higher education is not just a topic of study for higher education researchers. As an ‘open access’ field (Harland, 2012), it is also a focus for disciplines such as sociology, economics, business studies, political science, psychology and even geography.  As in other porous areas of the social sciences, this is to be welcomed as a way of incorporating new perspectives, concepts, theories and methodologies into the field.  While this may have led to a certain lack of interaction and integration initially (Macfarlane, 2012; Tight, 2014), the trend towards interdisciplinary scholarship can bring these different perspectives together in creative ways. After all, it is likely that more holistic, multi-disciplinary and innovative approaches will be needed to understand and address current and future challenges, such as artificial intelligence, decolonising the curriculum, academic precarity and populist critiques of universities. Topic-based networks of scholars – where the focus of study rather than the discipline is prime – can encourage this. A major task, however, is to provide space for indigenous knowledges and new ways of knowing that may challenge traditional disciplinary hierarchies and ‘Western’ epistemologies.

4. How to focus on deeper, longer-term issues without losing immediate relevance for policymaking?

On the one hand, we might ask how evidence-based higher education research is? Some of what is submitted for publication is description, commentary, impressionistic interpretation and, even, polemic. We might also ask what form might an acceptable evidence base take? Policymakers tend to look for unambiguous findings that provide clear-cut guidance for decision-making – hard data of a quantitative rather than a qualitative kind. Yet, in education, meaningful quantitative studies are harder to accomplish than in some other areas of public policy. Systematic reviews of literature and randomised control trials do not work as well in education as in medicine, for example. Do we actively seek to build the evidence base? Or do we risk creating fragmented knowledge produced by a series of short-term, small-scale, barely connected projects, based on different and incompatible theoretical and conceptual foundations or employing methodologies that cannot be scaled up?

We should also acknowledge that higher education researchers are investigating their own world. They are interested parties in the object of their studies. Their research agendas are likely to be influenced by these ‘interests’. (Many readers will be familiar with doctoral students researching areas relating to their own experiences, for example, as students or higher education employees). Researchers are often on the receiving end of many of the policies and their impacts. As a result, too much research on higher education has been based on the assumption of a golden age which is being dismantled, rather than from a forward-looking perspective that seeks to meet broader, emerging societal needs.

So, we should recognise the limitations of this expanding higher education research. To date, much of it has been small scale, short-term and dependent on consultancy-style funding. It has had a fragmented and weak institutional base. It has tended to focus on the ‘public life’ of higher education, on strategic issues and their impact, rather than the ‘up close and personal’ issues that can be uncomfortable to investigate. Some of it is only just becoming “disinterested research on reasonably long timescales, with open agendas and based on reflective and critical intellectual values and practices” (Scott, 2000: 124).

On the other hand, how realistic (or idealised) are our conceptions of policymaking and implementation? It is rarely feasible simply to extrapolate the policy implications from a given set of findings, which may simply analyse a problem rather than propose a solution. “It is not a linear, rational-analytical process of examining all the evidence, ‘reading off’ the policy implications of this and then formulating well-designed interventions guaranteed to achieve the outcomes desired” (Locke, 2009: 124). If we are to understand policymaking, and the place of research evidence within it, we have to acknowledge “…the messy realities of influence, pressure, dogma, expediency, conflict, compromise, intransigence, resistance, error, opposition and pragmatism in the policy process” (Ball, 1990: 9). There are many other factors than research findings to take into account in the world of policymaking, not least politics and political expediency (for example, unifying the party, ideology, public opinion and budgets). “A better understanding of the policy-making process and the factors that facilitate or inhibit the take-up of research findings is needed, including the role of the commissioners of research and how findings are presented to, and understood by, policymakers” (Locke, 2009: 125). 

We should also be thinking about the relations between research, policy and practice.  After all, there are gaps between policy and practice: the infamous unintended consequences of policy implementation. However, there is also the danger of slipping into a utilitarian, ‘what works’ frame. The relations between research, policy and practice are empirical matters, themselves open to research and investigation. Studies of policymaking and implementation can enlighten us about the successes and failures of particular policies in specific contexts, and the factors that influence these.  Perhaps we should be aiming for policymaking that is influenced and informed, rather than driven, by evidence? 

5. How to explore the policy implications of research findings in ways that can be useful to policymakers?

The higher education research and policy communities are not always so separate. Research commissioned by policy bodies makes up quite a large proportion of funded higher education research. Most higher education researchers want their research to have impact, and policymakers (at least below ministerial level) want evidence on which to base their policymaking. There is some movement between these worlds, but there should be more and think tanks play a critical role in mediating between the worlds of research and policy. Finally, networked governance suggests we should be looking at audiences beyond government and parliament, to include wider public engagement with research findings, which is essential to democracies.

But how far should this constructive engagement go? It is naïve to think that educational research can solve problems on its own. The relationship between research and policy has been characterized as indirect and more about ‘sensitising’ policymakers to problems than solving them. Research might be seen more as a means of helping policymakers reconsider issues, think differently, reconceptualise what the problem is, and challenge old assumptions. This suggests a more serendipitous and loose relationship between research and policy. So, perhaps we need to be more modest in our aspirations for evidence-informed policy and practice and adopt a greater degree of realism about what can be achieved.

This is an abridged version of the editorial from the latest issue of Policy Reviews in Higher Education.

William Locke is a founding Joint Editor of the journal and a recovering academic. Recently retired, he is a former Director of the Centre for the Study of Higher Education (CSHE) at the University of Melbourne, Director of the Centre for Higher Education Studies (CHES) at the UCL Institute of Education and Deputy Director of the Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE). He has also had senior policy roles at the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and Universities UK.

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The Secret Lecturer: What Really Goes on at University

Canbury Press 2024, 208pp. ISBN 9781914487217 (paperback), 9781914487224 (ebook)

Review by Rob Cuthbert

If you do research in higher education, this book might make you angry – but probably not for the reasons the author hopes. The blurb says: ”For more than a decade, the deteriorating state of the higher education sector in the UK has been known to insiders, but not to the public. Now … an academic who must remain anonymous … presents a no-holds-barred account of life on campus.”

I had high hopes. The Secret Barrister was a runaway success, earning the respect of professionals and public alike. The Secret Doctor trod much the same path. Surely The Secret Lecturer could not fail to do for higher education what its predecessors had done for law and medicine?

Yes it could. So why was it such a disappointment? Not because it is full of jaw-dropping anecdotes and stories which could be hard to believe. I believed all of them, and too many HE staff will have had many similar experiences. The disappointment is at an opportunity wasted, with the book’s opening sentence enough to deflate all expectations:

“For many people the question, ‘Are British universities f***ed?’ is as rhetorical as ‘Does the Supreme Pontiff devoutly believe in the monotheistic faith he leads?’ or ‘Do members of the Ursidae family of carnivorous mammals defecate in arboreal regions?’”

Many would be tempted to stop there. This “no-holds-barred account” comes from someone too bitter to let his professed love of higher education show, and not as clever as he thinks he is (the text suggests it is a ‘he’).

Where other secret professionals enrich their anecdotes with insights on how their profession could be better and develop a convincing narrative, The Secret Lecturer just indulges in stereotypes. Students are either lazy drug-taking plagiarists who make fantastic excuses for their lack of effort, or disadvantaged and benighted souls who have been cruelly betrayed by their schools, lecturers, departments, university or the system. Academic and professional colleagues are mostly treacherous, cowardly, prejudiced, ambitious, lazy backstabbers, apart from the few who share the world view of the author, and a dedicated administrator or two. Managers are all intellectually dull time-wasting control freaks who get in the way of proper academic work, often with “meaningless HE rituals”. Academics in business, marketing and law collude in lowering academic standards – “it’s all poster presentations and multiple-answer quizzes” – which in other disciplines are jeopardised mostly by fear and management pressure – “If you exhibit talent round here, you’re likely to be hated rather than appreciated.” And when The Secret Lecturer steps outside the campus he finds only a dystopian ghost town where all the shops have gone out of business and the bureaucrats’ blood runs even colder than in the university.

Clunky similes and metaphors keep popping up: the inflation rate is “as high as Johnny Depp atop a heap of hard drugs” before “another gormless rectangle of a senior manager” intervenes. They become even more mysteriously obscure – on just one page not only: “feeling more forlorn and nauseous than if I’d been forced at gunpoint to watch the complete television work of Ross Kemp”, but also “It’s hotter than the air that issues from Adrian Chiles’ mouth.”. The author presents events as if they are from just one academic year, which is a perfectly legitimate device, but his day-by-day account through two semesters is the only structure for the text. The longer-running threads such as a job application to a foreign university and giving a paper at an overseas conference are less convincing, suggesting lack of due diligence by the author as much as bad faith by others. And surely hardly anyone who still does it believes that external examining is “a nice little earner”.

The brief Epilogue purports to suggest a way forward, involving abolishing fees, culling the massed ranks of management, decarbonising, demilitarising, decolonialising and restoring institutional democracy. But these remain mere slogans in the absence of any coherent narrative, and the horror stories remain as symptoms in the absence of any coherent diagnosis of the underlying problems. “My idealistic aim is that someone, somewhere might read this book and be cheesed off enough to clear up the mess.” Higher education may be a mess, but ranting while waiting for someone else to clear it up is not a solution.

Rob Cuthbert is editor of SRHE News and the SRHE Blog, Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Management, University of the West of England and Joint Managing Partner, Practical Academics. Email rob.cuthbert@uwe.ac.uk. Twitter @RobCuthbert.


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The importance of academic mental health

by Roz Collings

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

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

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

Figure 1

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

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

What can universities do?

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

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

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

Reference

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


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Narratives at SRHE 2023 – more than just mere rhetoric

by Adam Matthews

It’s January 2024 and I am sitting down to write up my reflections on the SRHE Conference 2023. At the time of writing, the UK news agenda is being dominated by what is being described as one of the biggest miscarriages of justice the country has ever seen – 736 post office workers between 1999 and 2015 were prosecuted for false accounting or theft based on information from an IT system called Horizon. The system was not fit for purpose and the reporting of accounting shortfalls have found to be incorrect. The Post Office scandal has captured the public imagination thanks to a dramatisation of the events on mainstream terrestrial TV.

What has this got to do with an academic conference on higher education?

The power of media, narrative story and the broader humanities have the capacity to convey stories through genres such as drama and comedy in compelling and accessible ways. My own work is concerned with discourse and narratives on the idea and purpose of a university and its role in society. I contributed to two presentations at SRHE 2023 which both involved an analysis of narratives – the first being political party manifestoes from 1945 to 2019 and the second an analysis of Knowledge Exchange Framework policy. Both of these presentations and my wider interests look at discourse and narratives as data in higher education policy and practice.

The telling of the compelling Post Office scandal story in an accessible format has reached millions of screens, sparking conversation in workplaces and around dinner tables. This surge in public feeling has kicked off further investigations into the miscarriage of justice which involves a complex network of state and private actors over many years. This shows how narratives can reach many diverse audiences to begin to unravel the personal stories as well as the complexities involved. The SRHE conference theme for 2023 itself looked to unpick connections and complexity between Higher Education Research, Practice, and Policy.

Connected research, policy and practice was a key theme in both keynotes, the first online from Professor Nicola Dandridge and the second kicked off the in person 3 day event in Birmingham at Aston University – a panel discussion and plenary on re-shaping Tertiary Education with Professors Huw Morris, Ellen Hazelkorn, Chris Millward, and Andy Westwood, chaired by Professor Sir Peter Scott.

The complexity in making connections across research, policy and practice was clear as the speakers challenged researchers of higher education to come up with answers to the sector’s issues and challenges as well as re-shaping the sector into one which is tertiary rather than just higher. Browsing the conference programme at the sessions to come showed hugely diverse topics and methods used in higher education research. It certainly is complex to respond to the challenge of research providing the answers or even more challenging the answer.

The growing direction of travel towards tertiary is thankfully not a singular path. Like other potential futures, the panel showed a plurality of potential paths, all bound up with a plurality of perspectives, values and ambitions as well as the key aspect of funding. The panel on tertiary education came up with at least three perspectives on our tertiary futures, from conservative through to radically progressive.

Research findings cannot be put into a large language model artificial intelligence machine to spit out the answer but there is much more scope for researchers, policy-makers and practitioners to collaborate. Geoff Mulgan’s recent book When Science Meets Power analyses in detail how politics, policy, research and findings are muddled and muddied and lays out how scientists, politicians and bureaucrats need to acknowledge their strengths, knowledge (epistemic humility) and democratic values to make expert knowledge and politics work together.

Narrative might be something that can help to make sense of some of this complexity in both analysis but also in making a change at policy and practice levels.

The first of my own two presentations at the conference looked at political discourse of higher education in UK elections from 1945 to 2019. Debbie McVitty and I looked at the political narratives and discourses of Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat party political manifestoes to track how higher education was written about and in what context. Broadly, the Labour Party used ‘higher education’ more than the other two parties but all three had similar frequency when writing about the sector when it came to the word ‘university’. We observed spikes in frequency of ‘higher education’ and ‘university’ in 1966, 1987, 2001 and 2010. The first three elections were incoming second and third term governments which might hold some clues for 2024 in the UK. The context in which manifestoes talk about higher education has changed and broadened over the 74 year period. In 1945 and for the majority of the remainder of the 20th century, higher education and universities were mentioned in the context of education, health, science and innovation and youth. Progressively following the turn of the millennium in line with growth in student numbers, political parties began broadening the scope and influence of universities. We saw themes linked to universities in the context of lifelong learning, the economy, immigration, the European Union, public services, apprenticeships and equality. In short, as universities have grown in size and number, politics has looked to them do and achieve more for society and adds to the complex role of higher education in society. As we look ahead to 2024 and the biggest election year the world has ever seen it will interesting to see how universities are positioned politically in the UK and all over the world.

Globally, universities are not being depicted in a positive light in a range of contexts. The UK Government has questioned the value of some degrees describing them as ‘rip offs’ to be cracked down on. Politically, polarisation is a key concern for the health of our democracies and those gaining a degree and those that do not has been sighted as a contributing factor in such division, often under the veil of meritocracy. Hostility towards universities has entered into the culture wars with curriculum and pedagogy being attacked by politicians in the US and in Europe. And currently there is controversy on free speech and conflict at prestigious universities in the US as leaders have been forced to stand down over handling of  the Gaza-Israel conflict culminating in allegations of plagiarism in their own research.

More positive narratives could be found in my second presentation with Vanessa Cui from Birmingham City University. We looked at the narratives of the Knowledge Exchange Framework (KEF) – a regulatory policy exercise from UKRI. Universities are required, in a similar way to teaching and research excellence frameworks to submit narrative statements alongside quantitative measures. We looked at these statements to see how universities told the story of knowledge exchange (often described as third mission) outside the more structured activities of teaching and research. We found a wide range of activity carried out by universities which contributed to both the local economy as well as public and community engagement. Characters in these narratives included students and graduates, university staff, local authorities and public services, publics, businesses and other education institutions. Activities ranged from collaborating with local people on research projects and providing learning opportunities to responding to and contributing to large scale events such as the Commonwealth Games and City of Culture organisation. Moreover, universities clearly played an important role during the Covid-19 pandemic, not just in developing vaccines but providing services and support in collaboration with many different organisations and communities.

For both of these projects we are using the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) as a broad methodological framing for policy narratives and responses, assuming:

  • A constructing of social reality
  • A bounded relativity (beliefs, norms, ideas, strategies, context)
  • Narratives have generalizable structural elements
  • Policy narratives operate at three levels (macro, meso, micro)
  • Narratives play a central role in communicating information

In previous work I have analysed similar regulatory narrative responses using computational text analysis (corpus-assisted discourse analysis) as a method of analysing corpora running into the millions of words. This we combined with the NPF and plan to develop this methodological integration in further work.

Objective and positivist measures are a big part of much of the English regulatory landscape, TEF takes data from the national student survey and continuation, completion and progression indicators to evidence student experience and student outcomes. The REF, KEF and TEF ask for narrative statements alongside the numbers as evidence and to ultimately provide outcomes. Vanessa and I concluded with regard to KEF that universities have a narrative challenge in crafting texts which tell the story of the idea and purpose of their institutions to regulators but also then to students and publics.

Narratives play a key role in human communication. This echoes the importance of narrative and story outlined above and the impact of drama and stories to public consciousness. Narratives and storytelling also play a key role in marketing, from BT selling the gift of family communication to the addictive quality of R Whites Lemonade. The marketisation of a higher education in the neoliberal era has been widely researched and theorised. But in responding to the call from the keynotes and others working with the sector at SRHE 2023, to make the case for higher education and universities, maybe we need to adopt some of the narratives used in the big neoliberal marketised machine. Again, how does the university, tell its story and purpose to a wide range of stakeholders?

Researchers in higher education are analysing and crafting narratives in diverse and creative ways. Charlie Davis presented his work on academics of working-class heritage creating narratives through stories and comics. Social science fiction narratives can allow us to explore ideas and different conceptualisations and visions of the future. These approaches are drawing upon research data, literature and theories but in new and futures-orientated and playful ways. Justyna Bandola-Gill presented her study on narrative CVs – a relatively new approach to research funding whereby researchers craft their own story rather than a list of achievements. And Josh Patel got into the detail of the Robbins report pulling out the ambitious and verging on poetic narrative from the neoliberal economist Lionel Robbins’ vision of expanded public university education – Josh urged us all to go and read a very accessible and hopeful narrative from 1960s higher education policy.

Narratives are not going away. In the latest 2023 publication of TEF statements, institutions could submit up to 25 pages as part of their provider submission (up 10 pages from the previous round) and new to the latest set of statements are panel decision narratives and (optional) student submissions. In December 2023 this provided half a million words each from panels and students and 1.8 million words from providers. A by-product of such an exercise is a unique corpus of texts which provide an insight into how a range of institutions are responding to policy in describing their own practice in diverse ways. This provides a huge amount of learning for the sector.

Narratives play a central role in communicating information and constructing reality. From a research perspective we can analyse these texts as policy stories and wider discourse on what is constructed as a social reality. Narratives involve characters, context, morals of a story and plot lines. Rhetoric is the ancient art of persuasion. Aristotle broke this down into ethos (speaker’s status, character, credibility and authority), pathos (appealing to emotions, values and beliefs of the reader) and logos (logic, reasoning and argument).

As well as using these tools for analysis, universities and higher education researchers can use them to create narratives which surface the purpose and ideals of education to politicians, policy-makers, funders and publics. We may need them, as hostilities towards the university grow.

Many people knew about the Post Office Horizon IT system injustices but they were hidden away in reports and information based news articles – telling the personal stories of those involved on prime time TV captured a public imagination and support. Mr Bates vs the Post Office has been viewed almost 15 million times (at the time of writing) and has led to more than 100 new potential victims coming forward.

Maybe higher education needs to tell its stories and narratives to the wider world in equally accessible and creative ways.

Adam is a Senior Research Fellow in education systems and policy at the University of Birmingham. Adam’s work looks at universities as part of tertiary education systems and the role that they play as key sites of knowledge production and dissemination in wider society. This includes how technologies and media have and are shaping, knowledge production and access.


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Painting and shaping Learning Landscapes with Assemblages in mind

by Peter Goodyear

This third SRHE Landscapes of Learning symposium – Assemblages – was a deeply engrossing and thought-provoking event. In this response, I want to do three things: pick and connect some particularly fruitful points from each talk – there were many, so this is hard; comment on assemblages and assemblage thinking in relation to current and future learning arrangements, and segue into the practical work of realising better spaces for learning in better universities. Landscapes are both depicted and made. An alertness to relations and flux can sharpen our perception, but can an assemblage sensibility inform better architecture?

Points plucked from the talks

Carol Taylor’s keynote made a persuasive case for connecting Deleuzian thinking about assemblages with a broad set of posthuman perspectives. She went on to offer an impressive array of spatially and materially-grounded example studies, illustrating her approach and also inspiring further research. Assemblage thinking helps us to see things that would otherwise be invisible, to give (almost?) simultaneous attention to questions of how, why, when and what, and to refuse sharp distinctions between bodies, things, words, ideas and feelings – to start with relations between things, rather than with the things themselves. Forming better ways of understanding the circumstances in which things happen is important for students of all fields and disciplines. It is important for teachers and other education workers in a second sense, because it helps set up situations for valued learning and for inducting students into practices of knowledge-making, including the practices of shaping convivial epistemic environments for themselves.

Tim Fawns used ideas of entanglement to reconcile hackneyed arguments about “technology in the service of pedagogy” vs “technology as driving and constraining pedagogy”. Pedagogy first or technology first? In most cases of educational innovation, pedagogical practices and technological infrastructures already exist and are used to justify, explain and constrain one another. They are already assembling or, one might even say, co-constituting one another. This argument is even stronger if one looks more broadly at the personal aims and technologies that students bring with them, and when one takes properly into account the complicated learning places that students configure, furnish and equip for themselves and their peers. 

Karen Gravett’s talk made clear that very little is known about how students’ activities are distributed in space, how students find, make and curate places for learning and what this means for matters of belonging (to a university). Certainly, university teachers and leaders cannot claim to know this in any representative, well-theorised or systematic way. Indeed, it emerges that there are many ways of belonging, no one way of managing campus spaces to afford inclusion and no simple metric connecting qualities of place with feelings of belonging, such as might be useful for an estates director’s KPIs.

Harriet Shortt researches relations between places, artefacts and organizational life, including places we might too-simply tag as “for work” or “for learning”. The main research site she spoke about was a newly-built Business School, though she was using this to advocate for participant-led visual methods: getting the users of buildings to photograph places of significance to them and share their annotated images. This is very useful for post-occupancy evaluation but also raises lots of deeper questions about place-making, including how people reconfigure places to resolve tensions between privacy and community, or collaboration and interruption.

The four talks illustrate the importance of understanding study activities through students’ eyes and experiences, with a capacious framing – so that what students curate and contribute isn’t simply missed – and then weaving more elaborate descriptions that catch multiple entanglements (place, tools, tasks, bodies, minds etc) so that all participants and stakeholders can agree a shared understanding of how things are being achieved, sufficient to improve the circumstances in which joint work is done. Subtle observation and an openness to complexity are important when making descriptions of how things are coming to be as they are. Then provisional simplifications are needed to agree on collective action.            

Assemblages and assemblage thinking

At several points in the “Assemblages” symposium, a leitmotif emerged: an allusion to using theoretical language at Academic Board. This recognisable shorthand conjures up our shared frustrations, as scholars of higher education, with the conceptual and linguistic gaps between research, policy and practice and with a paradox at the heart of educational work in universities: the insistence on discussing education in a vernacular language, unpolluted with exotic terms-of-art.

I am academic enough to value fine-grained disputes between knowledgeable scholars over what Deleuze and Guattari were trying to say when they wrote about rhizomes, lines-of-flight, segmentarity or assemblage. I also endorse something Carol Taylor said about the dangers of extracting ideas and terms from their intellectual homes and deploying mangled versions of them to serve dubious ends.  

But, in my own practice, I am deeply invested in understanding how knowledge, ways of knowing and ways of coming to know, that emerge in our work as scholars of education, can be made useful to other teachers and to students.  I have a practical interest in this occurring, coupled with an intellectual interest in how people actually do this work; I study epistemic practices at the boundaries of disciplines and professions. I try to understand what happens when (say) university managers in education, campus infrastructure and IT try to create better learning spaces or when people try to help design ideas travel. In thinking about “assemblage”, I am interested in how clusters of ideas migrate and become useful – to students, when they are tackling challenges that matter to them – and to teachers, architects, technologists and others involved in shaping educational spaces. So, I would say:

  • Whatever disciplines, professions or roles our students might be preparing themselves for, they will need subtle and sophisticated tools for understanding the world and acting ethically and effectively with others. Posthuman and postdigital perspectives can help students analyse the complex (learning) situations in which they find themselves, and reflect more deeply about how good work is accomplished.   
  • Scholarly teaching must acknowledge the complexities and risks involved when ideas move outside the domain of specialist scholarly debate. It is one thing to induct students into academic life by modelling scholarly disputation. It is quite another to maim or kill a half-grasped idea while it is in flight. There is a time and a place for correcting other people’s use of the term “assemblage” – but perhaps not at meetings of Academic Board.  

It’s also worth noting that “assemblage” exists somewhat independently as a technical term in fields such as archaeology, ecology, data science and art practice. One can use the noun “assemblage” to speak about the toolset of an ancient culture, the animals and plants typically inhabiting an area, a complex data set or a three-dimensional collage of objets trouvés, though these usages don’t normally have strong connotations of flux and evolution, such as we find when assemblage is understood as a verb. Moreover, there are lines of analysis within organisational science and science and technology studies (STS) that talk cogently about sociomaterial and sociotechnical assemblages, free from any visible Deleuzian mooring. I’m thinking, for example, of writing by Wanda Orlikowski, Susan Scott and Lucy Suchman on  technology in organisations and sociomaterial entanglements in working practices: productive resources for thinking about educational technology, technology in higher education, current and future learning spaces.

In sum, “assemblage” helps us notice and depict sociomaterial relations and change, but it is not the sole preserve of Deleuzian scholarship.

Learning landscapes: making places for coming-to-know

“A key element of placemaking is thus its open-ended and contingent nature. Placemaking is a dynamic experience, through which people, practice and the materiality of place undergo constant change.” (Sweeney et al, 2018, 582).

Harriett Shortt asked why so many new campus buildings mirror corporate head offices. Why do estates directors and architects impose these giant glazed voids upon us? She asked us to think of other more congenial forms: galleries and museums, for example. I think we should also be bolder and think how it might become possible for everyone involved in university life to engage in intentional place-making. We see what can be done in course and curriculum design through movements such as “Students as Partners”. We get other glimpses of what’s possible in the place-making events captured in the images our speakers shared. Beyond that, I suggest, we might try to make a scholarship of learning places that works in symbiosis with much more organic, bottom-up developments: less concerned with space-efficiency metrics and enabling the corporate; more invested in giving biophilic form to the market-place of ideas. There’s a well-established strand of work in architecture, urban planning and place-making on which we can draw. Christopher Alexander, Jane Jacobs, Marwa al-Sabouni and Thomas Heatherwick spring to mind.

It can be helpful to make a distinction, in educational work, between analysis and design. The first tries to depict and understand an existing state of affairs. The second involves steps to protect or improve upon it. The two depend upon one another, but work upon different objects. They require a dual ontology. In reflecting upon past and present educational events, we do well to acknowledge that tasks, tools and people are deeply entangled – considering assemblages or agencement helps here. But in thinking about what we can change (eg for the next time a course is run, or for the layout of a new learning space), we must break tangled realities into components over which we have some control. By “we” I don’t just mean teacher-designers or learning space researchers. Everyone has a role in this kind of place-making.

Collectively shaping material instances of what Raewyn Connell calls the “Good University” or Ron Barnett calls the “Ecological University” involves some tricky challenges. How do we form coalitions around images of what universities should be doing? How do we identify zones in which we have power to make change – including changes that give us more power to make other changes? How do we consolidate incremental changes so that we don’t dissipate our strength in perpetual defensive work? How do we co-create the infrastructure and reshape the landscapes that afford more socially responsible, sustainable and just ways of working and learning together?

Some of this may still be in our DNA. Jane Jacobs closed her great book on the organized complexity of cities with the following words. I like to think we can apply them to universities.

“Dull, inert cities, it is true, do contain the seeds of their own destruction and little else. But lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves.” (Jacobs, 1961, p448)

Peter Goodyear is Emeritus Professor of Education at The University of Sydney. His research on place, space and learning has appeared in a number of books, including “The Education ecology of universities: integrating learning, strategy and the academy” (Routledge/SRHE, with Rob Ellis, 2019); “Spaces of teaching and learning: integrating research and practice” (Springer, with Rob Ellis, 2018) and “Place-based spaces for networked learning” (Routledge, with Lucila Carvalho & Maarten de Laat, 2017).


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Responsibilities and gatekeeping in using language certificates for HE admission

by Jana Berg, Michael Grüttner, Stefanie Schröder

With the exception of a few master’s degree programs, the German higher education system is dominated by monolingual organizations. Therefore, language certificates are a key element of access to German higher education for international students. Trust in language certificates is critical, both for international student applicants and for university staff as well. However, in admission practice, there might be a tension between professional responsibilities and a lack of trust in the validity of standardised language certificates.

From 2017 to 2021, we conducted the study “Refugees’ pathways to German higher education institutions (WeGe)” on study preparations for refugee students in German higher education at the German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies (DZHW), which was funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research under grant number 16PX16015. Our interview partners included staff of HE institutions as well as preparatory colleges that have to decide about admission to study preparation courses for international students. Those courses often include language instruction, but an at least intermediate level of German proficiency is usually mandatory for enrolment.

Our interview partners demonstrated a strong sense of responsibility. On the one hand, to fulfil their perceived role in the context of quality assurance by selecting capable and motivated students. And on the other hand, to prevent students from wasting their time with futile endeavours. This responsibility was embedded in their role, but also reflected in their perception of tasks and priorities. At the same time, we found notable insecurities regarding the quantitative evaluation of language skills. Standardised language certificates, even though formally recognized on an institutional level, were commonly perceived as no representation of actual language proficiency. Interview partners referred to their practical experience that language skills of applicants with the same language certification varied widely.

This insecurity between institutional quality conventions and formal access criteria raises problems for the perceived responsibility to ensure a maximum chance of success for students. We illustrate this with qualitative interview material from one case that emphasised the perceived lack of reliable documentation of skills by standardised language certificates. The interviewee strongly identified with the role of keeping up quality conventions. However, he perceived a strict formal protocol based on paperwork as insufficient, as his professional experience had shown that language certificates do not always match his expectations in an applicant’s language proficiency. He emphasised: “I don’t really care about documents, the skills have to back them up”. His strategy to deal with this lack of trust was his personal, informal language test: “Whenever it is possible, if the people are present, I do an assessment test. It is 100 tasks with 40 minutes, like a snapshot. It is supposed to show what people can access spontaneously”. Theoretically speaking, a tension arises between two quality conventions, a first concerned with an evaluation that takes into account the local circumstances and personal responsibility for the individual purpose of the international student applicants, and a second concerned with an evaluation that treats every international student applicant as equal and self-reliant (Imdorf & Leemann, 2023). As a compromise between these two quality conventions, university staff invent localised, self-designed short language tests to address this tension.

After high dropout numbers and bad experiences with a lack of language proficiency in the past, our case study participant reported that his now more selective and rigorous procedure had improved the course results of participants. However, it was still very much based on his individual perception of potential participants, as one exception he had made emphasises: “A prime example is a woman from Sudan, South Sudan, with two small children. […] she got up at four in the morning to study before the children were awake. […] And I don’t know why, I looked her in the eye, and she wanted to. And went through with it, mercilessly. So really, as a prime example. And is now studying electrical engineering.”

This case emphasises how professional insecurities can cause the development of professional strategies that devalue institutionalised procedures and increase the relevance of subjective impressions. However, it is not an issue only related to this case, even though this interviewee was especially explicit in addressing his insecurities and his coping strategies. Our findings imply that this divergence between perceived professional responsibilities and institutional conventions on the one side, and the quality and reliability of even internationally recognized certificates on the other side, is causing a lack of direction. This void is met with strategies of additional support, individual assessment criteria, and sometimes a stronger emphasis on personal perceptions of applicants. This has implications not only for HE professionals, but also for accessibility and equity in higher education. When practitioners perceive documents as unreliable and adapt their selection measures accordingly, application procedures become unreliable and less than transparent to applicants. However, all HE application procedures should transparently respond to one question: what counts?

On a practical level, we recommend addressing such insecurities with HE practitioners, by offering practical training and creating opportunities for exchange and supervisions. Additionally, a closer look at the perceived insufficiencies of language certificates could and should also be used to further develop standardised language tests, best in a dialogue between test providers, teaching professionals and course participants. Further research in the area of study preparation on conditions conducive to the acquisition of German language skills at the university level could also usefully contribute to improvement.

Dr Jana Berg is a postdoctoral researcher at the German Center for Higher Education Research and Science Studies (DZHW). She holds a Dr. in Sociology from the Leibniz University of Hanover. Her main research is on widening participation, the governance of HE internationalization, and climate science communication.

Dr Michael Grüttner received his Dr in sociology from Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany. He conducts research at the DZHW with a focus on social inclusion, migration, lifelong learning, and higher education.

Stefanie Schröder, MA, is the coordinator for continuing higher education at the Hochschulallianz Ruhr at Bochum University of Applied Sciences. Previously, she worked as a researcher at the DZHW. Her research focuses on educational inequalities, alternative access to higher education, and anti-discrimination data.

Image of Rob Cuthbert


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Radical proposals in leader’s conference speech

by Rob Cuthbert

The leader’s speech to Conference was expected to include far-reaching proposals for higher and further education. We obtained this leaked text of an early draft:

“It is time for radical change. We will introduce the new rigorous, knowledge rich Advanced British Standard which will bring together A-Levels and T-Levels into a new, single qualification for our school leavers. At the next level, what we used to call further and higher education will be swept away to create a new Higher Skills curriculum. The first part of this (HS1) was achieved some years ago through investment in infrastructure connecting the UK with the rest of Europe. But now we need to change course. We committed to a second phase of the project (HS2) through legislation in the Higher Education and Research Act in 2017. The first part of HS2 is progressing but if we are to create change and drive growth across our country, then we must get our infrastructure right. HS2 is the ultimate example of the old consensus. The result is a project whose costs have more than doubled, which has been repeatedly delayed.

Universities are overcrowded, because too many students want to be in higher education. The Labour government pursued the false dream of 50 per cent of children going to university … one of the great mistakes of the last 30 years. We now have an Office for too many Students – student choice must be paramount, but only if they are the right students. The previous government’s efforts (well, alright, it was this government, but that was three prime ministers ago) to transfer most of the cost of HE to the students has been thwarted by the Office for National Statistics, which forced us to account for fees and loan repayments properly, and of course by the previous government’s mistakes in changing repayment thresholds (well, alright, it was this government, but that was two prime ministers ago). We have of course now changed repayments to ensure that loan repayments will cost graduates a lot more, which should help in choking off demand from poor students.

Our country’s economic competitiveness demands that we now cut back on higher education and graduate skills. Our Secretary of State for Education has pointed out that “people go to university because they don’t know what else to do”. We already lead the world in tuition fee levels for public universities, and we can also be world-leading by slashing student numbers, which will differentiate us from every one of our major competitors, indeed, probably the whole world (apart from Afghanistan). In this way we can also prevent further recruitment to rip-off courses which prepare students for their future employment in our low-wage economy [Speechwriter’s note: you may need to rephrase this bit]. Identifying rip-off courses has been a bit tricky, but I have asked the Office for Students to redouble its efforts to find them by concentrating the search on universities in unlikely places in the North and the Midlands. If all else fails we can rely on the OfS Proceed metric, which generally avoids  drawing attention to courses in London and the South East where graduate salaries are much higher. Of course the cost of living is much higher there too, which ensures that graduates still have virtually no chance of buying a house, unless they enjoy inherited wealth. To support the housing market I am therefore considering abolishing inheritance tax.

Student accommodation is a problem for many universities, but I welcome the innovative solution of universities like Bristol, which has decided to house some students in a different country. A similar approach has also been mooted for our prison population, and this has led us to consider extending our agreement on migrants with Rwanda. At our expense, naturally, they are willing to construct a series of new universities to accommodate students unable to gain admission to our own elite institutions. The Rwanda Institutions Providing Offshore Courses (RIPOff Courses) project should drastically reduce demand and the pressure on our universities in the same way that for immigration, with the prospect of Rwanda, small boat crossings are, for the first time since the phenomenon began, down 20 per cent this year. In some disciplines Rwanda may have a problem recruiting sufficient staff with the necessary expertise, but we propose to offer them the staff from places north of London which really shouldn’t have a university. We can also re-use the small boats abandoned by people traffickers to provide free cross-Channel transport for socioeconomically disadvantaged would-be students who prefer to take their chances in Europe. This will further enhance our student support measures.

HS2 has of course reinforced the golden triangle, in line with longstanding bipartisan government policy, but that means it has so far only reached as far north as Oxford and Cambridge. I welcome the new challenger institutions, almost all innovatively offering business courses in London, which have done so much to drive up the pay of their senior managers and their profits or surpluses from student tuition fees. However the number of institutions willing to provide such cheap courses has overall been disappointing, and therefore the cost of the HS2 project has continued to rise. The result is a project whose costs have more than doubled, which has been repeatedly delayed and for which the economic case has massively weakened. I say, to those who backed the project in the first place, the facts have changed. And the right thing to do when the facts change, is to have the courage to change direction. And so, I am ending this long running saga. I am cancelling the rest of the HS2 project.

In its place, we will reinvest every single penny (of what’s left after deducting the costs of RIPOff) in hundreds of new projects in the North and the Midlands, and across the country. We are putting in infrastructure improvements in selected places to form a new Network North. Durham, of course. York, probably. A bit for Newcastle, Manchester and Leeds, if we must. Nothing for Liverpool, except where there are people in marginal constituencies unable to travel to anywhere better. Nothing at all for Bradford, because my vice-Chairman says no-one wants to get there.

My main funding priority in every spending review from now on will be education. No more rip off degrees; no more low aspiration; no more denigration of technical education. Just the best education system in the Western world. But we will go further towards this vision. The pernicious effects of arts and humanities, and I might add social sciences, have already received one welcome corrective with the decision of the Arts and Humanities Research Council to cut PhD studentships by 25%. We will therefore extend the proposals on smoking for younger people, because if we are to do the right thing for our kids we must try and stop teenagers taking up arts and humanities in the first place. Because without a significant change thousands of children will start studying arts, humanities and social sciences in the coming years and have their future prospects cut short as a result.

People take up these subjects when they are young. Four in five sociologists have started by the time they are 20. Later, the vast majority try to quit. But many fail because they are addicted and they wish had never taken up the habit in the first place. If we could break that cycle, if we could stop the start, then we would be on our way to ending the biggest cause of preventable left-leaning wokery in our country. So, I propose that in future we raise the age at which young people are allowed to enrol on any arts, humanities or social science degree by one year, every year. That means a 14 year old today will never legally have access to any knowledge that doesn’t have Maths in it, and that they – and their generation – can grow up free of any understanding of culture and society.

Be in no doubt: it is time for a change. And we are it.” Editor’s note: the italicised text survived unchanged in the final version.

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


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Interest rate changes could challenge universities, student loans and post 16 and vocational education

by Sir Adrian Webb

The publication on 13 September 2023 of the House of Lords Industry and Regulators Committee report on the Office for Students drew attention to the financial challenges facing universities in the UK and to the challenges associated with regulating and overseeing these risks.  

This week we look set to see these challenges increase with the possible increase in the  base interest rates by the Bank of England (the “Bank Rate”) to 5.5% when the Monetary Policy Committee next meets on Thursday 21st September (Guardian, Financial Times, 24 August 2023 ). If there is another 0.25% increase in the base rate, as is widely anticipated, this will place government and university finances under further pressure over the next few years with significant negative implications for HE students, the UK Government’s education budget in general and the further education college budget in particular. Furthermore, this anticipated rise in the Bank Rate may not be the last of these increases if Government spending remains high and inflationary pressures persist through the winter months. 

The most immediate and direct effect will be on the interest payments that universities need to pay on short term loans. According to HESA, average HE provider debt as a proportion of turnover stands at 0.16%, but with highs of 454% and lows of 0%, with unrestricted reserves of 204% of income (HESA, 2023). Of course, financial indicators expressed as a percentage of income for institutions of very variable sizes give no feel for the absolute amount of cash owed, or the annual cost of repayments.  

The top 13 higher education providers by percentage of debt are all small private institutions; most have recorded deficits in recent years and appear to have low levels of cash available to cover running costs. The next 35 institutions by scale of debt all have debt levels of over 50% of turnover. Among these institutions there are 22 large pre- and post-92 universities in all parts of the UK.  

The challenges presented by potential increases in interest payments will be exacerbated over the next two years by the continued decline in the real value of student tuition fees, limitations on the recruitment of overseas students with dependants and a decline in the proportion of students applying to low and mid-tariff universities.  

When student tuition fees were first introduced, HE providers were encouraged to set fees at between £6,000 and £9,000 per annum. Some price competition between institutions was expected but in practice the vast majority set their fees at the higher level. Recent analysis by Mark Corver of DataHE, an independent higher education consultancy, indicates that the real level of fees that higher education providers charge students as tuition fees has dropped below £6,000 if the value is deflated by the Retail Prices Index (RPI), slightly higher if other measures of inflation are used.

Over the last five years, many HE providers have been attempting to cover the reduced value of undergraduate home tuition fee income by recruiting larger number of international students, particularly from China, India and Nigeria. This approach has attracted large numbers of students to the most selective universities and those in major cities; many universities now have more than 25% of their students recruited from these sources. The announcement of restrictions on the release of temporary visas to support the dependents of international students has already had an impact on the recruitment of people from overseas who want to study at UK universities.. This impact looks set to continue and increase in 2024. 

To illustrate the issues faced by the more highly indebted institutions with a significant number of international students, consider the composite case of the University of Camberwick Green, with net debt of circa £200m and current loans with a weighted average debt cost of 3.5%. If this institution needed to renew all of its existing debt obligations this would likely double the costs of debt servicing from £7million to at least £14million. This would mean an additional annual outlay as a proportion of turnover in excess of 5%, dependent on the interest rates agreed with lenders and the term of their loan (e.g. revolving credit facility, private placement, bond or bank lending).  For a university like Camberwick Green, which has also recorded large operating deficits in recent years, additional debt is likely to be more expensive and so the short-term options are likely to focus on selling assets or laying off staff; these are not easy or attractive options. Changes to course portfolios and/or increased international student recruitment and transnational operations are unlikely to produce the necessary returns quickly and without undue financial or reputational risk.  

The more prestigious and selective universities in the more affluent parts of the UK are unlikely to face pressures that are likely to bear down hard on those which are, by conventional measures, less prestigious and less selective, in parts of the UK that engaged in levelling up activities with significant HE involvement. The impacts of high indebtedness, declining student recruitment and operating deficits are already being felt with significant redundancies planned at ten universities. 

The next most significant impact of higher interest rates will be on student loan repayments and the arrangements for funding this activity. The student loan book currently stands at £206bn with an additional £20bn of loans being issued each year. The internal real interest rate charged on these loan arrangements by HM Treasury, i.e. the real discount rate (excluding inflation), was set at -0.7% in 2021 at the height of the Covid crisis and remains the rate proposed in the Plan 5 changes scheduled to come into place during 2024. The nominal discount rate taking account of inflation is 1.9%. If Bank of England interest rates and by consequence HM Treasury bond/gilt rates move to 6.25% in 2024, as has been forecast, and the student loan rate is changed as a consequence, this will create an adverse upward movement in real interest rate charges on the loan book of circa 5%. Dependent on the scheduling of the loans this will then feed through into the calculation of the principal debt students are required to repay and also the Resource Allocation Budget (RAB) charge paid by the UK Government on loans that are forecast not to be repaid. Under revised accounting rules introduced in 2021, a proportion of this increased RAB charge will need to be accounted for in the national deficit in the year it is incurred and cannot be delayed until the loan matures. With forecast increases in the scale of the student loan book through to the next decade there are likely to be powerful voices in the Treasury wishing to pay down this debt or reduce the scale of its growth. This in turn is likely to mean a need to revisit the current arrangements in advance of the next HM Treasury Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) in 2025. 

The current loan book is financed in part by the spread (difference) between the notional interest rate charged to students on loans they have taken out, which is currently set with some reference to the Prevailing Market Rate (PMR) for commercial loans, and the lower rate paid by the Treasury for its borrowings. The PMR was set at 7.3% in February 2023 and confirmed at this level for the period between September and November 2023 on 11th August. . At present the Bank of England Bank Rate is 5.3% and so the spread between the student loan rate and the Bank Rate was 2%. If a similar spread is expected if  the base rate rises further to 6.25% the PMR could be 8.25% or even higher. Interest rates at this level would make almost all student loans un-repayable, effectively converting the loan system into a graduate tax confined to new students and also potentially introducing a significant element of “moral hazard” as many students would face little incentive to do anything other than maximise their student loans. Given that they will never repay them; they will face an additional marginal loan repayment (tax) rate of 9% on undergraduate loans and 6% on postgraduate loans, so why not take out as much loan as possible and complete a postgraduate taught or research degree, even when the economic returns to them individually and to the public purse are negative. Beyond this “moral hazard” argument there is also arguably a “moral outrage” argument to be had about imposing an age-related differential income tax rate on younger people who are recent graduates. 

The problems outlined above are then likely to be heightened by forecast increases in the number of prospective undergraduate students entering the system over the next seven years.  In 2021/2022 there were 2.16 million U.K. domiciled students in UK HE institutions and a further 0.68 million students from the EU and other overseas countries. By 2030 the number of UK domiciled students is expected to increase by between 200,000 and 400,000 as a consequence of increases in the number of people in the relevant age groups. This would be at an average additional cost per student of at least £60,000 per three-year undergraduate degree, based on loans for tuition fees of 3 x £9,250 and for maintenance of 3 x up to £13,022 for students living away from home in London. Many students study for longer than three years on foundation and/or masters programmes, hence the forecast of £60,000 per student. This is an additional annual cost of loan outlay of £12bn or more. This seems unlikely to be fundable. 

The implication of these cost pressures would be serious enough if they were confined to HE, but they are not. Far from it. At present the growing costs of HE are being paid for by other parts of the UK Government’s education budget, resulting in real terms cuts to the further education budget, consequent low rates of pay for FE college staff, and cuts to the adult education budget. In adult education, FE and apprenticeship provision pay rates are set locally rather than nationally and so reductions in institutional budgets in this part of the education sector have tended to be accommodated by falling wages and unfilled vacancies rather than through redundancies as has been the case in the university sector. These different parts of the post-school education system are making greater use of part-time and temporary contracts and precarious jobs. This at a time when the need for more and better vocational education is increasingly widely recognised and the need for “industry standard” staff capable of delivering the new and upgraded skills required by rapid technological change has never been greater.  

Across the UK 70% of adults have not been to university, but like many older graduates they would benefit from the opportunity to take a course at a local college or other adult education provider. With 20% of the adult working age population (5 million people) currently economically inactive and with chronic skills shortages in all parts of economy it is very worrying that the pay of college lecturers in catering, construction, digital, engineering, health and social care is considerably below the rates paid to comparably skilled people working in the private sector. Employers in the UK spend on average 50% less than their counterparts in mainland Europe on workforce education and training. The combination of reductions in employer spending on training and cuts in UK Government funding for FE and apprenticeships has led to a reduction of over 1 million student places in adult education, apprenticeships and FE per year in the last ten years. This is not the position the UK needs to be in to improve productivity. Indeed, it is the very opposite of what is required to support such mission – let alone to promote inclusive and sustainable economic growth.  

Who is responsible for monitoring and governing this system? At the moment the financial position of individual universities is overseen by their governing bodies, aided by internal and external auditors predominantly drawn in combinations of two of the big four audit firms. The Office for Students (OfS) monitors the financial position of individual higher education providers as part of its regulatory function, but it is not formally required to intervene financially at an early stage to support institutions in difficulties. It may issue a requirement to improve the plans for protecting students, but it is not required to prevent an institution from failing. The Student Loan Company (SLC) is overseen by an independent board and supported by a representative from the sponsoring departments in the UK’s national governments (i.e. Department for Education, Scottish Government, Welsh Government and Northern Ireland Office in the absence of the Northern Ireland Executive). Whether the OfS, national regulators in the devolved nations or the SLC have modelled the scenarios outlined in this note is a moot point. Indeed, it is more of a mute point because no one is publicly talking about these issues and the problems that go with them in a joined-up way with a long-term perspective. It would be helpful if they did, and if there was a debate about the consequences for higher and further education providers and student loans of the return to real interest rates more in-keeping with the long run historical average. Given the commitment of central banks around the world to move in this direction after 15 years of ultra-low interest rates there is a pressing need for a comprehensive review of where we are heading and what needs to be done about it. 

As we approach a General Election in 2024, now is the time for the major political parties in the UK to commit to the appointment of a Royal Commission or equivalent to look at these issues with an impartial, sector neutral and critical eye.  Over the last hundred years all major changes of this type have proceeded in this way (i.e. Smith Report 1919, White Paper on Education 1943, Robbins Review 1964, Dearing Review 1997 and Browne Review 2011). Indeed, in 1997 Gillian Sheppard (Conservative minister) and David Blunkett (prospective Labour minister) agreed in the run up to the General election to respect the Dearing Committee proposals. A similar arrangement was reached regarding the Browne Review between Peter Mandelson (Labour Minister) and George Osborne (prospective Conservative Minister) in the run up to the general election in 2010.  The settlements in 1944 and 1963 were similarly effectively cross-party. This is a fundamental issue for the future of the UK and deserves to be made non-political with recommendations for the long term. Previous reviews have produced long term plans which have been implemented when they had cross-party support and straddled a General election. 

Sir Adrian Webb was an academic at the London School of Economics and Loughborough University; he was Deputy Vice Chancellor at Loughborough and Vice Chancellor at the University of Glamorgan. As well as holding a number of senior management positions and a wide range of public service/consultancy roles in local and central government (including HM Treasury, DHSS, Home Office, DFES, and the Ministry of Justice) and in Wales, he has also held many roles in the Third Sector. Sir Adrian was a member of the Dearing Review committee in the late 1990s and chaired a review of further education colleges and funding in Wales in 2007. 

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of any organisation with which the author is affiliated.  


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New Higher Education Institutions in England: A real chance to innovate?

by Katherine Emms

The 2017 Higher Education and Research Act (HERA) enabled new and innovative HE providers to enter and establish themselves, with the aim of diversifying the HE sector. The HERA reforms enabled institutions to apply to register as HE providers, obtain their own degree awarding powers (DAPs) and finally secure university title and status through a supposedly more streamlined and flexible process overseen by – the then new body – the Office for Students (OfS). At this unique time when many providers have been seizing this opportunity to enter the market, the Edge Foundation wanted to capture the experiences of setting up and developing new HEIs in England. Our subsequent research therefore aimed to explore how vision, pedagogies and approaches to learning are being developed, and what are some of the challenges these HEIs are experiencing in establishing themselves.

To investigate this we conducted a series of semi-structured interviews focusing on six newly established HEIs across England. At the time of the interviews some were in the process of recruiting their first intake of undergraduate students, while others were in their first few years of programme delivery. We spoke to founders, directors, senior leadership team members and those involved in setting up a new university and developing the first programmes. Policymakers were also interviewed.

We found that all the new HEIs set out clear and purposeful visions for their establishment. Many regarded the opportunity as a chance to break the mould of the traditional HE landscape and to help provide solutions to some global issues through preparing students sufficiently for a varied portfolio career in a complex world. Some HEIs were responding to more local needs, whether that be local skills shortages or offering HE opportunities for young people in their locality to help tackle local economic issues and widen participation.

Across many of the institutions’ organisational structures, administrative and academic processes, and physical spaces, they looked to break away from normalised HE structures. For instance, admissions policies and procedures aimed to move away from academic grades as the primary judgement for admitting students. Instead they consider personal attitudes and the potential of the applicant important. They assessed this through use of broader admission measures eg interviews and submission of ‘selfie’ videos. The scalability of such approaches however is uncertain as applications to the new HEIs grow. One of the reasons behind these approaches was to ensure they widened participation to more disadvantaged and diverse groups of students who may struggle to have previously entered HE.

For their staff body, new HEIs wanted to ensure that they recruited not just pure academics but also those with a background in industry. In order to recruit the right staff, they went beyond standard interviewing processes for recruitment, instead using a broader set of methods, such as running a test class. They were particularly looking for engaging and excellent teachers who also have the ethos, creativity and impetus for working in a start-up environment.

All the new HEIs in this research took non-traditional approaches to programme design and delivery, particularly by not relying on lectures and exams to teach students. Instead they wished to use more student-centred approaches to learning and make connections to the real-world through pedagogies such as problem-based learning, whereby students work primarily in teams to tackle issues whilst drawing on knowledge from multiple disciplines. Employers and external partners also are key role players in the design and delivery of these new HEIs, from designing the curriculum to offering real-world and authentic projects for students to work on. Importantly students also interact with these employers whether that be through presenting their ‘product’ from the team projects to the employer or through such interactions as expert lectures or work placements. A disinterest in traditional pedagogies and enthusiasm for external collaboration were understood as key to ensuring the authenticity otherwise suggested to be lacking in some existing HE provision.

Setting up a new HEI was not an easy feat, with participants reporting a number of challenges including funding and attracting new students. One particular challenge was the registration process and navigating the regulatory system. The process from registering as a HE provider to gaining DAPs was often seen as a slow and, for some, complicated process. Furthermore despite the impetus behind the Higher Education and Research Act (2017) endorsing ideas of innovation, new HEIs felt that external factors restricted the degree to which they could truly be ‘innovative’. For instance, the regulatory frameworks that new HEIs had to work within to register as a provider were based on assumptions about the traditional model of a university. One provider described the experience as ‘trying to fit a square peg into a round hole’. Likewise, some new HEIs discussed similar restrictions applying when working in partnership with existing universities, meaning they were restricted within the parameters of their awarding university. In both cases, some new HEIs stated that this led to mission-drift or a watering down of their ‘innovative’ approaches. 

Nevertheless, these new HEIs were ambitious and keen to achieve their visions through wielding and deploying unorthodox means, whether that be reimagining organisational structures and processes or combining pedological practices that would not necessarily be considered innovative by themselves, such as problem-based learning, interdisciplinary teaching and learning and student-centred teaching. But through presenting these practices together or in different combinations and in new contexts HEIs made ambitious attempts to generate different student outcomes.

The HEIs featured in this research were still in the early stages of conception or delivery. It is difficult therefore to judge their success as HEIs. It is yet to be seen whether many of their current practices, such as their innovative and personable approach to recruitment, are manageable when student applications and intake grows, or whether relationships with employers can be sustained and courses kept up to date. For the new HEIs of today, many of them consider the markers of their success will be in their student numbers over the coming years and the success of their graduates once they enter the workplace. Yet, despite the attention of policymakers looking to clamp down on “low-value degrees”, we may need to look beyond graduates’ salaries as a marker of success and instead delve further into learners’ experiences of HE, innovative and otherwise.

Katherine Emms is a Senior Education and Policy Researcher at the Edge Foundation. You can read the research New Higher Education Institutions in England: A real chance to innovate? here.