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Editorial: The End of the Year Show

by Rob Cuthbert

The UK HE academic year 2022-2023 is coming to an end, or not, amid disputes, unrest and polarised attitudes which seem unprecedented. Recent years have seen previous strikes, days of action, marking and assessment boycotts and more, but nothing quite like this. At the time of writing there seems little prospect of rapprochement between the employers and the Universities and Colleges Union. So the marking and assessment boycott continues, as ‘action short of a strike’ (ASOS). Many students – no-one knows how many – have not received their degrees on time, and there are many reports of swingeing deductions of pay for those involved in the boycott – many, but we don’t know how many, staff and institutions are affected. 

For the students who should by now be graduates this is an unhappy end to a repeatedly troubled period of study in HE and beforehand. Those who took GCSEs in 2018 are the most-assessed school cohort ever, after repeated government policy changes affecting their primary as well as secondary education. They then experienced the disastrous shambles of the A-level algorithm in 2020, before embarking on a mostly locked-down higher education experience which for many was also punctuated by academic staff strikes prompted by low pay, poor conditions and huge reductions in the USS pension entitlement. And then at the end of their three disrupted years of study comes this final blow, as some will not receive marks and therefore final awards before September, October or who knows when. Their progression to further study or employment may also be on hold, if as so often it depends on final results. To make things even worse, universities, under pressure from government, the media, and the regulator OfS, have cut back sharply on the proportion of first class honours to be awarded. Even graduands with first class results for their first two years may be in for future disappointment.

Universities were at pains throughout the lockdowns to argue that the alternative on-line provision they made was of equal value and maintained the same standards; it was convenient and inevitable that government would agree. Many staff worked wonders in redesigning their teaching for lockdown, almost overnight, so that much teaching might indeed have maintained standards. But universities’ marketing in most cases promotes a much broader vision of the student experience involving a range of curricular and extracurricular activities, many of which require physical attendance on campus. The legal situation is unclear, not least because there is no generic university-student contract, despite the best efforts of leading authority and OfS board member David Palfreyman, who has long argued for just such a contract in his definitive work with Dennis Farrington, The Law of Higher Education.

Nevertheless collective action by students is gathering momentum. On 16 March 2023 lawyers Farrer & Co issued advice to universities trying to deal with UCU action in the ongoing dispute. They noted that “… Student Group Claim is already seeking to recover financial compensation for students from leading universities for disruption to academic degrees caused by Covid-19 and strikes by university staff. With the level of industrial action taking place now, it would not be surprising to see similar claims being brought, potentially both in relation to strike action and ASOS.”

Universities face the uncertain but possibly costly outcome to that action as they try to cope with a rapid and massive loss of real income. Mark Corver (DataHE/THE) tweeted on 19 April 2023 about the March 2023 inflation figures, showing a 12-month change of 14%. The real value of fees has fallen 32% since 2012, when £9000 fees were introduced. In 2023 prices, fees should now be £13530; in 2012 prices they are actually now worth only £6150. Universities have lost the equivalent of £2.6billion in less than 18 months. At the same time the USS revaluation implied big cuts for staff and further massive costs for employers, until the latest changes suggested some relief. However universities’ TPS pension bill soared by £125million and Tom Williams reported for Times Higher Education on 30 May 2023 that universities were seeking Treasury relief for the steep increase in TPS payments from April 2024. The government seems disinclined to offer any relief, and is even doubling down by proposing to tighten the rules on international students and their dependants, which seems targeted at limiting the income of universities probably most in need of financial support.

UCU continues to assert that universities could afford a more generous pay increase than the offer on the table, but as David Kernohan explained for Wonkhe on 30 January 2023, most of the surpluses for the HE sector as a whole are confined to a handful of elite institutions. The system and structures are hugely complex: “There is a national pay bargaining system in higher education, though not all providers are party to it. National bargaining is fair because it supports equal pay for equal work, but as a consequence it constrains the overall offer to that which can be afforded by the most precarious employer and it can struggle to accommodate specific local issues.” There are arguments on both sides about whether ‘shiny new buildings’ should have been preferred to better staff pay in recent years, but the decline in HE staff pay has gone in step with the much broader decline in public sector pay over the last ten years. The current widespread unrest, with strikes by such improbably militant groups as schoolteachers, nurses, junior doctors and even hospital consultants, is a stark reminder of the precipitous decline in public spending, with its impact on not only pay but the quality of public services and working conditions for public servants. Many, it seems, have simply had enough of putting up with it and decided to draw a line, especially after so many had gone the extra mile to keep things going during the pandemic.

Even in early July the exchange of letters between employers and unions did not suggest that a resolution of the dispute was close. Tom Williams reported for Times Higher Education on 16 May 2023 on the growing pressures on managers, staff and students as the UCU marking and assessment boycott spread. David Kernohan provided a superb explanation on 26 June 2023 of where we are, how we got there, and what might happen next: “What is beginning to emerge at a local level – as exemplified by the joint statement between the UCU branch executive and vice chancellor at the University of York Charlie Jeffery – is a position where it is agreed that staff deserve to be paid more, and the universities need more money to be able to do so. Here we also find a focus on longer term thinking about pay, with both sides of the dispute keen to avoid annual industrial action.”

That may be a necessary precursor to actual negotiation to resolve the dispute, but such resolution still seems distant, and attitudes seem to be hardening as the marking and assessment boycott hits the target and explodes. Jim Dickinson’s blog for Wonkhe on 20 April 2023 speculated about the consequences of universities’ withholding pay for partial performance of academic contracts, and whether notional allowances for marking could be deemed reasonable, in a legal sense. Since then there have been horror stories about universities making very large deductions from pay, 50% or even 100%, for many months. We are in Ashes-Bairstow-stumping territory: deductions may be legal, but would you want to win a dispute this way? Is this the way to treat staff who only very recently moved mountains to keep the show on the road during Covid lockdowns?

The impact of the boycott is not just on staff incomes, nor even just on delays for students in getting their final marks and awards. The situation is a test for university management everywhere in how they respond. There are reports of universities making alternative arrangements for marking which seem to fall well short of a commitment to maintaining academic standards. In some universities some students have not received final grades. Others are reported to be resorting to apparently less-qualified staff or PhD students to mark students’ work to avoid graduation delays. If this is happening it suggests a reckless disregard not only for the long-term maintenance of academic standards, but also for long-term relationships with staff who will think their values are being trashed along with their pay and working conditions.

The producers of those end-of-the-pier shows knew what would play well. The government has produced higher education’s end of the year show and it should have known better, because none of the audiences find it popular or entertaining. Nevertheless, this show might run and run …

Paul Temple


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No, it doesn’t make sense to me, either

by Paul Temple

I recently gave a cat-oriented friend a framed copy of a New Yorker cartoon showing a vet’s waiting room. A vet is saying to a man sitting there, “About your cat, Mr Schrödinger, there’s good news and there’s bad news…” Linda put the cartoon in her downstairs loo, and says that half her visitors think it’s hilarious while the rest are completely baffled.

The cartoon really summarises the totality of my knowledge of quantum mechanics, but as it seems to be one of those topics where if you think you understand it, you almost certainly don’t (and you’d be in pretty good company, see below), then my almost boundless ignorance doesn’t feel too bad. But as ideas borrowed from quantum mechanics seem to be colonising areas of discourse that were until recently understandable (we thought) to those of us without doctorates in the subject, perhaps we’d better make an effort.

A recent example of its spread is the paper by our colleague Ron Barnett, ‘Only connect: designing university futures’ in Quality in Higher Education, in which Ron uses the idea taken from quantum mechanics of “entanglement” to consider the university’s relationship with other entities. (And this is where it starts to get tricky.) As Ron notes, entanglement implies that the entities involved are mutually constitutive: one entity cannot be understood without examining the other entities with which it is entangled: “It may be true that one cannot give a description of the modern university without also referring to the economy but the reverse situation also holds: one cannot give a proper description of the economy without referring to a society’s universities. The economy is constitutive of universities, certainly; but universities are also constitutive of the economy”.

So far, so just about OK, yes? But the entanglement idea leads us into territory that is beyond weird: Einstein apparently wrote that “no reasonable definition of reality could be expected to permit” what entanglement implies, but – assuming that quantum computing is going to work, and there are some big bets on it doing so – it turns out that even he was mistaken. What Einstein couldn’t accept, it seems, was that two entangled objects, wherever in the universe they may be, become in effect one, after at first assuming opposite states.

Yes, this is way past anything that we’ve learned to accept as normal. One suggestion of how to think about entanglement asks us to imagine you and a friend tossing entangled coins. (How did they become entangled in the first place? Pass.) If, when you look at your coin, it’s heads, then your friend’s coin will, necessarily, be tails. But if your friend now looks at their coin, it will be heads, which means that your coin will now be tails: back to Schrödinger’s cat, simultaneously both dead and alive. (While the bits in normal computing have a value of either zero or one, qubits in quantum computing can have values of zero and one: Schrödinger’s cat is at the computer keyboard, which incidentally needs to be at a temperature close to absolute zero.)

With Einstein, perhaps, you may think this makes no sense, but earlier this year Google announced a breakthrough in creating an “error correction quantum computer”, having spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the project (Microsoft, Amazon, the Chinese, and others are also on the case), so they obviously think this stuff will work, regardless of the normal rules of the universe.

So, to pursue Ron’s suggestion about the university and the economy being mutually constitutive, it seems to follow that they will be – must be, following the theory – in opposite states. If you were looking for an argument for universities needing to be independent of government, might this be it? Next time a minister inveighs about universities being nests of woke, perhaps someone should explain the quantum aspects of the situation to them: the more regressive government policies become, universities will necessarily become more radical – it can’t be helped, it’s just to do with entanglement and the structure of the universe. I’m sure they’d appreciate the clarification.

Dr Paul Temple is Honorary Associate Professor in the Centre for Higher Education Studies, UCL Institute of Education.


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The ongoing saga of REF 2028: why doesn’t teaching count for impact?

by Ian McNay

Surprise, surprise…or not.

The initial decisions on REF 2028 (REF 2028/23/01 from Research England et al), based on the report on FRAP – the Future Research Assessment Programme – contain one surprise and one non-surprise among nearly 40 decisions. To take the second first, it recommends, through its cost analysis report, that any future exercise ‘should maintain continuity with rules and processes from previous exercises’ and ‘issue the REF guidance in a timely fashion’ (para 82). It then introduces significant discontinuities in rules and processes, and anticipates giving final guidance only in winter 2024-5, when four years (more than half) of the assessment period will have passed.

The second surprise is, finally, the open recognition of the negative effects on research culture and staff careers of the REF and its predecessors (para 24), identified by respondents to the FRAP consultation about the 2028 exercise. For me, this new humility is a double edged sword: many of the defects identified have been highlighted in my evidence-based articles (McNay, 2016, McNay, 2022), and, indeed, by the report commissioned by HEFCE (McNay, 1997) on the impact on individual and institutional behaviour of the 1992 exercise:

  • Lack of recognition of a diversity of excellences including work on local or regional issues because of the geographical interpretation of national/international excellence (para 37). Such local work involves different criteria of excellence, perhaps recognised in references to partnership and wider impact.
  • The need for outreach beyond the academic community, such as a dual publication strategy – one article in an academic journal matched with one in a professional journal in practical language and close to utility and application of a project’s findings.
  • Deficient arrangements for assessing interdisciplinary work (paras 60 and 61)
  • The need for a different, ‘refreshed’, approach to appointments to assessment panels (para 28)
  • The ‘negative impact on the authenticity and novelty of research, with individuals’ agendas being shaped by perceptions of what is more suitable to the exercise: favouring short-term inputs and impacts at the expense of longer-term projects…staying away from areas perceived to be less likely to perform well’. ‘The REF encourages …focus on ‘exceptional’ impacts and those which are easily measurable, [with] researchers given ‘no safe space to fail’ when it came to impact’.
  • That last negative arises in major part because of the internal management of the exercise, yet the report proposes an even greater corporate approach in future. The evidence-based articles and reports, and innovative processes and artefacts that arise from our research will have a reduced contribution to published assessments on the quality of research, though there is encouragement of a wider diversity of research outputs. More emphasis will be placed on institutional and unit ‘culture’ (para 28), so individuals disappear, uncoupled from consideration of culture-based quality. That culture is controlled by management; I spent several years as a Head of School trying to protect and develop further a collegial enterprise culture, which encouraged research and innovative activities in teaching. The senior management wanted a corporate bureaucracy approach with targets and constant monitoring, which work at Exeter has shown leads to lower output, poorer quality and higher costs (Franco-Santos et al, 2014).

At least 20 per cent of the People, Culture and Environment sub-profile for a unit will be based on an assessment of the Institutional Level (IL) culture, and this element will make up 25 per cent of a unit’s overall quality profile, up from 15 percent from 2021. This proposed culture-based approach will favour Russell Group universities even further – their accumulated capital has led to them outscoring other universities on ‘environment’ in recent exercises, even when the output scores have been the other way round. Elizabeth Gadd, of Loughborough, had a good piece on this issue in Wonkhe on 28 June 2023. The future may see research-based universities recruiting strongly in the international market to provide subsidy to research from higher student fees, leaving the rest of us to offer access and quality teaching to UK students on fees not adjusted for inflation. Some recognition of excellent research in unsupportive environment would be welcome, as would reward for improvement as operated when the polytechnics and colleges joined research assessment exercises.

The culture of units will be judged by the panels – a separate panel will assess IL cultures – and will be based on a ‘structured statement’ from the management, assessing itself, plus a questionnaire submission. I have two concerns here: can academic panels competent to peer-assess research also judge the quality and contribution of management; and, given behaviours in the first round of impact assessment (Oancea, 2016), how far can we rely on the integrity of these statements?

The sub-profile on Contribution to Knowledge and Understanding sub-profile will make up 50 per cent of a unit’s quality profile – down from 60 per cent last time and 65 per cent in 2014. At least 10 per cent will be based on the structured statement, so Outputs – the one thing that researchers may have a significant role in – are down to only 40 per cent, at most, of what is meant by overall research quality (the FRAP International Committee recommended 33 per cent). Individuals will not be submitted. HESA data will be used to quantify staff and the number of research outputs that can be submitted will be an average of 2.5 per FTE. There is no upper limit for an individual, and staff with no outputs can be included, as well as those who support research by others, or technicians who publish. Research England (and this is mainly about England; the other three countries may do better and certainly will do things differently) is firm that the HESA numbers will not be used as the volume multiplier for funding (still a main purpose of the REF), though it is not clear where that will come from – Research England is reviewing their approach to strategic institutional research funding. Perhaps staff figures submitted to HESA will have an indicator of individuals’ engagement with research.

Engagement and Impact broadens the previous element of simply impact. Our masters have discovered that early engagement of external partners in research, and 6 months attachment at 0.2 contract level allows them to be included, and enhances impact. Wow! Who knew? The work that has impact can be of any level to avoid the current quality level designations stopping local projects being acknowledged.

The three sub-profiles have fuzzy boundaries and overlap. Not just in a linear connection – environment, output, impact – but, because, as noted above, for example, engagement comes from the external environment but becomes part of the internal culture. It becomes more of a Venn diagram, that allows the adoption of an ‘holistic’ approach to ‘responsible research assessment’. We wait to see what those both mean in practice.

What is clear in that holistic approach is that research has nothing to do with teaching, and impact on teaching still does not count. That has created an issue for me in the past since my research feeds (not leads) my teaching and vice versa. I use discovery learning and students’ critical incidents as curriculum organisers, and they produce ‘evidence’ similar to that gathered through more formal interview and observation methods. An example. I recently led a workshop for a small private HEI on academic governance. There was a newly appointed CEO. I used a model of institutional and departmental cultures which influence decision making and ‘governance’ at different levels. That model, developed to help my teaching is now regarded by some as a theoretical framework and used as a basis for research. Does it therefore qualify for inclusion in impact? The session asked participants to consider the balance among four cultures of collegial, bureaucratic, corporate, entrepreneurial, relating to the degrees of central control of policy development and of policy delivery (McNay, 1995).  It then dealt with some issues more didactically, moving to the concept of the learning organisation where I distributed a 20 item questionnaire, (not yet published, but available on request for you to use) to allow scoring out of 10 per item, of behaviours relating to capacity to change, innovate and learn, leading to improved quality. Only one person scored more than 100 in total and across the group the modal score was in the low 70s, or just over 35%. That gave the new CEO an agenda with some issues more easily pursued than others and scores indicating levels of concern and priority. So my role moved into consultancy. There will be impact, but is the research base sufficient, was it even research, and does the use of teaching as a research transmission process (Boyer, 1990) disqualify it?

I hope this shows that the report contains a big agenda, with more to come. SRHE members need to consider what it means to them, but also what it means for research into institutions and departments to help define culture and its characteristics. I will not be doing it, but I hope some of you will. We need to continue to provide an evidence base to inform decisions even if it takes up to 20 years for the findings to have an impact.

SRHE itself might say several things in response to the report:

  • welcome the recognition of previous weaknesses, but note that a major one has not been recorded: the impact of RAE/REF on teaching, when excellent research has gained extra money, but excellent teaching has not, leading to an imbalancing of effort within the HE system. The research-teaching nexus also needs incorporating into the holistic view of research. Teaching is a major element in dissemination of research (Boyer, 1990) and so a conduit to impact, and should be recognised as such. That is because the relationship between researcher/teacher and those gaining new knowledge and understanding is more intimate and interactive than a reader of an article experiences. Discovery learning, drawing on learners’ experiences in CPD programmes can be a source of evidence, enhancing the knowledge and understanding of the researcher to incorporate in further work and research publications.
  • welcome the commitment to more diversity of excellences. In particular, welcome the commitment to recognise local and regionally directed research and its significant impact. The arguments about intimacy and interaction apply here, too. Research in partnership is typical of such work and different criteria are needed to evaluate excellence in this context.
  • welcome the intention to review panel membership to reflect the wider view of research now to be adopted.
  • urge an earlier clarification on panel criteria to avoid another 18 months, at least, trying, without clarity or guidance, to do work that will fit with the framework of judgement within which that work will be judged.
  • be wary of losing the voice of the researchers in the reduction of emphasis on research and its outputs in favour of presentations on corporate culture.

References

McNay, I (1997) The Impact of the 1992 RAE on Institutional and Individual Behaviour in English HE: the evidence from a research project Bristol HEFCE


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The health of higher education studies – cause for optimism?

By Rachel Brooks

How healthy is the area of higher education studies? When we look at the extant literature, there seems to be cause for concern. Scholars have noted: the frequent absence of theory and short-term focus of such research; the proximity of researchers to policy-makers which, it is argued, can make critical distance hard to achieve; and the fragmentation of the field. Higher education research has also been critiqued for occupying a relatively marginal place within the wider discipline of educational research. Nevertheless, I suggest that an analysis of recent data paints a rather different, and more optimistic, picture.

Indeed, there is mounting evidence that higher education research is an increasingly vibrant area of enquiry. In relation to research funding, for example, data from the UKRI’s Gateway to Research on the number of grants awarded from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) (Figure 1) indicate that, since the turn of the century, higher education-focussed projects have regularly been funded, albeit still not to the same extent as those that are schools-orientated. The grants from these bodies are relatively large (for the arts, humanities and social sciences), and are typically expected to make a theoretical, not only empirical, contribution.

Figure 1. Number of ESRC and AHRC grants awarded by ESRC and AHRC, with higher education or school in title, 2006-2022, by date of award*

Source: UKRI Gateway to Research database

*The data show only the date of the award, not the years over which the award was spent.

NB Data are available from 2004, but no education grants are recorded for either 2004 or 2005.

Vibrancy within the field of educational studies is also evidenced in data from the most recent national research assessment exercise in the UK (REF2021). As the exercise allowed researchers to be much more selective about the work they submitted for assessment than in previous exercises (ie they were required to submit a minimum of one research output and, across submissions as a whole, an average of 2.5 such outputs per full-time member of staff, compared with a minimum of four submissions per staff member in REF2014), the work submitted is clearly only a relatively small proportion of the overall research conducted within the area. Nevertheless, the data do facilitate comparative judgements over time, as well as giving a good sense about what is considered, by both individuals and institutions, to be high quality work within education. As Table 1 shows, the percentage of outputs submitted to the Education unit of assessment for REF2021 that focussed on higher education, at 14 per cent, was markedly higher than the corresponding proportion in the previous exercise, at nine per cent. A similar increase was evident in relation to the impact case studies submitted for both exercises, with the number of higher education-focussed impact case studies increasing from 15 per cent of all those submitted to the Education unit of assessment in REF2014 to 21 per cent in REF2021 (see Table 2). The increased vibrancy of higher education scholarship was also noted within the final report for the Education unit of assessment, which explicitly remarked on the growth in this area since REF 2014.   

Table 1. Submission to REF2021 Education sub-panel: outputs

 Total number of outputsHE-focussed outputsPercentage
REF201455195029
REF2021527273014

Source: REF2021 database; REF2014 analysis from Cotton et al 2018

Table 2. Submission to REF2021 Education sub-panel: impact case studies (ICS)

 Total number of ICSHE-focussed ICSPercentage
REF20142143215
REF20212264721

Source: REF2021 database; REF2014 analysis from Cotton et al 2018

The third source of evidence for the vibrancy of higher education within educational research is individual journals. The British Journal of Sociology of Education is a well-established international journal, based in the UK, which publishes work across many areas of education from pre-school to adult education and workplace learning. A comparison of the content of articles published in this journal since the turn of the century indicates that the proportion of work focussed on higher education has seen a steady growth, with a particularly large number of articles published over the most recent period (see Figure 2). Alongside this, new higher education journals have emerged over recent years. Policy Reviews in Higher Education, for example, was launched in 2017, with the remit of publishing articles that engage explicitly with topical policy questions and significant areas of higher education policy development.

Figure 2. Percentage of articles focussing on higher education published in the British Journal of Sociology of Education, by issue number: 20 (1999) to 43 (2023)

Source: British Journal of Sociology of Education website

Evidence from these three sources – research funding bodies, the UK’s national research assessment exercise, and education journals – indicates that higher education research now occupies an important place within the wider educational research landscape, and has grown in vibrancy over the past ten to twenty years. Moreover, it appears to have successfully addressed some of the weaknesses identified by scholars a decade or so ago, which were outlined above. The success of higher education researchers in securing grants from prestigious funding bodies suggests that they are no longer dependent on the short-term grants from policy organisations, enabling the exploration of issues in more depth across longer timescales. All three sources of evidence discussed above also indicate that the ‘absence of theory’ is no longer an accurate characterisation of the field. As noted above, UKRI grants typically require grant-holders to make a theoretical contribution, as well as an empirical one, through their work, while a robust conceptual framework is obviously important to work published in high status journals (such as the British Journal of Sociology of Education) and likely to be a consideration for work selected for submission to REF2021, given the relatively low number of submissions required per individual.

The vibrancy of higher education research can be explained by factors at a variety of levels. First, despite the points above about the ‘critical distance’ between researchers and policymakers, it seems very likely that much higher education research is related to the wider national policy context in the UK (and other parts of the world), in which politicians and policymakers have shown a high level of interest in the higher education sector, and taken up an increasingly interventionalist stance. Researchers are likely to be, in part, responding to this political prioritisation. The ongoing massification of higher education in the UK, with around 50 per cent of each cohort going on to degree-level study, may also have driven research activity in this area – with researchers cognisant of the importance of the sector to many people’s lives. As scholars have noted previously, higher education research is also encouraged at the institutional level – not only through the work of academic development units (or similar) – but also through the funding made available by universities to their academic staff to better understand their student populations and/or to pursue pedagogical research, with the aim of improving processes of teaching and learning. Often these are bound up quite closely with the wider policy environment: a desire to use research to improve ‘the student experience’ may be underpinned by market imperatives – for example, to improve an institution’s performance in the National Student Survey. Increased support from professional organisations (such as the SRHE and the network of Early Career Higher Education Researchers) is likely to have also played a role in the stimulation of higher education research. Finally, the ease and low cost of access to research participants (ie students and higher education staff) may also have driven enquiry in this area, in a context where research funding has become extremely competitive. While there are many reasons to be concerned about the focus of researchers’ gaze (ie the state of UK higher education itself), the current vibrancy of higher education studies is, in many ways, to be celebrated.

This blogpost is based on an article that has recently been published in the British Journal of Educational Studies.

Professor Rachel Brooks is Professor of Sociology and Associate Dean for Research and Innovation at the University of Surrey, UK. As well as being co-editor of the Routledge/SRHE book series, she is editor-in-chief of Sociology and an executive editor of the British Journal of Sociology of Education. She has published widely in the sociology of higher education. Recent books include Student Migrants and Contemporary Educational Mobilities (with Johanna Waters); Reimagining the Higher Education Student (with Sarah O’Shea) and Sharing Care (with Paul Hodkinson).