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What’s love got to do with neurodiversity and HE art and design?

by Kai Syng Tan

A loveless storm and a love-filled symposium

On 18 November I was ill. I recovered in time to travel to Helsinki for a symposium two days later, but winter storms shut down the airport, delayed flights and lost luggage, including mine. The symposium director Dr Timothy Smith (image 2 below, to the left) had to step in to act as my wardrobe assistant. Like many neurodivergent academics, Tim works across an astonishing range of knowledges, including political science, fine art, public policy and pedagogy. But I’m quite certain that sourcing for clothes to fit 155cm grumpy people isn’t part of their typical repertoire.  

A symposium with person standing to the left holding a microphone; another in the middle, seated, in front of a projection with book cover and QR codes and next to a screen showing live captioning; more people in the foreground on different forms of seating and being
Image 2
Image 3: Fidget toys placed on top of a paper file that reads ‘UNIARTS HELSINKI’, with a name tag with a lime green strap and name ‘KAI’. 
Image 3

Image 2: A symposium with person standing to the left holding a microphone; another in the middle, seated, in front of a projection with book cover and QR codes and next to a screen showing live captioning; more people in the foreground on different forms of seating and being

Image 3: Fidget toys placed on top of a paper file that reads ‘UNIARTS HELSINKI’, with a name tag with a lime green strap and name ‘KAI’. 

Tim’s Neurodiversity in the Arts Symposium, which took two years of advocacy and planning, and draws on several more of research across neurodiversity and art education, took place at the University of the Arts Helsinki, modelling best practices for inclusivity, not just for neurodivergent folx. Universities, watch and learn. Yes it can be done. So, what does a symposium led by love look like in action? Let’s spell out a few ways how:   

  • Programming not to neo-liberalist but ‘crip time’ (Kafer 2013), enabling us to process our thoughts, with 30 minute breaks between sessions, and a 2-hour lunch break;
  • Employment of live professional CART (Communication Access Real-Time Translation) captioning – not the still racist AI captioning that does not grasp ‘non-standard’ accents (image 2, to the right);
  • Where divergent modes of being – including horizontally, in motion etc, not just seated or erect – are affirmed (image 2, foreground);
  • Inclusion of fidget toys in the goody bag (image 3);
  • Provision of quiet spaces – no, we’re not talking about a broom cupboard or first aid room doubling, but a (care-)fully decked out sensory rooms for group or solo use, with low lighting, different soft furnishings as well as more sensory objects for people to shut off, calm down and/or regroup (image 4);
  • Detailed maps, diagrams and instructions for ‘walking or wheeling’ to venues; including for a dinner, at a five-star hotel, which was a delicious vegan spread – and entirely free of charge;    
  • Priced at less than one-third the fee of a usual conference at €100 – and that’s for ‘participants receiving full institutional financial support’; otherwise, ‘please select the €0 fee option’;
  • Elevating and celebrating diverse body-minds-worlds whose research, creative and professional practice gather, collide and transcend disciplines, fields of knowledge, cultures, geopolitical borders, and specialisms and in the lineup. This includes shy*play, a pedagogical platform, collective, and art practice comprising teacher-researchers from Netherlands-Spain Antje Nestel and Aion Arribas, who invite us to ‘do neurodiversity’ (images 5a-5b); Estonian-UK PhD candidate Iris Sirendi discussing their Curating for Change curatorial fellowship at the Museum of Liverpool and urging – no, daring – the arts and cultural sector to step up and ‘crip the museum’ (image 6); US-Canadian-Polish feminist researcher and author of several books including Asexual Erotics Professor Ela Przybylo disclosing their new identity/positionality of being autistic, and inviting responses Towards a Neuroqueer Conference Manifesto/a/x.
Image 4: Sensory room, with low blue-green lighting, soft furnishings and soft toys
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Image 5a: shy*play’s Antje Nestel and Aion Arribas, both holding microphones and reading from papers strewn on a long table
Image 5a
Image 5b: people ‘doing neurodiversity’ in different ways, including by displaying their creations on a wall that acts as a shared canvas
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Image 6: Estonian-UK PhD candidate Iris Sirendi at a long desk speaking to a projection with a slide with the heading ‘What’s Next?’ and a logo that reads ‘The Neurodiverse Museum’.
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Image 4: Sensory room, with low blue-green lighting, soft furnishings and soft toys

Image 5a: shy*play’s Antje Nestel and Aion Arribas, both holding microphones and reading from papers strewn on a long table

Image 5b: people ‘doing neurodiversity’ in different ways, including by displaying their creations on a wall that acts as a shared canvas

Image 6: Estonian-UK PhD candidate Iris Sirendi at a long desk speaking to a projection with a slide with the heading ‘What’s Next?’ and a logo that reads ‘The Neurodiverse Museum’

The above are just a few of the highlights from the in-person session on 22 November 2024, which complements an online symposium with a different programme a week prior on 15 November 2024 for those who prefer the digital interface, both of which are recorded with transcripts which all participants can freely access. 

I’m not singing the praises of the Neurodiversity in the Arts Symposium because I was the keynote speaker.

I’m saying the above as I’ve been a keynote as well as participant in more than 100 conferences – and I’m still allergic to them, not least as someone who is hyperactive and literally cannot sit still. I’m also saying this as someone who’s curated several, including one on running as an arts and humanities discourse that a 2014 Guardian article said ‘other conferences could take a leaf out of’, for its 8-minute sprint formats and multi-modal approaches including film screening, meditation sessions and run-chats.

But Tim’s conference was way better. The symposium is prioritising not just neurodivergent and queer – neuroqueer (Walker 2021) – perspectives. Following the positionality of multiply-minoritised researchers in higher education Angel L. Miles, Akemi Nishida and Anjali J. Forber-Pratt at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Vanderbilt University as expressed in their powerful open letter to White disability studies and ableist institutions of higher education (2017), the symposium focuses on research that counter ‘white supremacy and racism; colonialism and xenophobia; ageism; sexism and misogyny; cisnormativity and transphobia; and heteronormativity and heterosexism’.

And I’m sure that Tim, like me, wants other conferences to come, to even better ours. 

So, take our baton. Run with it.

Why neurodiversity? Why now?

‘Neurodiversity’ – broadly the coexistence of different ways of processing information, learning and being – has exploded as a buzzword in the past few years. If you didn’t know that 15-20% (Doyle 2020) of humans are autistic, with dyslexia, Tourettes, ADHD and other forms of neurodevelopmental processes, you will have run into the extensive media coverage, or seen your Gen-Z students or kids declaring their ‘neuro-spiciness’ on Tik Tok.

It is well-established that neurocognitive variants like dyslexia, ADHD and autism are over-represented in the arts and culture (above 30%, eg RCA 2001; Bacon and Bennett (2013); Universal Music (2020)). This is unsurprising, given how neurodiversity, innovation and change-making are powerfully entangled, being essential for human’s evolution, inventiveness, creativity and more. Networks, academic publications, research centres, educational research centres and conferences by/with/for neurodivergent creative researchers have been emerging in the last years too.

This year alone, I was external examiner for two creative PhDs by/for/with neurodivergence, and helped deliver one PhD candidate to the finish line and whom, since 28 November, can now add ‘Dr’ to their name, likely to the chagrin of those who think that only clinicians are ‘real’ doctors and experts. Collectively, these efforts are countering medicalised and deficit approaches to cognitive difference. By 2050, 1.94 billion of the 9.4 billion population will be neurodivergent – making neurodivergence far from a ‘niche’ phenomena or area of research, but one with substantive critical mass.

Those with social capital wear their difference as proud badges of honour. So far so ‘authentic’. 

But surprise, surprise – for the multiply-minoritised, their difference continues to be demonised, pathologised, infantilised, and/or policed. This includes teachers and researchers who draw on their neurodivergence in their teaching and research. That’s also why many aren’t out – or have/want access to diagnosis (which themselves have long waiting lists, are costly and more), etc, and often aren’t reflected in the official figures and studies. It’s also only recently been understood in leadership studies that when a white heterosexual cis-man expresses his ‘true self’, it’s just not acceptable, or even laudable. For those who are not straight, not white, not of the right class, or the right skin tone etc – authenticity comes at a high cost – including literally so. Being dyslexic, I struggle with normative approaches to reading and writing – but reading and writing are literally bread and butter for an academic! Disclosing that you cannot read or write would be tantamount to career-suicide, especially if you are on a fixed-term contract – if you have been able to survive the ableist, racist and sexist HE system at all, that is.    

Harvard, World Economic Forum, NESTA and other global bodies have been selling neurodivergence as the ‘next talent opportunity in the workplace’, ‘competitive advantage’ and a ‘neuroleadership’ antidote to in tackling wicked challenges for the Fourth Industrial Revolution — but without neurodivergent voices in this discussion, isn’t this objectifying and othering?

Then, there’s a certain cartoon-tycoon who has been dominating the headlines. When not firing their critics from their factories and firms, or firing rockets to colonise the moon and Mars, this person is firing spats on social media — before buying up the site to make it their temple for ‘unmoderated toxicity’. After firing pot-shots at child-free cat ladies, they’re asking ‘high-IQ revolutionaries’ to work for no pay for an incumbent government. The latter call is interesting because this person had announced that they are ‘with Aspergers’, using the outdated terminology still instrumentalised by certain ‘high-functioning’ autistic people, to denote that they are a genius — ie a high-IQ revolutionary themselves!    

Why neurodiversity, love and HE art and design?

As an autistic child-free cat lady, it’s my duty to ask other neurodivergent artists, academics, activists and allies within Higher Education (HE) to do more and do better, to call out on dangerous neurodivergent figures and approaches, and to counter that with love. If Machiavellian misfits and messiahs weaponise their neurodivergence, so must neurodivergent movers and shakers dis-arm them.  

Image 7

Caption: Love-led guidelines for to make spaces more inclusive, in diagram form with 8 blocks of texts. From Tan, Kai Syng. Neurodiversity In/& Creative Research Network shared, LIVE, CO-CREATED Community Guidelines since 2022

For several years, I’ve researched into and discussed the need to dismantle harmful narratives of neurodiversity. Through an art-psychiatry project, founding of a global 435-member network for neurodivergent innovators, I’ve urged for a decolonial  — ie shift of focus away from knowledge and practices in the West and global north — and intersectional — ie consideration of a how multiple, complex contexts interact and intersect  — approach. We’ve come up with love-led guidelines for activities (image 7). I’m editing a publication with a major academic publisher, which is possibly the first book with openly neurodivergent academics ranging from early career researchers to established, newly-‘out’ professors, to discuss our research through the prisms of neurodivergence and creativity (c2027). Along the way, we are introducing and foregrounding neurodivergent approaches to knowledge, creative research and writing with play, lived experience and more, thus challenging the dominant, normative habits demanded by the academic publishing industrial complex that emphasise the linear, causal, and ‘neutral’.   

On this SRHE platform, I’ve previously discussed a neurodivergence-inspired pedagogical approach to transform HE culture, illustrating how this isn’t just an armchair exercise or a theoretical pontification from the ivory tower, with examples I have led, such as a four-day festival for Black History Month 2020 in Manchester. To mark Valentines’ day this year, I discussed the need to build love into HE curricula – standing on the shoulders of great artists, activists and teachers before us, like bell hooks, Paulo Friere and James Baldwin.

My keynote at the Neurodiversity in the Arts Symposium was entitled ‘Neuro-Futurism and Reimagining Leadership’.  My performance-lecture was based on my book of the same title, subtitled ‘An A-Z Towards Collective Liberation’. Grasping how systemic oppressions are interconnected and how liberatory approaches to education must be joined up is vital in this discussion. I postulate a new intellectual agenda and action plan for ‘leadership’ as discourse and practice anchored in visual arts and arts education. Re-claiming the subject from business or arts management, and away from a trait/talent hinged on individualism, hierarchy, genes or luck, the book – and my performance – entangles critical leadership studies with socially-engaged art and relational aesthetics, embedding neuro-queering, futurity, and Chinese Daoist cosmology for the first time, to introduce ‘neuro-futurism’ as a beyond-colonial, (co-)creative change-making framework.

The participants of the symposium grasped this, responding by describing the performance-lecture as ‘phenomenal’. Brazilian artist-researcher Fran Trento, a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Geosciences and Geography at the University of Helsinki, even took live notes and pictures to add to their mobile participatory art installation, and wheeled it around, further spreading love in HE – literally (Image 8). If it hadn’t been snowing so heavily, Fran would have wheeled their installation outside, beyond the ivory tower, to make visible what the abstract yet very simple four-letter word – love – can look like.  

Image 8: Dr Fran Trento standing next to their mobile installation that comprises a jacket onto which participants can make marks onto, scrolls of film, and a pail with cameras and other creative and critical tools to dismantle harmful narratives and approaches
Image 8
Image 9: A signboard ‘Neurodiversity in the Arts Symposium’ covered in snow, in a street raging with a snow-storm with cars passing by in front of a building across the road.
Image 9

Image 8: Dr Fran Trento standing next to their mobile installation that comprises a jacket onto which participants can make marks onto, scrolls of film, and a pail with cameras and other creative and critical tools to dismantle harmful narratives and approaches

Image 9: A signboard ‘Neurodiversity in the Arts Symposium’ covered in snow, in a street raging with a snow-storm with cars passing by in front of a building across the road

And love is critical if we want to dis-arm and dismantle violent master (sic) narratives and approaches of neurodivergence. If neurodivergence is a superpower — a trope I have also critiqued as, while useful, it can be reductive/fetishistic, and capitalised by the ‘high-functioning’ to self-select into an elitist club that excludes others — then there are also villains and Machiavellian messiahs who abuse their (super)power. The irony is — and yes, autistic people can grasp irony — is that these self-proclaimed ‘anti-establishment’ ‘outsiders’ are often the very personification and product of the system,as poster boys of capitalism and more. Remember the call for ‘weirdos and misfits’ outside the Oxbridge set to join Number 10 – by figures whose pedigrees were archetypal of the ruling class — private education, Oxford degree, political strategist to a prime minister similarly outfitted?

Now that’s weird!

Braving storms ahead

My luggage got lost – again – on my way back to the UK, but academic and arts and cultural workers must lose neither our focus or hope. As hatred becomes even more mainstreamed and normalised, minoritised body-minds and approaches will remain hardest hit. There will be storms ahead (image 9). We – and that includes you – must step forward and step up. As US author Octavia E Butler (1947–2006) warns, unless we build ‘different leadership’ by ‘people with more courage and vision’, we’ll ‘all go down the toilet’. That’s why the Black science-fiction bestseller, who was also dyslexic, wrote story after story that reimagined different, better realities. 

To not go down the toilet, we must disarm those who weaponise their neurodivergence. Here are some of the things that neurodivergent academics, artists, activists and allies can do:  

  • Shift your curricula to elevate and celebrate efforts that are truly leader-ful, joy-ful and equitable, and directed towards collective liberation. I’ve named several in this article. No excuses.  
  • Stop the hierarchy of normality – within neurodiversity groups in and beyond HE too – that props up antics that are white supremacist, patriarchal, misogynist, racist, transphobic, homophobic, xenophobic, colonialist, capitalist, ableist and extractive. Stop fuelling the misfits and messiahs with ill-intentions. 
  • Instead, invest in and donate your time, energy and skills to support love-led efforts. If you have a voice/ platform and can afford to, mobilise it to push back against the violence. People in senior management paygrades, make use of your position/proximity to the top of the food-chain to action positive change beyond lip service or generic policy statements about the civic duty of HE, and bring to life its promises about equity, social justice and inclusion.

On that latter note, I’m seeking to curate a 3-day international summit in 2026 that re-imagines HE art and design as a change-making and future-making force through neuroqueer, social justice and leadership prisms. This welcomes anyone with a stake in the arts and culture, higher education, social change and inclusive futures, to get together to explore the coexistence of different ways to (un-)learning and being in the world, to share best practices about inclusion, and to collectivise and co-create action plans for more inclusive futures within and beyond the art school and HE. Through quickfire provocations, transdisciplinary speed-dating, reverse-mentoring, co-creation of toolkits, skateboarding tours, running-discourses and other embodied forms of engagement, we will not just learn about ways to make ‘reasonable’ adjustments for neuro-divergent students and staff, but to learn about their innovative approaches, and thus reimagine ways to understand and do ‘leadership’, so as to make positive changes, within and beyond art and design and HE. This shift in paradigm to position art and design higher education is aligned with – and can amplify – other ongoing efforts in the sector, such as the Creative Education Manifesto. Get in touch if you’re keen to help do the work.

All that said, clearly, neither Tim’s symposium or my proposed summit are the only or last word in this matter. You, too, can lead with love, if you don’t already. Prioritise an intersectional approach to neuroqueer the curricula, towards dis-arming stories and approaches that are white supremacist, racist, colonialist, xenophobic, ageist, sexist, misogynistic, classcist, transphobic and heteronormative.

CREDITS: Photographs by Kai. Photograph of Kai by neurodivergent artist-curator-activist-PhD-candidate Aidan Moseby

Kai Syng Tan is an artist, academic, author, and agitator who adores cats and alliteration. Their book Neuro-Futurism and Re-Imagining Leadership: An A-Z Towards Collective Liberation re-imagines leadership as a co-creative, neuro-queered practice centring anti-oppression and futurity: it was published in Summer 2024. See here to join the book tour. Sign up here to participate in the CHEAD Leadership Programme taster entitled What’s love got to do with leadership? led by Kai as a new CHEAD Trustee, which will feature a response by Pascal Matthias, Associate Vice President EDI and Social Justice, University of Southampton and Co-Founder at FACE (Fashion Academics Creating Equality). Kai is Associate Professor in Arts and Cultural Leadership, University of Southampton, UK. All views here are their own.


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Investigating the experiences of the many stakeholders of degree apprenticeships

by Andrea Laczik, Kat Emms, and Josh Patel

Degree Apprenticeships (DAs) have been ascendant in popularity and visibility since their launch in 2015. They are of particular interest to us at the Edge Foundation, where we’ve long championed novel approaches to the alignment of employer needs with provider offer and of the importance of access to high quality education experiences. In our recent event hosted with the SRHE’s HE Policy Network, we explored how DAs fit in the English higher education system, and reflected on their purpose.

DAs are offered across 17 industry sectors by employers ranging from SMEs to large national and international employers and are widely used in the public sector including in policing and the NHS. Studying on a DA programme is an opportunity to earn alongside learning at degree level and without paying tuition fees. About 100 higher education providers currently deliver this learning. The content of the curriculum is designed in partnership with employers, and employers fund DAs through an employer levy which employers can claim against to fund apprenticeship training. The number of DAs continue to grow, with participation up 8.2% to 46,800 in 2022/23.

While DAs were originally designed to address skills shortages and contribute to national economic growth, there has been some debate as to how effective DAs are as instruments to increase access and widen participation as claimed. It is also unclear how far the content of the curriculum should be determined by immediate employer needs versus the duty to prepare an effective and productive workforce for the future.

Our presenters provided productive and complementary perspectives on these questions from different stakeholders around DAs: employers, students, and mentors.

Employers and returns

Andrea Laczik and Kat Emms presented findings from Edge’s forthcoming research report on ‘Degree Apprenticeships in England’. This work based on interviews with nearly 100 stakeholders provides a broad sample of experiences of these groups which hitherto have often been considered in separation. Here we concentrated on employers’ motivations to engage with degree apprenticeships.

Employers favoured the sustainable employment and progression opportunities moulded closely to their needs that DAs facilitate. Some employers did see this as an opportunity for upwards mobility and diversification of the workplace. As one SME employer told us:

‘There are too many people in the IT industry that are like me. Okay, so we’re talking middle aged white guys… degree apprenticeships allow people who wouldn’t consider getting into this industry from a variety of backgrounds, creeds, colours. I want to increase the diversity in IT’.

Apprentices were also valued for their ability to apply theoretical learning to practical applications in work, for their developed communication and teamworking skills.

However, it was primarily large employers who had both greater resource and capacity to administer their levy funds and input into the design of DAs, meaning their DAs are often more closely aligned to their needs compared to SMEs. Many employers prioritised operations at the expense of workforce development and struggled with what was perceived as the loss of an apprentice for their off-the-job training for one day a week. The serendipity of the deployment of DAs in most sectors indicates a lack of clarity, dispersion, and embeddedness in employer thinking, behaviours, and strategising. There is a place for regional authorities to help administer levy transfer schemes, which may be underutilised currently.

Apprentices and belonging

Julie Pepper and Katherine Ashbullby, University of Exeter, explored how degree apprentices negotiate dual identities as both employees and students, and how this affects their relationship with the university. The degree apprentices they spoke to regarded themselves as employees first and foremost. This may be linked to the fact that they felt disconnected from a traditional university life and experience. However, many also regarded themselves as lifelong learners with distinct qualities including industry experience, connections and resilience. They discussed their ‘journey of transformation and change’ which they were able to fulfil through a DA. The weight of the dual identity nevertheless came with increased pressures.

The identities Julie and Katherine described bear considerable resemblance to that in existing research on part-time learners. And they illuminate some of differences between the highly structured programmes of employment-oriented identity formation in DA models and the more ‘open’ identity formation of UG courses. This is a productive difference. But it involves a trade-off – full time students have a disconnect with employers which mirrored DAs’ disconnect with socialisation opportunities in educational institutional communities.

Mentors and mentoring

Aimee France, Claire Staniland and Karen Stevens presented on their research, with Trudy Sevens from Sheffield Hallam University and with Josh Patel from Edge, on the role and identity of Work Based Mentors (WBMs) of degree apprentices in Allied Health Professions (AHP). DAs are increasingly important in NHS workforce planning. Defining the role of a WBM and identifying good practice is consequently valuable to ensure the success of DAs. As Aimee, Claire and Karen discussed, WBMs have a unique role distinct from an academic tutor or workplace assessor. Their role is both pastoral and acting as a bridge between the academic world and practice, particularly helping to identify opportunities to better integrate theory and practice. This is critical to providing recognition, perhaps accreditation, and effective training for WBMs. The formalisation of such roles might be welcomed, but only if important virtues of voluntarism, care, and reciprocity are maintained. The relevance of these findings outside AHP is likely to be high regarding other liminal mentorship roles.

Providers and social justice

Charlynne Pullen, also of Sheffield Hallam, turned to the perspective of providers, drawing on her research with Colin McCaig, and Kat Emms and Andrea Laczik from Edge. In the current uncertain higher education landscape, providers are motivated to strengthen and diversify their applied provision to draw on ‘untapped markets’ of student demand. Cultivating this market requires substantial efforts to stimulate interest from employers and potential students. How far these efforts do broaden entry and widen participation varied. With the growing awareness of DAs, concerns have arisen around so-called ‘middle-class capture’ of DA opportunities by candidates who likely would have attended HE regardless. DAs have high entry requirements, sometimes including assessment centres, and providers have limited means to influence recruitment which is ultimately the purview of employers. This meant that DAs currently display a contested role in enabling individual social mobility. Opportunities for school leavers seemed limited, though there is an arguable role for DAs in widening participation and entry to higher-level professions for adult learners. Social justice can potentially be achieved through DAs in two ways – either through social mobility of degree apprentices, and/or through widening participation in HE. DAs can offer social mobility for existing employees (as can any substantial on-job training) but will have no substantive role in widening participation to HE on current measurement methods which focus on young people, because DAs aimed at 18-year old school leavers do not attract the same level of diversity as existing undergraduate degrees offered by providers.

Conclusions

DAs represent one of the most exciting innovations in the way providers approach the design and delivery of degree level education in the UK. Together, this research indicates that while for employers and learners who can take advantage the benefits are substantial, there is work to do to improve their accessibility. DAs are still small scale. And, first and foremost, they are jobs. If employers do not have degree level vacancies, DAs cannot be offered. Until there are programmatic efforts to simulate job creation, distributing resources between employers, evidencing the impact of DAs more clearly, and identifying best practice in areas such as mentoring, would help strengthen the effectiveness of DAs.

Edge will be publishing three of the pieces of research on DAs featured in this blog in September and October 2024. To keep up to date with our research, sign up to our mailing list, or follow us on Twitter @ukEdge and LinkedIn.

The Edge Foundation is an independent, politically impartial foundation, inspiring the education system in order to help young people acquire the knowledge, skills & behaviours to flourish. Andrea Laczik is the Director of Research, Kat Emms is an Education and Policy Senior Researcher, and Josh Patel is a researcher.


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Debt and doubt: a graduate’s frustrations with the current higher education loans regime

by Josh Patel

And I am a weapon of massive consumption,
And it’s not my fault, it’s how I’m programmed to function.

When I was asked to speak about my experiences of graduate indebtedness at the recent SRHE event in June, I was initially enthusiastic. I was a member of the first cohort of school-leavers expected to take out the government loans to pay the then new £9000 university fees in 2012-13. I took a gap year, completed an undergraduate degree, and subsequently received funding for a Master’s and a PhD. I believe I am one of the first of this new generation of highly indebted graduates to have been afforded the time and space to develop expertise around and reflect on the HE system I was a part of. Few graduate voices on their indebtedness are heard in research or policy discourse. 

However, figuring out my contribution became frustrating. Firstly, any perspective I would bring would be unrepresentative. I am a mixed-race male from the home counties. I attended a Russell Group university, and had far too much fun in the sandbox of further academic study, sheltered from having to think seriously about entering the external labour market. Secondly, I had conducted no research myself on graduate experiences. I am also not an economist. I would be exposing my feelings about the current student finance regime (albeit informed by my related research) to the potentially sharp questioning of experts. This felt epistemically precarious. 

Graduate indebtedness

My frustrations around the legitimacy of my voice and my disenfranchisement from the conversation around indebtedness are part of a broader series of doubts and tensions. It’s hard to avoid a sense of resentment every time I check (mainly to satisfy a grim curiosity) my rapidly ballooning student debt total on the Student Loans Company website. I will likely be making payments that have a negligible impact on that total until 2047. It is Sisyphean. At the same time, I had heard for many years hear policymakers and academics like Nick Barr talk about the inherent fairness of income-contingent loans. Given that individuals receive a substantial return from their investment in higher education (HE), it is right that the balance of costs should be shared between students and the state. 

In Claire Callender and Steve Jones’ work on student experiences of indebtedness, the complaints of students and graduates are primarily centred around the slight delays of a few years to the privileges of an expected middle-class lifestyle, like buying a first house or having a family. Are these frustrations really valid, or are they just the mewlings of the demanding children of the late welfare state, now that democratic due diligence has found the public investment in our education was not providing an effective social return?

Thinking through these doubts was hard. Like the students in Claire’s and Steve’s research, I had internalised a certain logic. My failure to shed the shameful label of indebtedness lay in my regrettable choice to pursue history, my (apparently?) poor work ethic, and my subconscious suspicion of Big Four consultancy grad schemes. But I came to think about my frustrations with indebtedness through the work I’d done during my PhD. My frustration with the current loans regime is a frustration with ‘the whole way in which a society selects its priorities and orders itself’, to redeploy EP Thompson’s phrase from 1970. Our current politics has de-prioritised investments in the future, which undermines the realisation of a good society. Indebtedness serves as a sharp and recurring reminder of all of this.

The balance of freedoms

The axiom that those that benefit most from HE should bear proportionately more of the cost derives somewhat surprisingly from the 1960s. The story of post-war massification in the UK is a familiar one; participation in HE grew from less than 5% prior to 1939 to approaching 50% today. In 1962 a mandatory grant was introduced to pay for the education of ‘all those qualified by ability and attainment and who wished to do so’, in the words of the Robbins Report (1963). While this public-mindedness feels inevitable in the spirit of post-war optimism, at the time it was not uncontested. As one economist put it, in a system of grants, resources of the ‘poor and stupid’ in the general population who would not benefit from HE are used to fund the privileged lifestyles of the few ‘rich and intelligent’ who attended universities. While the Robbins Report advocated expansion based on grants, the chairman of the Robbins Report, Lionel Robbins (himself a neoliberal economist, as I have explored) thought the argument for loans and grants was delicately balanced.

Robbins considered the problem one of what he called the ‘balance of freedoms’. There was an important balance to strike between preserving freedoms in the present, and enabling future freedoms in the pursuit of social prosperity. For Robbins, prosperity was a consequence of the inherent tendency of individuals to pursue their own self-betterment in conditions of freedom. This included generating individual returns on the labour market and broader social returns. University education would increase young people’s productivity and ingenuity, while enhancing their understanding of their responsibilities to society.

Taxation (a substantial transgression of personal freedoms by the state) was only justified when it could be shown to enhance future freedoms. In the context of proportionately low attendance of HE in the UK in the post-war period, grants were a state investment in removing structural and psychosocial barriers to self-betterment in the population, particularly for women and others from underprivileged backgrounds. When a greater proportion of the population were empowered to pursue those opportunities, both individual and social prosperity would follow. 

As a greater proportion of the population attended HE habitually, the justification for increased taxation would fall. It would no longer be justified to take poor people’s money to pay for the continued elevation of the gifted. When this happened, it would be more just for the burden of HE cost to fall back to young people so they could make an informed decision about the relative costs and returns of them attending HE. 

The question of the balance of costs of HE was never as simple as stating that: because attending HE generates both a social return and a large individual return, students should be expected to take on some burden of the cost of their education.

As Robbins understood it, the question is: on the balance of how far future freedoms are enabled by the reduction of freedoms in the present, how far is it right that resources should be redistributed from the general population to fund HE? 

Three frustrations

Revisiting the question of the balance of freedoms in the twenty-first century leads you to a different place than in the twentieth century. The burden of the costs of education is now tipped towards graduates far in excess of a good faith balance of freedoms. It serves a regime which has played politics, fetishised austerity, and sought short-term returns above sustainability and long-term economic prosperity. Reflecting on my indebtedness, I identified three rough frustrations:

Short-termism

Because we live in a democratic society, the assessment of our collective capacity to engender future freedoms is, rightly, subject to accountability through our political system. But the downward pressure this exerts on public expenditure is not inevitable (as it is sometimes presented) but a consequence of political culture. Public and policy discourse seems to have completely lost sight of the capacity of collective action to advance future freedoms. Austerity has led to an underinvestment in social infrastructure, ducked the costs of maintenance, and eviscerated our national capacities. The burden of the costs of repairing this damage has been shifted to our future. There is limited research as to the economic and social consequences of this debt. Both Labour and the Conservatives’ commitments to avoiding raises in tax feels like a failure to have an honest conversation with the electorate about our national priorities in the face of serious national and international challenges. 

Poor redistributive justice

Recent London Economics modelling demonstrated that, for those taking new loans from August 2023, lower income female graduates will subsidise high-earning males’ education. Or, as James Purnell put it recently in publications for HEPI, ‘a nurse must now pay back more than a banker’. This is deeply unjust. It is completely antithetical to the progressive income tax regime we all abide by. It violently severs one route this generation can mutually support one another in our pursuit of human flourishing. And it is pointless. As Barr has argued, ‘The argument that tax cuts lead to growth is mistaken; lower taxes are not always better. Productive private investment needs to be complemented by productive public investment’. Job forecasts from other advanced economies expect more than 80% of the workforce will require some tertiary accreditation by 2050. Skills shortages even today are calculated to cost the UK economy up to £39 billion a year from 2024 through to 2027. Investment in education and training by employers and the state has deteriorated and productivity is stagnant. Redistribution is imperative. 

Deterioration of HE

The deterioration of the unit cost following from the political deadlock around loans makes HE an unappealing place to plan a career. The transition period at the end of the PhD consists of a ridiculous juggling act of multiple contracts for everything from research to teaching to administrative roles. Despite all the hard work, remuneration is comparatively poor. All the delays to adult life that indebtedness inflict are compounded. Even permanent academic roles do not seem particularly secure given the redundancies sweeping over the sector. Add on top of all that the expected workload, bullying managerial cultures, artificial ED&I strategies, it is a wonder HEIs are able to attract qualified and ambitious candidates at all. During my time as a PhD and Fellow, I was paid more per hour as head coach of the university swim team than I was to deliver seminars.[1] Why bother?

The next sixty years

Robbins was arguing for expansion just after the Cuban Missile Crisis. The wars of the first half of the twentieth century were raw, living memories. HE was implicated in this in a complicated way – the powerful knowledge of modern societies taught through HE had the potential to both to raise living standards to unparalleled heights but also enable mass atrocities. A proper education cultivated the wisdom in students to wield modern technologies with responsibility. 

Obviously freedom is diminished after a nuclear holocaust. But the existential crises I fear – everything from crises in teaching and healthcare, gender and social inequality, to the climate change and the resurgence of fascism across the world – if they are not tackled are also equally non-conducive to overall freedom. They require exponentially more of my generation and later generations to be part of the solution. Indebtedness is a constant reminder that our contribution to solving these problems is not worth collective support. 

Josh Patel is a Researcher at the Edge Foundation. There, he has contributed to research on Degree Apprenticeships, New HEIs, and T levels, and is currently leading research on student experiences of tertiary pathways between HE and FE. He was previously a Fellow at the University of Warwick and completed his PhD on the justifications for the massification of higher education in liberal thought. He is writing a monograph on this topic for SRHE’s Research into Higher Education book series with Routledge. Here, Josh writes in a personal capacity. The views contained within do not necessarily reflect the views of the Edge Foundation.

[1] I have to qualify this by stressing that participation in student-led communities was central in my and (as I saw as a coach, tutor, and researcher) others’ personal development. My point is that there is a social maldistribution of resources that permits this circumstance.


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Hearing the voices of care-experienced academics

by Neil Harrison and Simon Benham-Clarke

The face of higher education is changing, albeit slowly. Despite decades of initiatives to seed diversity, the academy – in the UK at least – continues to be dominated by voices from groups that have historically enjoyed educational privilege.

Over the last ten years, there has been increasing interest in understanding and supporting the participation of ‘care-experienced’ learners in higher education – that is, students who spent time in the care of the state during childhood, usually due to neglect or trauma within their birth family.  It includes, for example, those who spent time in foster care or children’s homes. It is a group of learners who have generally faced significant disruption and adversity in their lives, with the legacies known to persist into adulthood.

Definitive numbers do not yet exist, but it is estimated there are at least 5,000 care-experienced students in UK universities at any given time. It logically follows that a proportion of these will be in a position to seek entry into academic careers as they pass from undergraduate to postgraduate study and onwards. Indeed, there have long been care-experienced students in our universities – and it seems safe to assume that many have transformed their interests and successes into a career within the academy.

In reality, though, we don’t know.  While there is vibrant interest in, for example, the careers of working class or disabled academics, we don’t believe that care-experienced academics have been the explicit focus of research before. In conceiving the study that underpins this piece, we envisaged that it would be a group that had faced – and overcome – significant challenges to reach their position.  However, we wanted to understand more.

About our study

Our main objective was to seek out and foreground the voices of care-experienced academics. We wanted to understand the routes taken to their careers and these were impacted – if at all – by the legacies of their early lives. However, we were also cognisant that exploring groups who face particular challenges can often offer wider illumination about educational systems and their failings: what could the working lives of care-experienced academics tell us about the contemporary academy?

In our study, we spoke to 21 academics, spanning roles from research assistant to professor in universities across the UK. Most were women and aged between 30 and 44, with the majority based in social science departments. We were struck by the individualised nature of the career pathways represented, with around two-thirds having significant breaks in their educational journeys, especially between school and university.

Precarity and safety nets

An important consideration for our participants was the inherent precarity of academic careers. Several reported that they had benefited from ‘lucky’ relationships with doctoral supervisors or senior colleagues that had helped them to progress through short-term contracts or secure a permanent role.

While this is not itself an unusual experience, our participants generally had to navigate this without the family ‘safety nets’ on which other aspiring academics are generally able to draw. Several described anxieties, either presently or in the past, about insecurity of income or housing that reminded them of their early lives.  Conversely, an academic career could offer long-term stability – not quite ‘a job for life’, but highly-valued financial security and more work-life flexibility than many other options.

Nevertheless, we were left questioning whether there were others outside our study who had not had these supportive encounters or for whom the precarity had proved unnavigable. Indeed, one of our participants had recently left academia and another was thinking seriously about doing so. 

Imposter syndrome, rejection and belonging

Despite the satisfaction they experienced from their career, nearly all our participants described feeling a degree of ‘imposter syndrome’ within academia. They were conscious that they did not conform to the prevailing stereotypes of who an academic should be and many noted elements of their identity that emphasised this difference – clothing choices, hairstyles or body art.  Feelings of difference are not, of course, unique to care-experienced academics and it reminded us of previous research focused on gender, social class, ethnicity and disability.

Questions of belonging were brought into sharper focus by workplace microaggressions or experiences of academic rejection. For example, one participant described how they felt compelled to challenge derogatory comments made by a colleague about young people in care, while another talked about how the harshness of the publication process surfaced difficult childhood memories about judgement and acceptance. These accounts led us to reflect on how more kindness in academic life would support greater inclusivity.

Visible or hidden?

Being care-experienced is unlike many other sites of inequality as there no physical attributes that conclusively identify someone. One ramification of this is that the individual gets a degree of choice about whether (and how) to disclose their status to managers, colleagues and students. We noted how our participants had come to quite different decisions on this, based on how they viewed their workplace and their role within it.

Around one-third had purposively chosen public visibility, often as part of an advocacy role within academia and wider society.  This group tended to be teaching or researching around care issues and often used their profile to challenge negative stereotypes and expectations, as well as pressing for improvements in policy.  Several talked about how their visibility helped them to build rapport with – and empower – disadvantaged or marginalised students.

Others reflected carefully on the persistent societal stigma around care and opted to not to share. They voiced concerns about prevailing stereotypes, fearing that colleagues might make assumptions about their mental health or academic abilities. There were also worries that their care-experienced status might overshadow their academic achievements or that they would be expected to be ‘bid-candy’ to help colleagues win funding.

A third group had adopted a strategic approach of disclosing selectively to trusted colleagues or presenting a fictive account that avoided difficult conversations. Even this approach could be vexed by misunderstandings from colleagues and require considerable work to juggle competing identities.

Final thoughts

It is difficult to summarise wide-ranging findings in a short piece like this, but we hope this has offered a flavour. Firstly, we argue that the endemic precarities of contemporary academia disproportionately impact those with the flimsiest safety nets. Secondly, we suggest that ignorance and inconsiderate practices undermine belonging, especially for those already perceiving themselves as imposters. Thirdly, we recognise the additional social and emotional work required to negotiate authentic identities. All three points draw inspiration from our participants’ lived experience, but each has wider relevance for how we structure and occupy spaces in the academy.

Finally, we would like to thank our participants for their time, insight and willingness to share sensitive elements of their lives with researchers who are not care-experienced.  We are indebted to them and we hope that we have done justice to their stories.

This study was kindly funded through a British Academy and Leverhulme Trust Small Grant.  The first article from the study is now available and we have articles in preparation focusing on academic identity work and the salience of school experiences.

Neil Harrison is an Associate Professor in the School of Education at the University of Exeter and an academic trustee of the National Network for the Education of Care Leavers. 

Simon Benham-Clarke is a researcher in the School of Education at the University of Exeter.


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How individual accommodation creates barriers to the inclusion of students with disabilities

by Pascal Angerhausen and Shweta Mishra

The inclusion of students with disability in higher education

Individual assessment accommodation is a widely used instrument for inclusion of students with disabilities. It aims at reducing barriers and promoting equal participation, by taking into account the individual needs of a person. However, our research in the project SuccessInclusive (ErfolgInklusiv) has shown that it can also create barriers and lead to new forms of exclusion. It shifts the responsibility to the individual and creates an additional bureaucratic burden for students and university staff. Further, there are issues of legitimacy associated with individual accommodation. If some students are treated differently from others, this raises issues of fairness and equality. Lastly, individual accommodation makes students dependent on those who provide it. We therefore urge universities and policy makers to rethink their focus on individual accommodation and prioritize universal design measures.

Individual accommodation and universal design in German higher education

Universities can choose between two different strategies to promote inclusion in higher education. Universal design and individual accommodation. Universal design aims to reduce or eliminate barriers for all, a priori, whereas individual accommodation consists of solutions that meet the individual needs of specific students. Both approaches have their own benefits and problems. Usually, a combination of the two is used to promote inclusion. If we look at German higher education, universal design plays a minor role. Even though universities are obliged to implement universal design measures, these are mostly limited to physical accessibility. Instead, inclusion in German higher education relies heavily on individual accommodation (Gattermann-Kasper/Schütt, 2022; Steinkühler et al, 2023).

Individual responsibility and bureaucratic burden

If students want to use individual accommodation in German higher education, they need to know about their rights. For many students, this is the biggest obstacle to using Disadvantage Compensation, as they either do not know about their rights or see themselves as entitled to it (Steinkühler et al, 2023). Once these barriers have been overcome, they need to apply on the basis of a medically certificated impairment. The application process can cost time, energy and sometimes even money. Students reported a lack of information, long waiting times and unclear bureaucratic processes. Some of them talked of having to travel long distances to see specific doctors who would issue the necessary medical certificates. In some cases, students also had to pay for these certificates themselves. If these students must renew their application every year – as some faculties require – applying for individual accommodation means a great deal of effort to the students and can in itself be a barrier. 

Additionally, individual accommodation involves a great deal of effort not only for the students but also for the university staff. At the German university where we conducted our interviews, each faculty accepts and handles applications on its own. The staff and the responsible professors review the applications, check them for form and plausibility, and must decide, if and to what extent students can be granted individual accommodation. These decisions are often based on previous decisions and experiences, rather than on official guidelines or laws. The small number of cases handled by individual faculties makes it difficult to build up experience and develop best practice. Thus, staff reported of uncertainty in dealing with individual accommodation requests.

The question of legitimacy

The lack of guidelines on the appropriate form and scope of individual accommodation creates uncertainties that undermine its legitimacy. Students who used individual accommodation reported that both, students and lecturers questioned the fairness of their accommodations. For example, fellow students asked them about their “advantage” and asked for advice on how they could get access to it so that their studies would be “easier”. Thus, students with disabilities who use individual accommodation often doubt its fairness and necessity, while simultaneously lacking an objective perspective. Social networks and previous experiences of accommodation can help in legitimizing accommodation and supporting the experience of studying as an equal.

Individual accommodation creates individual dependencies

Students also emphasized that individual accommodation strengthens the influence of individual people. To receive individual accommodation, students become dependent on doctors, university staff, lecturers and professors. While all of these can be helpful – and many students reported of positive and supportive encounters – this dependency can create impossible barriers. Students, whether they experienced negative or positive situations, highlighted this dependency as problematic. At every step, individuals can act as gatekeepers and prevent them from receiving the accommodations they need to rightfully study. For example, a student reported that he has to write several emails before every exam just to make sure the lecturers organize the accommodations that he is entitled to – and still does not always receive them. Another student was told by the university staff that the accommodation they requested would not be necessary, even though they provided a medical certificate. Many students shared stories of just being ignored by their lecturers, or of lecturers telling them that they did not have the resources to provide appropriate accommodations. Thus, individual accommodation was often experienced as creating an additional work load for the lecturers. In the worst case, these experiences can lead to students dropping out and missing the chance to pursue an academic degree; which is directly linked to the opportunity for students with disabilities to live a decent and independent life.

Accessing individual accommodation requires individual resources

Lastly, our interviews showed that the process of accessing individual accommodation requires resources that are unequally distributed. Students from academic backgrounds, with extensive financial resources or extended social networks are better equipped to access individual accommodations. They can get a second opinion from another doctor, receive information on how to formulate applications, how to appeal or even legal advice. Further, dealing with the problems of gatekeeping also appears to be a gendered issue. Women in particular reported being doubted by others. For some, this went as far as medical gaslighting, the experience of being systematically doubted by medical professionals. Some of those who experienced these doubts resigned themselves when they encountered someone who did not want to believe or support them, rather than fight for their rights. Thus, not all students have equal access to individual accommodation. For some, receiving information about their rights, attaining a medical certificate, applying for individual accommodation,or dealing with gatekeepers is more problematic than for others. So, while other researchers have highlighted differences between students with obvious and stable disabilities and those with invisible and variable disabilities (Goldberg, 2016), our research showed that social networks, academic background, and gender of the students play an important role in the use of individual accommodation.

Concluding remarks

While we have focussed on the ways in which individual accommodation hinders inclusion, students and university staff also emphasized the positive aspects of individual accommodation. If there is a supportive culture and university staff have adequate resources, focussing on the individual needs allows them to find appropriate solutions and highlights the individual situation of each student. Students can feel heard and their disadvantages can be properly compensated for. However, this is rather the ideal case scenario. In our interviews, students reported a lack of a supportive culture in many disciplines, and in society in general, while the staff and lecturers experienced individual accommodation as demanding in terms of time and resources. We can therefore conclude that relying on individual accommodation to include students with disabilities can create significant barriers that can (re)produce exclusion. Universities should therefore rethink the way they implement inclusion and instead refer to measurements of universal design.

Pascal Angerhausen is a research assistant and doctoral candidate at the International Center for Higher Education Research (INCHER) at the University of Kassel. Email: angerhausen@incher.uni-kassel.de

Shweta Mishra is the Managing Director of the German Institute for Interdisciplinary Social Policy Research. She is the Associate Editor of the Research into Higher Education Abstracts Journal. Her research focuses on social inequalities in higher education access and outcomes. She is an associate member of the International Centre for Higher Education Research (INCHER) at the University of Kassel.

References

Gattermann-Kasper M, Schütt M-L. (2022) Inklusive Hochschule. Konzeptionelle Grundlagen, aktueller Stand und Entwicklungen. In: Recht der Jugend und des Bildungswesens, 70, p. 92-106

Goldberg, C (2016). Is Intersectionality a Disabled Framework? Presenting PWIVID: In/Visibility and Variability as Intracategorical Interventions Critical Disability Discourses, 7: 55-88

Steinkühler J, Beuße M, Kroher M, Gerdes F, Schwabe U, Koopmann J, Becker K, Völk D, Schommer T, Buchholz S (2023) Die Studierendenbefragung in Deutschland: best3. Studieren mit einer gesundheitlichen Beeinträchtigung Hannover: DZHW


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It is not just about evaluation: the role of research in supporting widening participation

by Neil Raven

Much attention is now directed towards the role of evaluation in efforts to widening higher education participation. Indeed, the evaluation of interventions aimed at broadening HE access, and ensuring the success of those from under-represented groups once they are at university, is considered a priority by the Office for Students [OfS], (Blake 2022; OfS, 2023a; OfS, 2024).

Various guidance documents prepared by the HE regulator, both for individual higher education providers (OfS, 2023b), and Uni Connect, the government funded collaborative outreach programme (OfS, 2022), set out a rationale for this focus. ‘High quality evaluation,’ it is argued, ‘allows universities and colleges to understand the impact of their work to support students’, and to improve the effectiveness of this work (OfS, 2023a), and through sharing the findings of such investigations to ‘contribute to the wider evidence base’ (OfS, 2022, 12). In contrast, the role of research in widening participation [WP] receives far less attention and appears to be considered of less significance. Whilst ‘evaluation’ accumulates 42 references in the OfS’s advice to HE providers’ on their access and participation plans, research is mentioned 16 times (OfS, 2023b). More pointedly, the regulator’s guidance to Uni Connect partnerships states that ‘research is not one of the main aims or expected outcomes of funding’ (OfS, 2022, 13).

Yet, arguably, research has an equally important role to play in supporting and advancing the WP agenda. To appreciate this it is helpful to draw out the distinctions between research and evaluation. Perhaps the most fundamental of these relates to the broader remit that research has in ‘seeking new insights’ and making ‘new discoveries.’ Often this involves testing theories or hypotheses, and generating findings that have wider application (Anon, nd, np; Rogers, 2014). For some, research is viewed as ‘active and proactive’, whereas evaluation is ‘reactive’, in the sense of responding to an activity or practice (Anon, 2024, np).

Arguably, these distinct qualities mean that research has the potential to address a number of key WP challenges that remain unexplored in evaluations. For instance, providing insights into the reasons for the comparatively low rates of HE participation amongst particular groups of learners. These include young men from white, working class backgrounds, along with those taking vocational (applied general) courses and studying in further education colleges. All three are areas of current concern for those engaged in widening participation (Atherton and Mazhari, 2019; Raven, 2022; Raven, 2021).

In addition, it is by means of research that we can learn more about the longer-term impact of the pandemic and the cost of living crisis on the progression plans of those from more deprived neighbourhoods, as well as the reasons why some WP students appear more likely to drop out of university-level study. Research can also tell us about the post-graduation experiences of under-represented backgrounds – insights that are of central importance in presenting the case for HE.  Indeed, research can be viewed as complementary to evaluation. Research can provide insights and guidance on how a particular WP challenge can be addressed, with evaluation deployed to assess the effectiveness of the measures taken.

Whilst the OfS’s limited support (and funding) may explain some of the comparative neglect of research, the way much WP-related research (admittedly, this includes my own) has tended to be conducted and disseminated may also act as an impediment to recognising its true value. Therefore, besides calling on the OfS to acknowledge the role that research can play in supporting efforts to widen participation, I have five suggestions aimed at fellow researchers for enhancing the accessibility – and impact – of their work:

  • Share research findings with WP practitioners through talks and presentations, as well as more interactive workshops
  • Publish work in journals whose readership includes WP practitioners and policy makers
  • Explore opportunities to circulate findings in more widely read newsletters and e-bulletins
  • Engage directly with practitioners in exploring potential research topics
  • Consider the practical, real world application of research findings.

I would welcome readers’ views on these suggestions.

Neil Raven is an educational consultant and researcher in widening access. Contact him at neil.d.raven@gmail.com.

Acknowledgements – Thank you to Tony Hudson, Lewis Mates, Jessica Benson-Egglenton, Robin Webber-Jones and John Baldwin.


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Inclusive research agendas: what’s excluded?

by Jess Pilgrim-Brown

University discourse, policy, and practice has focused increasingly on access, widening participation and inclusion over the course of the last thirty years (Heath et al, 2013). In particular, understanding access, participation and inclusion for those who align with the different protected characteristics (as defined by the Equality Act 2010) has been of interest to academic research, given various political movements to widen access to higher education. There is a wealth of research in the space of equity, equality, and inclusion which has started to prise open the daily lived experiences of those who hold one or more of the protected characteristics as being part of their identity. Both in the tradition of UK academia, but also from research conducted in the US, we – as a research community – have begun to recognise the institutional and systemic structures which lead to sexism, microaggressions, blatant overt racism, disabilities and health inequalities, issues of access, pastoral burden and caring responsibilities. These facets can lead to extreme workloads, extreme discomfort, bullying and sometimes harassment routinely endured by members of both the academic community and the student body. Of course, research which seeks to make inequalities more transparent has also focused on social class background, which does not feature as one of the nine characteristics outlined by the Equality Act 2010. Here, research has predominantly focused on the experiences of working-class students, academics (and on one occasion, parents) but as yet, in the UK, the remit of who is included here is limited (Crew, 2020; 2021a; 2021b).

There are groups which exist outside the current research narrative which are less considered within the wider body of experiential evidence within the academy (Moreau & Wheeler, 2023; Caldwell, 2022). The ambition to promote access to these voices formed the basis of the rationale for my doctoral thesis research ‘Doing the heavy lifting: the experiences of working-class professional services and administrative staff in Russell Group universities’, completed in 2023. The study featured 13 participants who self-identified as working-class and worked in professional services and administrative roles in UK Russell Group universities. Using a novel approach it combined narrative inquiry (to understand historical personal biography and context) with more traditional semi-structured interviews, to understand the phenomena of existing in contemporary university spaces (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000).

As I discussed both in a presentation at SRHE’s annual conference and within my doctoral thesis research, there are distinct limitations within the academic research body which have isolated the experiences of students and academics with particular protected characteristics, often at the expense of intersectionality or of the representation of other stakeholders who have critical value within university spaces. I addressed the ways in which administrative staff and professional services staff are included within academic research, as a representation of their human capital, roles and responsibilities, the ‘minions of management’ that Dopson & McNay discuss leads to an absence of voice and authority. These accounts focus on the actions performed within the university space rather than the experience these individuals have of that space, and how these experiences reflect the wider institutional culture at play (Caldwell, 2022). This understanding of other people within higher education research as being inextricably connected with role rather than identity and experience is something which was also exemplified by Marie-Pierre Moreau and Lucie Wheeler (2023) in their recent SRHE conference presentation on the current status of academic research literature with ancillary workers in higher education in the UK. Finding little UK-based research, Moreau & Wheeler concluded that the everyday experiences of ancillary workers had thus far, to their knowledge, failed to have been included in the wider narrative about institutional culture and lived experience in UK HEIs. 

In a previous blog post for SRHE, Michael Shattock discussed the centralisation of UK higher education away from regional responsibility and governance. Similarly, the degree to which the internal systems of university administration is centralised, or not, has the potential to facilitate or negate healthy working relationships and partnerships, fostered by governance structures. It is particularly pertinent that the brokers of the relationships which are formed from levels of centralisation are the professional services and administrative staff who facilitate the function and process of legislation, administration and research management and the teaching, research, and technical expertise of those working on academic contractual pathways. And yet, like the ancillary workers who provide critical support to the daily function of the university in the most literal form, the experiential perspectives of these huge groups of university employees are left largely outside of the scope of academic research.

Organisational culture literature dictates that culture is predominantly dictated by three elements: assumptions, values and artefacts (Schein, 2004). Where assumptions are a mental model used by managers to make sense of the environment, values are the socially constructed principles that guide behaviour; these are reflected through speech, approaches and spoken goals. Artefacts are the ‘visible and tangible layer’, in the case of the university, the statues and buildings (Harris, 1998; Joseph & Kibera, 2019). In understanding the possibilities for development and promotion, career trajectories, workload, working environments and relationships between people in higher education it might be possible to make some small-scale assumptions about how much these institutions are indeed changing towards becoming more inclusive or how far removing cultural icons of oppressions, such as statues, is a purely performative act.

By collecting first-hand experiential evidence around the assumptions and values of an institution, the nature of organisational culture might be possible to discern (Harris, 1998). I fail fundamentally to understand how research culture initiatives, which, in their broadest sense tackle the measurement and progression of positive research cultures in universities in the UK, can make any progress on the status and environment of our institutions without having legitimate, robust, empirical evidence driving policy and practice. And that empirical evidence needs to include the perspectives, insights, and opinions of everyone who is a direct stakeholder within the organisation. By omitting large swathes of those who directly affect and are directly affected by that organisation we omit the opportunity to make credible, inclusive, necessary progress both in policy, but also in the implementation of practice. The absence of these voices is an academic failure which, in its current form, fails to address the full spectrum of the political economy of UK universities. It is only in doing more work in this area that progress in equalities agendas can fully be realised.

Dr Jess Pilgrim-Brown is a sociologist and researcher in education. She focuses on issues relating to social class, gender and wider social inequalities. Her thesis research ‘Doing the heavy lifting, the experiences of working-class professional services and administrative staff in Russell Group universities’ was the first of its kind in the UK. Her research interests span sociological theory, innovative methods in qualitative research designs and research ethics. She is a current Research Associate at the University of Bristol and Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Oxford.


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The pandemic and the progression plans of young people from widening participation backgrounds

by Neil Raven

Context

Whilst much has been said about the broadening education gap caused by covid-19 (Hayes, 2021; Crossfield et al, 2023; De Witte and Francois, 2023), fears have also been raised about its impact on the next-step plans of those from widening participation (WP) backgrounds (Nelsonet al, 2021; Co-op, 2021; Kingsley, 2021), including progression to university. A Sutton Trust (Montacute, 2020: 13) report observed how ‘recessions’, such as that triggered by the pandemic, ‘are known to have considerable impacts on educational aspirations and opportunities, with’, it is noted, ‘young people from disadvantaged backgrounds more likely to have their educational decisions influenced by labour market conditions’ than their more privileged peers (Raven, 2023: 101). However, these commentators and researchers were reporting in the midst of the pandemic when much was uncertain. In seeking to provide a more recent set of perspectives, I was commissioned by a Uni Connect partnership (of local universities, colleges and schools) to gather the insights of 14 teaching professionals based in schools and colleges located in the English West Midlands. The timing of this research coincided with the easing of lockdown restrictions (UK Parliament, 2021). All the institutions involved (which totalled 15, since one participant worked across two schools) had significant numbers of students from disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Whilst the semi-structured interviews with these teaching professions highlighted a range of challenges faced by their students, they also drew attention to the kinds of support that had the potential to overcome them. The results that this blog post reports and reflects upon are based on a recently published journal article (Raven, 2023).  

Challenges

The central argument made in this article was that ‘the challenges wrought by the pandemic accentuated the engrained disadvantages those from WP backgrounds have long had to contend with.’ My interviewees talked about the impact covid had on their students’ mental health. Our ‘year 10[s] [aged 14-15] and upwards,’ one teaching professional observed, are ‘used to hearing from the media that they are so far behind and have missed so much. That is [affecting] plans for where they go’ next. Whilst the impact was evident amongst students who had struggled before the pandemic, those with ‘no previous mental health issues’ were also being affected, including in terms of diminished levels of confidence and resilience. ‘They are much quicker to give up if it is hard work’, one interviewee observed (Raven, 2023: 107).

The teaching professionals also discussed students who were now less certain about the possibility – and suitability – of HE. In part, this was because they had concerns over components of the curriculum that had not been covered. However, it also reflected the fact that lockdowns and restrictions on school visits, as well as who could visit their school and college, meant that they had ‘missed out on’ a range of outreach interventions (Raven, 2023: 101). In addition, the pandemic had reinforced students’ concerns about moving away from home and leaving the communities they were familiar with and felt secure in. It had also acerbated long-held anxieties over debt and the costs (and benefits) of a higher education, in part because of the challenging labour market conditions generated by the pandemic, including in witnessing parents who had been furloughed or lost their jobs (Raven, 2023).

Response

In seeking to address these challenges, interviewees identified the need to ensure ‘students were informed of their options.’ A process, it was argued, that should start early in their secondary school education (years 8 or 9, when they would be 12 to 13 years old), and place university in the context of the wider learner journey, including the post-16 transitions to college or sixth form. Suggested interventions included workshops aimed at exploring what HE is and what it could offer, along with sessions designed to equip these young people with the skills that would enable them to research ‘the range of [university] courses available.’ There was also a need to provide these young people, and their parents/guardians, with ‘more information about student finance,’ as well as the  ‘placement opportunities’ offered by many HE courses (Raven, 2023: 109-111). 

In addition, the teaching professionals highlighted the importance of providing young people with a more detailed understanding of higher apprenticeships. One interviewee argued that whilst their students may ‘know you can work and get paid for it,’ they have very limited understanding of ‘the ins and outs of a degree apprenticeship,’ and that these are ‘attached to a university. [More] needs to be done’, it was added, including providing opportunities for these young people to speak with current higher level apprentices who could tell them about their ‘real life experiences’ (Raven, 2023: 111).

Whilst the provision of information, advice and guidance (IAG) was important, interviewees emphasised the need for outreach. Campus visits could dispel ‘commonly held perceptions that HE will be classroom-based’, it was argued. More broadly, providing first-hand accounts of HE could be especially important ‘because a lot of our kids don’t have parents who have been to university. So, doing those [university] trips has a big impact on the [them], and [is] something that we have not been able to do recently’ (Raven, 2023: 112).

The teaching professionals also highlighted the part that undergraduates could play as role models. In particular, those who came from ‘relatable demographic and social backgrounds.’ Various ideas for how university students could be deployed were described. These include a ‘university pen pals’ scheme, that ‘would enable those involved to ask the students about their university, their course, or anything [they] want to know really.’ Mentoring opportunities were also discussed. These could enable students from under-represented backgrounds to ask their mentors about ‘their journeys’, including ‘what the start of university [was] like, [and] how they cope[d] financially’ (Raven, 2023: 113).

Conclusion

The findings from this study suggest that the pandemic has reinforced existing patterns of disadvantage. Moreover, they provide a corrective to views that IAG and outreach support can be offered (and prove effective) as one-off activities. Instead, they underpin the imperative for a ‘sustained and progressive programme’ of interventions that not only support the development of students but counter the detrimental impact of external events (Raven, 2023: 16). However, there remains a need for more research. Not least, in hearing from the students themselves and, ideally, by adopting a longitudinal approach that captures change in views and post-18 intentions over time. It is hoped that a new research project will afford such insights.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the teaching professionals who took part in this study for their time, insights and expertise. Thank you also to members of the Higher Horizons+ Steering Group for supporting this study and especially to Ant Sutcliffe, the Network’s Head, Dr Hannah Merry, the Operations Manager, and Katie Coombe-Boxall, the Data and Research Manager, for all their guidance and patience.

Neil Raven is an educational consultant and researcher in widening access. Contact him at neil.d.raven@gmail.com.


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Exploring British Muslim transitions to PGT studies

by Zain Sardar and Amira Samatar

The social mobility charity, the Aziz Foundation, has published a major new report examining the progression challenges encountered by British Muslims aspiring to PGT studies. We consider this a timely intervention, in the context of a rapidly changing student demography, indicated in the popular usage of such terms as ‘hyper-diversification’ (Atherton and Mazhari, 2020) within HE policy discourse, and corroborated in recent projections by the professional membership body, Advance HE. In the wake of these demographic trends, a recent TASO publication (Andrews et al, 2023) reports that the sector is gripped by a high degree of uncertainty over the most expedient institutional approaches to adopt in dealing with disparities in progression and attainment. 

Transitions: British Muslims between UG and PGT studies will be of benefit to HE practitioners, researchers and forward thinking institutions willing to engage in an analysis of the granular experiences of discrete, minoritised communities. That is, decision and policy makers open to targeted interventions, as opposed to the one-size fits all, universal approach that delineates the current comfort zone in HE. We are particularly concerned with the direction in which the widening participation agenda will seek to evolve, encouraging the better incorporation of the access needs of faith communities in any future trajectory.

The progression challenge

The policy exceptionalism that discounts British Muslims from HE regulatory frameworks and formulas helps to sustain the equality gaps that hinder academic progression. To expand on this theme: recently there has been a greater regulatory focus on disparities in relation to ethnicity, which is certainly welcome. For example, there is a consensus that the most pressing sector wide challenges centre on the degree-awarding gap, as mentioned above, and access to doctoral studies for minoritised communities (OfS, 2020). However, a lacuna is still visible: the disadvantages that accrue around faith – as an operative dimension of the British Muslim identity – are still not part of the ‘intersectional mix’ making it onto the regulatory agenda (although we should acknowledge that the new ‘Equalities of Opportunity Risk Register’, established to regulate the student experience, does make mention of Muslim students) (OfS, 2023).

The progression challenge, however, is very evident and borne out in the Office for Students’ (OfS) own data dashboard. It indicates a drop off in British Muslim participation between the undergraduate and postgraduate taught level (from 12% to 8%)(OfS, 2021-22). Furthermore, this is not replicated amongst those from non-faith backgrounds or other control groups, such as Christian students.

We can thus detect in national datasets the contours of an entrenched social mobility fault line. The sector’s response to this is critical, as dealing with these disparities will necessitate enhancing the current access regime. It will need to build in more responsiveness to the forms of disadvantage that holds back intersectional communities – such as British Muslims – from participation at the postgraduate level.

An intersectionality of disadvantage

Transitions centres the testimonies of British Muslims, deploying a Critical Race Theory (CRT) methodology and qualitative analysis to examine the lived experiences of candidates for the Aziz Foundation’s flagship Masters Scholarship programme.

The charity has awarded over 560 scholarships since its inception in 2016, and commenced surveying its candidates in 2019/20, subsequently undertaking this exercise on an annual basis. In having access and utilising the Foundation’s rich seam of data, we would like to position the report as a form of community-based research. From our perspective, participating survey respondents are co-producers of knowledge, supporting an investigation into the factors that inhibit educational progression, as well as shining a light upon the reasons why British Muslims wish to pursue PGT study. 

Moreover, the key concept of ‘intersectionality’ is deployed in order to explore the British Muslim identity through the testimonies (or autoethnographies, in which respondents are invited to reflect on their own condition within HE) of scholarship candidates. As both faith and ethnicity, and the interaction between the two, determines the experiences of, and hardships faced, by British Muslims, this is a crucial focus area. We emphasise this as a ‘hidden’ dynamic, as this type of intersectional disadvantage – in its granularity – is rarely acknowledged in its complexity by HEIs within institutional strategies. 

Pipeline issues and recommendations

Transitions explores why the transition to PGT is of so much significance for British Muslims, as well as the wider sector. It has ramifications beyond the low number of this demographic who progress all the way into academia as researchers and members of the professoriate. For instance, Masters programmes are thought of as a way to redress imbalances in social capital, providing minoritised communities with opportunities to widen networks for professional development. This is important in relation to labour market outcomes, taking into account the underrepresentation of senior leaders across professions and industries of a British Muslim heritage.   

More widely, we would like to ask institutions to reflect on ways in which they can mend the ‘broken bridge’ of PGT – and so fortify the academic and education-to-work pipeline. Some of our report recommendations for institutions and the sector provide a starting point:  

  • Amongst HEIs, there ought to be parity of esteem and financial resources between pre-entry widening participation and postgraduate widening participation
  • HEIs to be proactive in incorporating ‘British Muslim students’ as a disadvantaged group in Access and Participation Plans (APPs), considering institutional context
  • The ‘broken pipeline’ at PGT ought to be bridged with appropriate funding opportunities such as ring fenced scholarships

We urge institutions and practitioners to read our report carefully and consider our full set of recommendations.

Ultimately we believe that the future of the widening participation agenda can be effectively shaped through institutions that take the initiative, developing innovations and extending access to constituencies at the sharp end of the intersectionalities of disadvantage. 

Transitions: British Muslims between undergraduate and PGT studies can be accessed here. 

Dr Zain Sardar is a joint programme manager at the Aziz Foundation. He leads on the Foundation’s engagement with its university partners and higher education stakeholders. As well as completing his PhD in law at Birkbeck, University of London, he has previously worked in higher education administration and policy. Zain also currently sits on the Yorkshire Consortium for Equity in Doctoral Education external advisory board.

Amira Samatar, MA Ed., AFHEA, is a postgraduate researcher whose academic interests centre around the educational experiences and journeys of racially minoritised students in British universities, with a specific focus on Black British women’s experiences beyond the postgraduate level. Amira is an associate at MA Education Consultancy and is committed to progressing social justice agendas within the higher education sector and to this end, increasing opportunities for Black and Muslim students

References

Andrews, S, Stephenson, J. Adefila, A et al (June 2023) Approaches to addressing the ethnicity degree awarding gap, TASO Atherton, G and Mazhari, T (2020) Preparing for hyper-diversity: London’s student population in 2030 Access HE


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Why do vocational FE students choose to go to HE?

by Neil Raven

Introduction

In a previous blog, I explored the reasons why some students on level 3 (advanced) professional and applied courses decide against higher education. Those whose views were sought came from a further education college (FEC) located in the East Midlands. FECs are significant providers of such (vocational) courses in England (Archer, 2023, UCAS, 2023). Yet, their HE progression rates are typically lower than those reported by schools and sixth form colleges (GOV.UK, 2023). Indeed, the desire to address this differential has been highlighted by the Office for Students (OfS, 2022), including through the work of the Uni Connect programme (Raven, 2023). It also chimes with the government’s levelling up scheme, and the view that FECs are key players in addressing inequalities in regional skills levels (OfS, 2022). However, acknowledging the rationale amongst FE college students for rejecting HE provides only half the picture. Any initiative that seek to widening higher education (HE) participation should also take account of the drivers for progression amongst the same groups of learners, since a good number of FE college students doing vocational programmes go on to some form of higher-level study, although many more have the potential to do so. This was one of the key areas explored in a recent research project and discussed in a book chapter from which the findings in this blog are taken (Raven, 2023).

Method and approach

This research gathered the views of students in the second (and final) year of their level 3 professional and applied courses. The sample comprised 110 students from two FE colleges: one in the Midlands (60 participants), the other in Eastern England (50 participants). In addition to gaining insights into their motivations for pursuing higher-level study, the research looked at the support these students had received. A questionnaire was used for this purpose, with answers captured in a one-to-one meeting between my fellow researcher and each participant. Whilst these meetings required time to organise, this approach to the administration of the questionnaire ensured that all the questions would be understood and considered by those who volunteered to take part in the study (Raven, 2023: p59). To facilitate comparison – and draw out common themes – we chose participants who were pursuing the same three subject areas at each college. These comprised sport, animal management and child care, which were amongst the most popular options offered and where the ambition at both institutions was for more students to take the HE route.

Findings

Three broad sets of motivations for progressing onto higher-level study were voiced by participants across both colleges and amongst the three subject areas. The first set concerned the learning opportunities HE presented. These included gaining more skills, ‘furthering and improving one’s knowledge,’ and acquiring a higher-level qualification (Raven, 2023: p64). The second set of drivers related to ‘the experience’ a university education would offer. Here, participants talked about the social aspects of HE life, including the chance to make friends, gain greater independence, and acquire ‘new life skills.’ The third group of responses focused on the improved ‘employment prospects’ arising from going to university (Raven, 2023: p64). A higher education, it was argued, would open up ‘better job opportunities’, and enhance one’s chances of securing a well-paid job. In addition, it would enable the pursuit of a chosen career and help secure access to sought after professions (Raven, 2023: pp64-65).

Participants also provided insights into the ‘sources of next-step guidance’ that had proved valuable in their decision to pursue a higher education (Raven, 2023: p70). Five sources were discussed, although not every participant alluded to all of these. They comprised the support provided by family members, including ‘parents, sisters and brothers, [along with] extended family members and relatives’, as well as ‘friends.’ (Raven, 2023: p70). Online sources of information were also discussed, including the UCAS website. In addition, a number of participants talked about ‘the insights gained from the work experience’ component of their courses. The guidance and encouragement provided by college staff was also highlighted, in particular that offered by tutors and careers teachers (Raven, 2023: p70). However, surprisingly few made reference to outreach activities, including campus visits and university open days.

Implications

Whilst these findings are from a small study, the consistency in responses amongst participants who came from three different subject areas and were studying at two separate colleges suggests that they are of significance. Moreover, the motivations identified are consistent with those that have been discussed in other studies (Wiseman et al, 2017). The Uni Connect programme is seeking to raise progression rates from FE colleges (OfS, 2022). These findings suggest the value of ensuring any support offered considers and engages with the drivers likely to facilitate participation. They also draw attention to a gap that could be filled through the provision of outreach interventions (Raven, 2023).

That said, more research is needed. The questionnaire used in this study proved an efficient way of gathering the views of the majority of students on the designated courses. However, the deployment of focus groups, or semi-structured interviews, with a sample of the same students would enable a more detailed exploration of HE drivers, and a closer consideration of the nature and effectiveness of the support they received, and the types of outreach that would be of greatest benefit to them and their peers.

Neil Raven is an educational consultant and researcher in widening access. Contact him at neil.d.raven@gmail.com.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the students at both colleges who participated in this study. Thank you also to Dr John Baldwin for overseeing the questionnaire survey.