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The Society for Research into Higher Education


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Landscapes of Learning and other metaphors

by Marguerite Koole

As I write this response to the first symposium on “Prospects for Space in Higher Education”, I am aware of my asynchronicity. I listened to the recording of the session, and I am subsequently engaging in the conversation through writing. I am physically located 6,500 km away. While time and space may separate us, the technologies that we use in our daily engagements can weave us together. Interestingly, ‘Technology’, derived from the Greek technē, refers to an art or artifice; derived from Indo European *tekth- meaning to weave, build, join. Latin adopted it (textere) meaning to weave.

One of the characteristics that defines us as human is our use of technology. Technology surrounds us. As I write this, I am sitting on a chair, clicking on a keyboard, and reading on a screen with light waves projecting into my tired eyes. It’s midnight. There is an old Webster’s New World Dictionary from 1970 by my side. This old dictionary is a reminder of my past. (I have safeguarded it for many years because of the quality of the etymologies.) I am surrounded by physical and digital technologies as well as atmospheric conditions. It’s summer on the Canadian prairies. It’s hot. The air conditioner has been humming for hours.

To be sure, the spaces in which we find ourselves are replete with sounds and lights of varying quality and frequencies. There are objects in our spaces and, sometimes, other creatures such as flies, spiders, mites, pets, and people. Temperature, airflow, air quality, paint colour, physical dimensions, and many other aspects all relate to our use of these spaces. On a human level, Viola’s research into how students experience belonging in university spaces evidenced the importance of merging physical, virtual, and emotional connections. Beckingham’s discussion of bonding and bridging social capital highlighted elements of mattering: being noticed, being cared for and being needed. The characteristics of space can support and/or diminish connections and mattering. I would argue that all such factors, physical-environmental, digital, and socio-cultural co-create our personal and collective experience within spaces.

Listening to the four presenters I was fascinated with the words used to describe spaces for learning in the higher education context. I examined their slides, the whiteboard sketches, and my own notes. I circled words that conjured images in my mind. For fun, I asked ChatGPT to do a preliminary sorting of the list of words into five categories. Then, I chose titles, reviewed the lists, and conducted a final sorting (Table 1).

Table 1: Words for describing spaces

Spatial conceptsRelationshipsLearningTechnologyOther  
Polycontextual space Reflective space Virtual learning spaces Multi-polycontextual Space for stillness Siloed ecologies Space production Boundary crossing Meshwork Fixed nodes Invisible boundaries Multi-dimensional Model of space Peripheral Context collapse Seclusion Fluid Topology Holes and breathing spaces Accessibility Place spectrum Merging of spaces Participatory spaces Learning spaces Spaces for learning Unfolding  Bonding social capital Bridging social capital Networks Commitments Peers Learning relationships Communication breakdowns Nurturing connection Community engagement Mattering Co-presences Disaggregation of the person Ephemerality Association Social integration Learning communities Field of relations    Scaffolded Blended learning Hybrid learning Enablement Stimulation Transversal skills Fugitive practices Disaggregation of learning Cognitive integration    Post-digital Networks Mediations Datafication Surveillance Multi-modal  Strands Non-digital strands Transhumanist Human as a document Static models Transparency Tyranny of the designer Fit Haunting Imaginaries  

Clearly, many of the words in Table 1 can fit into multiple lists, and other people might sort them differently. The spatial concepts were highly metaphorical, and I found the number of items in each list intriguing. Relationship terms appeared emphasised and digital-technology terms seemed de-emphasised while the number of ‘learning’ words/variations was moderate. To create a visual sense of the salience of the individual words in the list, I created a word cloud (Figure 1). The two words most repeated words were ‘space’ and ‘learning’ – not unexpected for a series on “landscapes of learning”.

Figure 1: Word cloud (Created via https://wordart.com/)

As scholars, we strain to locate metaphors to encapsulate and model our world. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) argue: “human thought processes are largely metaphorical” (p6). They write: “The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thin in terms of another” (p5). For me, the very word ‘space’ invokes feelings such as openness, closedness, arrangements, activities, stillness, noisiness, walls, furniture, and so on.  I decided to delve more deeply into the meanings of the following space-related words:

Space

  • From Latin: spēi- to flourish, expand, succeed.
  • Area or room sufficient for or allotted to something [a parking space]

Place

  • From Greek: plateia a street
  • Space; room
  • A particular area or locality; region

Context

  • From Latin: contextus (n.) a joining together; contextere (v.) to weave together; com (together) + textere (v.) to weave.
  • The whole situation, background, or environment relevant to a particular event, personality, creation, etc.

As it turns out, the words ‘space’, ‘place’, and ‘context’ are not all that metaphorical in their common usage, but their etymological nuances are attractive and reflect, perhaps, what we wish to achieve in describing and/or envisioning learning spaces—that is, locations for flourishing, success, and weaving together of people, ideas, and experiences.

During her session, Gourlay opposed metaphors such as ‘network’ suggesting that it emphasises connections rather than one’s state of being. She argued that Ingold’s (2011) notion of meshwork was more appealing in its suggested fluidity with whole fields of relations unfolding. Similarly, she found metaphors such as ‘intertwining’ troublesome because it suggests merging of two entities into one, explaining that two pieces of twine cannot actually merge; rather, they remain two pieces of twine as they wrap around each other. Her thinking about space led her to concepts of ephemerality (that which is not recorded), seclusion (that which is not observed), and co-presence (that which is co-located at the same time and same place). She arrived at a metaphor of “fugitive spaces” for learning, which she argues are essential for human learning as opposed to information transfer.

With my own leanings towards the sociomaterial approach, I ‘get’ her argument. Within a sociomaterial sensitivity, reality can be thought of through multiple patterns of relations in which “human, digital, physical-environmental, and socio-cultural characteristics interact to produce phenomenon” (Koole et al, 2021, para 3; Sørensen, 2009). The ‘pattern of relations’ metaphor helps me to connect and order my experiences, readings, and discussions of the world. The use of metaphor appears useful and even necessary in discussions of space and how space is inhabited.

During the panel discussion, Bligh drew attention to the place-for-learning-spectrum in which there is a single continuum of structured to unstructured spaces. In addition to the need for conceptualising a multimodal spectrum, he suggested that there is a need for a common lexicon to discuss space. Such language could guide designers, builders, and users of space. As he noted, “design tends to focus on metaphor”. Yet, as Gourlay suggested, metaphor can also become an impediment in which we could become even more bogged down. It is important to interrogate and test our metaphors; we must know their limitations.

As I ponder the discussion in its entirety, however, I found the seemingly overwhelming use of metaphors productive. It is productive in terms of inspiring creative ideas about how we can understand space and our use of it. I find myself constantly exploring new metaphors and philosophical approaches in order to grasp new ways of seeing reality, ideas, and issues. Less conventional approaches such as sociomaterialism and the postdigital, for example, help me question what might otherwise remain hidden. An anecdote might help to illustrate how different approaches can help in seeing anew:

Many years ago, after I had completed my undergraduate degree, I took a wonderful class called “Drawing for the Completely Intimidated”. I had never taken a real art class outside of grade school, so this course seemed perfect for exploring my artistic side. As the course progressed, the students had opportunities to experiment with various materials, subject matter, and techniques. It was during a drawing exercise involving shading with pencil that I suddenly became attuned to lines and shades in a glass vase that I had never really noticed before. Even 30 years later, I still see everyday objects differently; my sensitivity had shifted, and now I can see a reality that was previously hidden from my gaze.

In recounting this story, I think of Bligh’s suggestion that we shift from static knowledge to possibility knowledge. Metaphors are useful tools for exploring possibility. While our metaphors might proliferate uncomfortably, they might also lead to novel ways of envisioning the co-creation of learning spaces as locations for flourishing, success, and the weaving together of people, ideas, and experiences.

Marguerite Koole is an Associate Professor in Educational Technology and design for the College of Education, University of Saskatchewan. In 2013, Dr. Koole completed her PhD in E-Research and Technology-Enhanced Learning at Lancaster University UK on digital identity in networked learning.  She also holds a Master of Education in Distance Education (MEd) with a focus was on mobile learning. Dr. Koole has a BA in Modern Languages and has studied French, Spanish, German, Blackfoot, Cree, Latin, Mandarin, ancient Mayan hieroglyphics, American Sign Language (ASL), and linguistics. She has designed interactive, online learning activities for various learning purposes and platforms—including print, web, and mobile devices. 

Email: m.koole@usask.ca

Twitter: @mkooleady

References

Guralnik, D (1970) Webster’s new world dictionary 2nd ed Nelson, Toronto: Foster & Scott Ltd

Ingold, T (2011). Being alive: Essays on movement, knowledge and description London: Routledge

Lakoff, G and Johnson, M (1980) Metaphors we live by Chicago: The University of Chicago Press

Sorensen, E (2009) The materiality of learning: Technology and knowledge in educational practice Cambridge: Cambridge University Press


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Make the tacit explicit: how to improve information on university webpages for potential doctoral applicants

by Dangeni, James Burford and Sophia Kier-Byfield

Working out how to apply for a doctoral programme can be a challenging process for many potential applicants. As countless Youtube videos, blogposts and twitter threads attest, there is much confusion and plenty of (sometimes contrasting) advice on the internet about what to do, whom to contact, and how to contact them. Some applicants find this process so challenging that they turn to a range of paid services that help them to learn how to contact a potential doctoral supervisor or develop a research proposal. There is clearly much demand for guidance on how to make a successful application to doctoral study, but for many academics and professional services staff doctoral admissions is a familiar and routine process where quick assessments can be made about the enquiries of a given applicant.

We began our recent exploratory research project, ‘Opening up the Black Box of Pre-application Doctoral Communications’, with an interest in the somewhat opaque processes that occur prior to formal doctoral admissions, but which often form a crucial part of the pathway to applying. We were concerned that the mysteries of the pre-application stage may have Equity Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) implications, making it easier for some to navigate toward doctoral study than others. We conducted a study to examine the pre-application stage of doctoral admissions in a single university context, the University of Warwick.

At the start of our study, we conducted a search for public-facing, institutional webpages relevant to doctoral admissions. Webpages are one of the key spaces where potential doctoral applicants can gather information about the application process, including institutional pages (eg produced by a Doctoral College) and departmental pages (eg departmental guidance or a potential supervisor’s webpage).

We aimed to identify and characterise information aimed at doctoral applicants prior to their making formal applications to study. Our primary goal in conducting this review was to understand: (a) the nature of pre-admissions information on university webpages; (b) whether this pre-admissions information was consistent across the institution; and, (c) whether the detail was a sufficient and adequate explanation of key pre-application steps to potential applicants.

This blog post gives our top six tips for stakeholders involved in doctoral admissions to consider for potential applicants, so that they have all the information they need from public-facing web pages.  

  1. Avoid complicated web designs, texts and duplicated material

All the webpages we reviewed provided ‘opening pages’ which covered the basic details and specifications of programme, but there was a wide variety of detail in terms of the introductions to departments. Some departments included short paragraphs, others offered more elaborate introductions which included orienting students to the research areas of the department, the ranking of the department in UK league tables, and student testimonials with multiple tabs and long paragraphs, sometimes with invalid links. These layouts can be confusing on a computer screen, but institutions and departments could also consider that potential applicants may use phones or tablets to access the information, and thus the webpage design should be tablet/phone friendly. It is also necessary to check whether the page is accessible, eg for visually impaired visitors or those with learning difficulties.

  • Display a checklist and flowchart for the pre-admissions process

We found two categories of admission information across department webpages. The first category was a link to signpost applicants to the central university portal for application advice and guidance, which provides an overview of the pre-application procedure for potential applicants to follow. The second category of admission information is commonly more tailored to a department’s specific procedures and is often accessed via a ‘how to apply’ section. However we noted that several departments did not undertake much departmental level ‘translation’ of general admissions information, perhaps simply linking applicants to the central university portal. We do not believe this would give potential applicants sufficient information to know how to get started and what to do in local contexts. In particular, decision-making related information and explanations were rare: very few departments explained details such as evaluation criteria, who is involved, the maximum cohort size each year, and the timeframe for decision-making. Therefore, we suggest that departmental webpages should consider displaying a checklist of key steps and a flowchart explaining the timeframe, decision-making process and who is involved.

  • Outline what is expected from applicants in terms of locating a supervisor before applying

Most departmental webpages advise applicants to contact prospective supervisors in advance of the application to discuss research interests and compatibility, although some do not require a nominated supervisor for application. Our web review identified that most departments do consider this process to be a key pre-application step, and some provide relevant information and guidance regarding how to identify a supervisor. Therefore, a clear indication of what is expected from applicants to contact prospective supervisors is needed on departmental webpages. Additionally, institutions/departments should encourage academic staff to update their staff profile web pages with consistent information eg current projects supervised, information on interests (topic, methodology/approach, country contexts, and capacity to take on new students) would be helpful for applicants in the preparation and communications stages.

  • Explain what counts as a ‘good’ research proposal

Another key category of pre-application information concerns how to draft a research proposal. Most departments require a research proposal for an application to be considered; research proposal-related guidance can be found in two categories. Most departments link to the central university portal for application advice and guidance, which contains the general structure of a research proposal (eg an overview of research question(s), main objective of research, potential contribution to existing research field/literature, research techniques, suggested data collection procedures and an outline timeline) and a list of department requirements. In contrast, in several departments, a webpage or a link to department-specific guidance can be found, providing an outline/structure with word count and what to include in detail. It is suggested that clear guidance on a ‘good’ research proposal (disciplinary equivalent) is necessary for applicants, including information on expected sections and length, as well as the evaluation criteria for the proposal.

  • Include clear contact information for the department for potential applicants

As emphasised on the central university portal for application advice and guidance, one of the most important points to consider is whether the academic department shares the academic interests of the applicant. While all departments suggest applicants make contact before proceeding with their application any further, different formats and categories of making the initial contact and sending inquiries can be found across departments. Though all departments provide email addresses for applicants to make general inquiries, some provide the Academic Director of PGR (who manages the department’s PGR programme) and relevant professional staff contact details. It is suggested that institutions/departments should include clear contact information for potential applicants, including which queries should be directed at which named members of staff and how long the wait time may be for responses.

  • Welcome applicants from underrepresented groups implicitly and explicitly

Only two departments across all faculties featured EDI-related information in their pre-admission information webpages. The first was in the form of a statement explaining why plenty of information was provided (‘in order to demystify the admissions process, as part of our commitment to enhancing inclusivity in doctoral education’). The second featured a video clip which sought to detail principles of an inclusive working and learning environment and welcome applications from individuals who identify with any of the protected characteristics defined by the Equality Act 2010. Websites which clearly communicate all required information to applicants serve an EDI function in that they do not require applicants to draw upon tacit information to make sense of pre-application steps that have not been carefully explained. In addition to clear and accessible information, welcome statements that determine a departmental position on inclusion can be helpful in that they directly acknowledge those under-represented in higher education. This could be written in collaboration with existing minoritised students.

Our aim is to share the findings from our institutional case study, but also to encourage reflection, review and conversation amongst colleagues about pre-application practices. We highly recommend involving staff and students in review processes as much as possible to ensure that webpages are readable, relevant and useful.

Further information

Two linked Pre-Application Doctoral Communications Research Projects have been carried by a research team based at the University of Warwick including Dr James Burford (PI), Dr Emily Henderson (Co-I), Dr Sophia Kier-Byfield, Dr Dangeni and Ahmad Akkad. The projects were funded by Warwick’s Enhancing Research Culture Fund. The team have produced a suite of open access resources including project briefings. For more information on the project see the website (www.warwick.ac.uk/padc) or #PADC_project on Twitter.

Dr Dangeni is a Professional Development Advisor at Newcastle University, where her teaching and research focus broadly on teaching and learning provision in the wider context of the internationalisation of higher education. She is particularly interested in research and practices around international students’ access, engagement and success in postgraduate taught (PGT) and postgraduate research (PGR) settings.

Dr James Burford is an Associate Professor at the University of Warwick. James’ research interests include doctoral education and the academic profession, higher education internationalisation and academic mobilities. Dr Sophia Kier-Byfield is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Warwick, where she works on the ‘Opening Up the Black Box of Pre-Application Doctoral Communications’ projects. Her research interests broadly concern equity in higher education, feminisms in academia and inclusive pedagogies.


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Landscapes of learning for unknown futures: presenter responses to audience questions

by Brett Bligh, Sue Beckingham, Lesley Gourlay, and Julianne K Viola

SRHE’s ‘Landscapes of Learning for Unknown Futures: prospects for space in higher education’ symposium series, delivered with Professor Sam Elkington and Dr Jill Dickinson, aims to foster continuous dialogue around learning spaces. Here the three presenters reflect on some of the ideas and issues raised during the first symposium on ‘Networks’. This blog has been compiled by Sam Elkington, Jill Dickinson, and Sinéad Murphy (SRHE Conferences and Events Manager.)

  1. How do we encourage academic staff to think more intentionally about how they use different spaces in and through their practice? How do we effectively build in ideas of working with spatiality into our learning and teaching strategies? 

Julianne: Academic staff should consider how students are connecting with each other and with educators in formal learning spaces. Spaces aren’t (in most cases) designed by the educators teaching in them, but looking at the formal learning setting (lab, lecture theatre, seminar room, etc) through a critical lens can help educators begin to think about what they might want to achieve in that space. For example, if you want to know whether a new way of teaching a challenging concept is landing with the students, also consider: can students see each other in the layout of this room? Can they look around the room to see whether anyone else has a quizzical expression on their face, so they know they aren’t alone in not understanding a concept? 

Sue: Staff need the luxury of thinking time and discussion to spark new ideas and share current practice. Encourage or lead a course/subject group activity where colleagues start by looking at how they use their own spaces, then visit other parts of their university. How are others using those spaces? Vignettes, videos and the like could be shared in newsletters which could then be used to prompt discussion and inspire alternative ways.  

Brett: If staff are to think more intentionally then they need to get used to talking about space in relation to their practice. One problem is that neither the pedagogical theories that people use, nor the institutional guidelines used in practice discussions, tend to be very helpful in talking about how space is used. We need to build a vocabulary that helps people to discuss the roles of space in practice. That vocabulary must be challenging, so that it provokes new thinking, but it must not be overly technical or oriented towards engineering or architectural concerns. In my own work I have put forward a tentative vocabulary that I think could be used, in both ‘everyday’ thinking and conversations and in institutional projects where space needs to be discussed more productively.

  • How do we work productively through the inherent contradictions of learning space design? For example, universities create specific spaces with the aim of helping to build a sense of community but then impose rules on how those spaces can be used. 

Julianne: Students tend to use spaces to socialise that aren’t entirely intended for that purpose. From example, my school friends and I used to gather in a hallway that adjoined the gym to the art wing at our high school, for no other reason than it was the perfect size for our group to hang out before school every morning! I’d be interested to see what the role of space utilisation monitors/ technology will be in the future of spaces like this. If my high school had these monitors available, I wonder whether they would consider expanding the space and adding some benches for students to sit on.  There have been some great StudentShapers projects at Imperial in this area – and the spaces that have been transformed to create more informal social space have garnered lots of positive feedback. 

Sue: When planning new buildings or updating current, it is essential that educators and students that will use those spaces are included in the conversations. The users of those spaces will be able to highlight what is missing and provide suggestions.

We need to start with reimagining what it is like to start a new course at university. I remember taking my daughters around multiple institutions for open days. Where they chose to go to was not just the course or the reputation of the university; it was where they felt comfortable and could imagine being there. Space begins with walking through the main doors, the café, the social spaces, the library and of course the formal learning spaces. Being able to visualise mentally what their future experience might look like, creating an affinity to and a sense of place they could relate to, and connect with is so important. Making the space feel welcoming and somewhere they would want to be. Connecting language to physical objects could include motivational quotes or saying welcome in multiple languages, graphics/images that depict diverse role models, big screens showcasing video clips with captions of what students are doing and creating, how and where they are collaborating and communicating. How can students be involved in created art/artefacts that can be showcased for others to see that depict the student experience?

Visiting an open day at the weekend may be busy but it doesn’t always capture the true feel of what’s to be expected in a session in full flow. How can this be created with video, AR or VR? The very spaces students will learn in are wide and varied, and may not have been experienced before.

Brett: We must view space design as an ongoing process in which refinement and new ideas are viewed as inevitably and welcome. Initial designs will hardly ever work in quite the ways intended, and so we must be prepared to refine the spaces and also recognise what has actually been achieved. To do so we need to provide ongoing forums for interprofessional and staff-student discussion. At present, these are often created for specific projects (for example, where a new building is being designed) and then wound up afterwards. Inevitably, these bounded discussions follow narrow agendas and seem formulaic. We need something more ongoing and permanent.

  • What do you think are the most immediate considerations pedagogically when thinking about how to make the best use of learning spaces? What can we practically be doing now to move staff towards being more open, flexible, and creative in and with space? 

Julianne: There is a walking interview method I’ve used in my research at Imperial: walking can generate thought. I’d be interested to see how educators can implement walking into their pedagogy, perhaps starting out with ‘office hours’ meetings happening over a walk, and maybe moving onto engaging students in formal coursework outside. Colleagues of mine like Dr Luke McCrone, who completed his undergraduate degree in Earth Science and Engineering, recognise the different way of thinking that one experiences when outside the classroom. There was a great 2014 piece on this in The New Yorker – “Why Walking Helps Us Think” by Ferris Jabr.

Sue: We can do more to create comfortable spaces to meet, collaborate and learn together outside of timetabled classes. Furniture is important; learning booths are popular in corridors as informal meeting places. Libraries, once hushed and quiet, now offer learning spaces students can use independently or with peers. Access to charging points for portable devices, as well as access to loanable devices. If we provide spaces for students to interact informally before class, it could make them feel more at ease when coming into a formal class. After the class has finished where can students go to debrief, plan for future groupwork, engage in social conversations? Landmarks they can communicate by text or group chat apps along with screenshots to arrange meetups. Such places will become favoured, and their use creates a sense of community and emotional connection. This links in to mattering as messages easily sent by mobile can cascaded to cohorts as well small groups.

Brett: Counterintuitively, the most constraining issue when discussing space usage tends to be timetabling rather than problems with particular spaces. We need to be clear that open, flexible and creative uses of space are not the same as efficient space occupancy; if a university is to be more innovative with space then occupancy metric will be challenged. I see no way other than to confront this contradiction directly.

  • Is it that spaces need to be seen as a way of ‘simulating’ certain modes of being and not just from a perspective of enacting certain forms of pedagogic content knowledge? What might this look like? 

Julianne: Great question, and my research on identity development ties in with this.  Interacting with other people and presenting different parts of ourselves to others depends on who we are with, and what the setting is. The idea of boundaries comes in again with this question. For example, the self that I present when I enter the Junior Common Room at Imperial (where the best katsu curry is!) is a bit inhibited – I feel I am encroaching on undergraduate territory, whereas I feel very relaxed having lunch or coffee outside with colleagues on the Queen’s Lawn, where the space feels more public. There are power dynamics in certain spaces!  

Sue: For current students, informal learning and self-directed learning starts before any scheduled class and often continues afterwards. Students line up ready to enter large lecture halls or sit cross legged in corridors waiting to enter a classroom for a seminar, lab, workshop or other discipline related space. Sometimes in deep conversation and some shy and yet eager to belong. If a picture is worth a thousand words what pictures would make a difference to the learning spaces to stimulate conversation? Perhaps some constant and providing familiarity, others changeable to create interest and intrigue? How can walls be used to share stories about the educators they will meet within the classroom? What stories can be told of prior students?

Brett: Many spaces do already stimulate certain modes of being. In my view these are often either ‘disciplinary’ spaces – including design studios, engineering labs, and finance trading rooms – or outdoor spaces, including green spaces but also pods and classrooms in wooded areas. If campuses are to continue to be viewed as valuable, then they need to be clearly differentiated from other forms of spaces. Too many campuses in recent times seem to look more and more like generic business parks as time goes on. This will inevitably erode how students perceive universities as places, and over time how valuable campuses are perceived to be—which could pose existential issues for some universities as institutions.

  • How can individual staff build creativity and criticality into their pedagogical approaches while working in learning spaces designed without their input? Is a collective voice among staff needed to influence how learning spaces are established; if so, how can this be facilitated, and how can an intersectional perspective on access needs and dynamics of power be assured?

Julianne: Bringing in different stakeholders when designing new spaces is key (see a list of prior StudentShapers projects at Imperial to see how students and staff became partners in designing new spaces at Imperial), and gives a sense of agency to staff and students alike. Building agency in the community would be a great outcome in and of itself. 

Sue: We need to push back against conventions. Why is furniture in a classroom in rows when we want students to interact and work in groups? Why do we plan for a lecture and separate seminar when we want students to engage in active/project/problem-based learning? It is important to evaluate innovative use of learning spaces from the students’ perspective. What works for them? How inclusive does it feel? What would they change?

Brett: Individual staff have increasingly limited power. Teaching is increasingly the domain of interprofessional collaboration and teamworking. I do think that collective voices are needed; including the forums for discussion I mentioned earlier. We also need to think more at the level of spaces across (a) whole programmes of study and (b) students’ entire experience of being at university, than at the level of the specific pedagogical interaction.

  • Hasn’t this whole conversation exploded, or at the very least fundamentally challenged, the conventional idea of a university campus?

Julianne: It has! The idea of a ‘university campus’ may also be different, depending on what your own university context is. Coming from a US liberal arts background, my initial mental image of a ‘campus’ is very different from the revised version that is in my mind’s eye after studying and working at universities in the UK. As technology has become a large part of the university experience, the conventional idea of a university campus should now include digital/online spaces, too. 

Sue: Successful examples of hybrid modes of learning are set to continue, so yes. But this also means we need to continue to review learning spaces that are not timetabled. We need to provide learning space for students to engage online; not all will have a space at home or reliable digital access, or it is too far to go home and then take an in-person class the same afternoon. Where lectures are scheduled online, students may value learning together using one screen or personal screens and headsets. In the classroom, planning a flexible space is important, being able to reconfigure seating plans to suit the needs of the class and activities. Long rows of heavy tables and chairs are not conducive to interactivity and spontaneous communication.  

Brett: Yes, I think that the idea of the university campus is being challenged profoundly, resulting in rearguard actions by some stakeholders as a form of defence. The attempts to make campuses ‘sticky’ are but one example of this.

Lesley: I would agree that it has – in some quarters – reinforced an already prevalent idea that the physical campus is obsolete or in need of ‘reinvention’. However, I would caution against an assumption that because universities managed to stay operational while fully remote, it is something to pursue post-pandemic. This was an emergency response, not an active choice, and it brought with it a large number of disadvantages to students and academic staff. Our own study at UCL into the impacts on academic and professional services staff revealed many tensions, stresses and difficulties encountered by staff remote working, with evidence of differential impacts on women and those with less workspace (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/departments-and-centres/centres/ucl-knowledge-lab/current-research/ucl-moving-online-teaching-and-homeworking-moth). Research has also shown that the pivot to online had negative effects on students in terms of alienation, lack of engagement and social support.

I would be highly critical of ‘discourses of inevitability’ which state that as a result of the pandemic, the role of the material campus and face-to-face engagement should be challenged. While remote engagement may have a limited place, I would argue that the pandemic has in fact underscored the vital importance of being physically together on campus, in terms of engagement in study, and also in terms of social contact, identity and depth and richness of experience.  

Dr Brett Bligh is a Lecturer in the Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University, and Director of the Centre for Technology Enhanced Learning. He is co-Editor of Studies in Technology Enhanced Learning and co-ordinator of the CL-SIG group dedicated to discussing uses of the Change Laboratory approach in higher education settings. His research interrogates the nexus of technology mediation, physical environment, and institutional change in higher education. Brett’s work prioritises Activity Theory conceptions of human practice, and interventionist methodologies. For further details about Brett’s work see his staff profile here.

Sue Beckingham is a Principal Lecturer and LTA Lead in Computing. In addition to teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate level, Sue has an academic development leadership role where she provide support and guidance relating to learning, teaching and assessment. In 2017 she was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship. She is also a Fellow and Executive Committee Member of the Staff and Educational Development Association. For details of Sue’s publications and other activities, see her staff profile here.

Professor Lesley Gourlay is a professor at the UCL Knowledge Lab, currently working in the intersection of Science and Technology Studies and Education, drawing on phenomenological perspectives and approaches. Her current project, funded by a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship Grant MRF-2020-35 (Sept 2021 – 2024), focusses on ‘The Datafied University: Documentation and Performativity in Digitised Education’. She is currently working on a new monograph for Bloomsbury Academic, with a working title of ‘The University and the Algorithmic Gaze: A Postphenomenological Perspective’. For more, see Lesley’s staff profile here.

Julianne K Viola is a postdoctoral Research Associate at the Centre for Higher Education Research and Scholarship (CHERS). Julianne leads the Belonging, Engagement, and Community (BEC) and contributes to educational research and evaluation efforts across College, and is a developer of the Education Evaluation Toolkit. Previously, Julianne completed her doctoral research at the Department of Education, University of Oxford, on how adolescents develop their civic identities in the digital age, conceptualisations of citizenship, and the interplay of social media and technology on youth civic identity. For details of Julianne’s publications and other activities, see her staff profile here.


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Redefining cultures of excellence: A new event exploring models for change in recruiting researchers and setting research agendas

by Rebekah Smith McGloin and Rachel Handforth, Nottingham Trent University

Research excellence’ is a ubiquitous concept to which we are mostly habituated in the UK research ecosystem.  Yet, at the end of an academic year which saw the publication of UKRI EDI Strategy, four UKRI council reviews of their investments in PGR, House of Commons inquiry on Reproducibility and Research Integrity and following on from the development of manifesto, concordat, declaration and standards to support Open Research in recent years, it feels timely to engage in some critical reflection on cultures of excellence in research. 

The notion of ‘excellence’ has become an increasingly important part of the research ecosystem over the last 20 years (OECD, 2014). The drivers for this are traced to the need to justify the investment of public money in research and the increasing competition for scarce resources (Münch, 2015).  University rankings have further hardwired and amplified judgments about degrees of excellence into our collective consciousness (Hazelkorn, 2015).

Jong, Franssen and Pinfield (2021) highlight that the idea of excellence is a ‘boundary object’ (Star and Griesemer, 1989) however. That is, it is a nebulous construct which is poorly defined and is used in many different ways. It has nevertheless shaped policy, funding and assessment activities since the turn of the century. Ideas of excellence have been enacted through the Research Excellence Framework and associated allocation to universities of funding to support research, competitive schemes for grant funding, recruitment to flagship doctoral training partnerships and individual promotion and reward.

We can trace a number of recent initiatives at sector level, inter alia, that have sought to broaden ideas of research excellence and to challenge systemic and structural inequalities in our research ecosystem. These include the increase of impact weighting in REF2021 to 25%, trials of systems of partial randomisation as part of the selection process for some smaller research grants, e.g. British Academy from 2022, the Concordats and Agreements Review work in 2023 to align and increase influence, capacity, and efficiency of activity to support research culture and the recent Research England investment in projects designed to address the broken pipeline into research by increasing participation of people from racialised groups in doctoral education.

At the end of June, we are hosting an event at NTU which will focus on redefining cultures of research excellence through the lens of inclusion. The symposium, to be held at our Clifton Campus on Wednesday 28 June, provides an opportunity to re-examine the broad notion of research excellence, in the context of systemic inequalities that have historically locked out certain types of researchers and research agendas and locked in others.

The event focuses on two mutually-reinforcing areas: the possibility of creating more responsive and inclusive research agendas through co-creation between academics and communities; and broadening pathways into research through the inclusive recruitment of PhD and early career researchers. We take the starting position that approaches which focus on advancing equity are critical to achieving excellence in UK research and innovation.

The day will include keynotes from Dr Bernadine Idowu and Professor Kalwant Bhopal, the launch of a new competency-based PGR recruitment framework, based on sector consultation, and a programme of speakers talking about their approaches to diversifying researcher recruitment and engaging the community in setting research agendas. 

NTU will be showcasing two new projects that are designed to challenge old ideas of research excellence and forge new ways of thinking. EDEPI (Equity in Doctoral Education through Partnership and Innovation Programme) is a partnership with Liverpool John Moores and Sheffield Hallam Universities and NHS Trusts in the three cities. The project will explore how working with the NHS can improve access and participation in doctoral education for racially-minoritised groups. Co(l)laboratory is a project with University of Nottingham, based on the Universities for Nottingham civic agreement with local public-sector organisations. Collab will present early lessons from a community-informed approach to cohort-based doctoral training.

Our event is a great opportunity for universities and other organisations who are, in their own ways, redefining cultures of research excellence to share their approaches, challenges and successes. We invite individuals, project teams and organisations working in these areas to join us at the end of June, with the hope of building a community of practice around building inclusive research cultures, within and across the sector.

Dr Rebekah Smith McGloin is Director of the Doctoral School at Nottingham Trent University and is Principal Investigator on the EDEPI and Co(l)laboratory projects. 

Dr Rachel Handforth is Senior Lecturer in Doctoral Education and Civic Engagement at NTU.


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Landscapes of Learning for Unknown Futures: Prospects for Space in Higher Education Reflections on Networks Symposium, 26 April 2023

by Sam Elkington and Jill Dickinson

Wednesday April 26 saw the launch of the SRHE ‘Landscapes of Learning for Unknown Futures: prospects for space in higher education’ symposium series, delivered in partnership with series co-convenors Professor Sam Elkington and Dr Jill Dickinson. This blog was compiled and edited by Sinead Murphy.

The intention of this Symposium Series is to bring together leading voices and space-based research from across the field to encourage critical discussion and debate with a view to generating and encapsulating key insights around contemporary landscapes of learning in HE. Traditionally, the needs of learning spaces have been often pushed into the background of institutional planning, decision-making, and curriculum design in favour of other, more visible performance measures of the student experience. Now the changing requirements of learning spaces are top of the agenda for university leaders, estates teams, and practitioners who must recognise and understand how learning can take place anytime and anywhere and, therefore, imagine new and radical strategies for student-centred, sustainable campus design.

We offer the concept of ‘learning landscape’ as a basis on which to explore how universities can use different ideas about learning spaces to reflect changing preferences, incorporate digital technologies, and critically consider future possibilities. This Symposium Series presents opportunities for key stakeholders to discuss and debate  new possibilities for pedagogy, technology, and learning spaces. Enacted through separate, hybrid symposium events, and structured through the prism of one of three thematic lenses – networks, flexibilities, and assemblages – the Series has been informed by a ‘Kaleidoscope of Notions’ (Wang et al, 2011) for interrogating theoretical and applied perspectives and priorities for future learning spaces.  We aim to encourage an overarching reflexive conversation with, and for, the sector.

Networks

The initial Networks themed symposium charted a focus shift in HE. It recognised that the contemporary learning landscape needs to be considered less in terms of singular learning spaces and more in terms of how spaces are becoming increasingly connective, permeable, networked, and interwoven (both physically and digitally) to provide inclusive and adaptive learning environments.

In her keynote address, Professor Lesley Gourlay offered a critical take on the concept of networks in HE learning and teaching. She highlighted an overemphasis on connection (defined in terms of interlinkages between discrete nodes) and the mediating role of technology in associated learning processes. Noting the inseparability of physical and digital space in and for learning, Lesley argued for the need to push beyond now established post-digital configurations of space and knowledge generation, towards a conceptualisation of ‘lived’ learning encounters as being more-than-digital, situated within an unfolding meshwork of formal and informal spaces. Lesley drew upon the work of Tim Ingold to animate her view of the meshwork of intertwined learning spaces in HE, pointing to the need to retain three critical components of the learning landscape:  ephemerality, co-presence with others, and the significance of finding seclusion and stillness. From this perspective, the spaces ‘between-the-lines’ possess value for students in their coming-to-know about their subjects, as well as themselves, offering what Lesley described as ‘fugitive spaces’; fleeting yet meaningful assemblages of space and practice that help students to navigate the increasing sprawl of HE campuses and their digital appendages.

In her talk, ‘Mattering, meaning making and motivation: building trust and respect through multimodal social learning communities’, Sue Beckingham shared insights from work exploring how social media can be used to support student mattering, helping to mediate intentional communicative action and trust across formal and informal spaces for learning. Drawing on the ideas of ‘bonding’ and ‘bridging’ social capital, Sue challenged us to question assumptions we can sometimes make about the concept of mattering, it being more than an exercise in fostering social connections between individual learners. Sue’s work provided a compelling empirical basis for utilising multimodal strategies to help students understand what is expected of them in spaces both on and off campus. For Sue, such strategies function as ‘gestures’ that encourage, and model for, relational practices through shared experiences where students have learned to work cooperatively across contexts and boundaries. 

Dr Julianne K Viola’s talk, ‘Nurturing meaningful connection in a new era of learning’, introduced longitudinal research that began before the pandemic and continued through periods of online and hybrid delivery, as well as taking in the more recent return to campus. Julianne’s research sought better understanding of the factors that influence students’ ability to navigate their university settings and build meaningful connections with campus space(s) and student communities. By encompassing student experiences prior to, during, and post-pandemic, Julianne provided unique insight into what matters most for students in building and maintaining a sense of belonging and community across different modes of delivery and experience. Key findings highlighted the significant impact that the lack, or absence, of physical contact with space, and the limited ability to connect and socialise with others, had on student engagement and motivation in, and for, their learning. Further insights pointed to the prevalence and persistence of certain structural barriers – viewed in terms of how certain physical (campus) and virtual spaces are set up and utilised – that can undermine or weaken meaningful connections for students. Supporting similar insights shared in Sue Beckingham’s earlier talk, students reported a positive or enhanced sense of belonging and community with their university settings when a mix of formal and informal spaces were available to them as ‘touch points’ in their wider experiences. Crucially, this merging of spaces points to the affective dimension of networked space as a means of nurturing meaningful connections for students on both an individual and collective level.

In his talk ‘Physical learning spaces and networked landscapes of learning: Prismatic mediations’, Dr Brett Bligh problematised how physical learning spaces mediate networked landscapes of learning, arguing that physical spaces exhibit multiple mediation on what is expected and made possible for students and educators therein. Brett challenged the established logic of ‘built pedagogy’, and associated proliferation of solutions in modern campus development, on the grounds that such solutions are typically based on a model of deploying different types of learning spaces to mediate certain forms of educational practice. 

Brett was quick to highlight the limiting nature of such an attitude towards learning space and how it encouraged certain ways of interacting and speaking about space production. Brett’s view is that, in the practice realities of learners and educators, such activities constitute a wider learning landscape comprised of a range of environments, people, social structures, and resources. It is within these ‘mediations’ that physical learning spaces are appropriated, and their agentic qualities and rhythms revealed. Building on established research, Brett made the case for an alternative language for conceptualising how space is a “mediating factor” within the actual practices of HE that is based around six core concepts, wherein space is understood to be transparent, enabling, stimulating, associative, cognitively integrated, and socially integrated. Whereas earlier research conveys distinctly normative views on space, focused largely on stability, this alternative framework is oriented towards encouraging stakeholders to reflect on their experiences and explore future possibilities within their institutions. Brett wants the associated vocabulary to support reflection, re-thinking, and re-conceptualisation – as stakeholders use it to explore their experiences and aspirations together.  

In the afternoon panel discussion contributors were given licence to expand, elaborate, and cross-examine the work presented with the aim of considering more deeply the ‘prospects for space’. Discussion identified the importance of connection, mattering, belonging, and a clear need to move away from performative paradigms in learning space and campus design towards a more participative paradigm of practice. Such a paradigm shift would acknowledge the rhythms of connections, of continuities and discontinuities in space, of working socially and solitarily, identifying, and intentionally inviting touchpoints that converge at the boundaries of experience (physical, virtual, and emotional). New strategies for enabling learning and accommodating the multiple demands on today’s students necessitate a rethinking of the  uses and locations of learning space. Increasingly, this will require universities, educators, and students to be flexible and network-minded in how they seek out, and bring together, formal and informal activities in an environment that recognises that learning can take place any time, in either physical and/or virtual spaces.

The powerful insights emerging from this first symposium have encouraged us to think about how we can help scaffold the spaces that students are already using for learning. We can draw on their experiences of using these locations and technologies to adopt student-centred approaches to designing landscapes of learning that extend across and beyond the campus. Our next symposium considers these, and related, ideas through the lens of Flexibility: we will explore how learning is situated relative to the demands of students for greater control in fitting their studies around their learning needs and preferences, as well as other aspects of their lives. Such a view implies a necessity for widening and loosening of the boundaries of conventional learning spaces to provide greater potential flexibility in how, where, and when learning happens. We hope that you will join us on 14th June, online or in person at SRHE’s offices, to continue this conversation.

Sam Elkington is Professor of Learning and Teaching at Teesside University where he leads on the University’s learning and teaching enhancement portfolio. Sam is a PFHEA and National Teaching Fellow (NTF, 2021). He has worked in Higher Education for over 15 years and has extensive experience working across teaching, research and academic leadership and policy domains. Most recently Sam worked for Advance HE (formerly the Higher Education Academy) where he was national lead for Assessment and Feedback and Flexible Learning in Higher Education. Sam’s most recent book (with Professor Alastair Irons) explores contemporary themes in formative assessment and feedback in higher education: Irons and Elkington (2021) Enhancing learning through formative assessment and feedback London: Routledge.

Dr Jill Dickinson is an Associate Professor in Law at the University of Leeds. As a SFHEA, Jill was also selected as a Reviewer for the Advance HE Global Teaching Excellence Awards, and she has been shortlisted for National Teaching Fellowship. A former Solicitor, specialising in property portfolio management, Jill’s dual research interests are around place-making and professional development, and her work has been recognised in the Emerald Literati Awards for Excellence. Jill holds a number of editorial roles, including board memberships for Teaching in Higher Education and the Journal of Place Management and Development. She has recently co-edited a collection entitled Professional Development for Practitioners in Academia: Pracademia which involves contributions from the UK and internationally, and is being published by Springer. Jill has also co-founded communities of practice, including Pracademia in collaboration with Advance HE Connect.


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Writing a Book Proposal

by Rachel Brooks and Sarah O’Shea

Professor Rachel Brooks and Professor Sarah O’Shea (editors of the SRHE/Routledge Book series) recently ran a Professional Development Programme event on ‘Writing a Book Proposal’. Sarah and Rachel offered their insights as authors and editors, discussing some questions frequently asked by those thinking of putting a book proposal together; they also include some advice from a publisher’s perspective offered by our colleagues at Routledge. This summary has been compiled and edited by Sinead Murphy, SRHE Manager, Conferences and Events.

Publishing a book is a significant undertaking – so why do it? Writing a book is a means for researchers to provide an in-depth and coherent account of their work, that often isn’t possible in shorter articles or other formats. Books are accepted in social sciences (including higher education research) as appropriate outputs, and provide opportunities to reach a larger, sometimes international, audience for your work.

Before embarking on such a project, it is important to consider the different options available for disseminating your research, and the advantages and limitations of each. Firstly, you may wish to weigh up the distinctions between edited books and monographs:

  • The labour of producing a co-edited book is distributed across a group authors and editors, and the format can facilitate a greater range and diversity of perspectives around a single topic or theme. At the same time, co-edited volumes demand a lot of time and project management from the editor(s), who must also ensure the overall quality of the finished product.
  • Monographs, on the other hand, are generally sole-authored or sometimes involve a small author team, such that the writing can be well-integrated, with ideas and arguments explored in significant depth. A sole-authored book involves a great deal of time, energy, and labour, but is an excellent addition to your CV.

Some of the most innovative books in the field of higher education research are based on doctoral research. However, turning your PhD thesis into a book often requires a substantial amount of work, and there are some specific considerations worth bearing in mind during this process:

  • Thesis chapters do not automatically translate to book chapters – restructuring, rewriting, revision, and addition is often required. Books typically do not, for example, tend to feature the same level of detail around methodological decisions and process as is found in a doctoral thesis. You may also need to ‘slice’ your thesis and explore a specific area or theme more deeply.
  • Consider any overlaps with previously published journal articles. Some publishers may be concerned about what will be novel or original about your book if you have already published extensively from your PhD research, while for others this may not be a significant issue. It’s therefore worth discussing this topic with your target publisher at an early stage, to establish what kind of changes or developments may be expected for a book proposal to be successful.
  • Discuss your publication plans (and/or draft proposal) with your current or former supervisor, or other experienced academics in your department or field. The transition from publishing works in progress and journal articles to publishing books can seem like a big leap, but supervisors – who know your work very well – are generally happy to discuss and advise on this process.

With your initial preparation complete, you may feel ready to approach a publisher. What are the next logical steps?

  • Research your publishing options, and consider not only what would best suit your field and specific topic, but also your motivation for writing the book. Are you, for instance, trying to apply for a job or promotion? If so, which publisher is highly regarded in your field?
  • Once you have decided on your publisher of choice, consider sending an informal e-mail to the editor(s). Your e-mail should provide a brief overview of your idea or focus and seek to gauge some feedback on whether this would appeal to the series – the response you receive can help you to quickly establish whether a publisher is the right fit for your work.
  • Check the different publication options offered – is a paperback option available? Hard copies can be prohibitive in terms of cost to the prospective reader, and so a paperback option could be a key selling point down the track. Are there options for open access – and if so, what are the fees and charges? Some contracts or research projects include funding for these costs.

Once you have conducted this initial research, a publisher may invite you to write a proposal – this is a formal expression of what you hope your book will contain, which provides the basis for the publisher (and others) to make a final decision regarding a potential book contract.

Usually there is a form or template available on the publisher’s website or which they can send you, which must be carefully followed. These forms vary across publisher, so it is important to access this early in your process to tailor your proposal to what the publisher is asking for. While completing this form:

  • Consult examples of successful proposals – colleagues in your department or wider network will often be happy to share.
  • Provide details of your writing or editing experience – this is an opportunity to outline what you have already published from your PhD.
  • The proposed timeline for someone drawing on their finished thesis will be much shorter than that of someone starting from scratch with a new research project. It is important to be realistic about how much writing you have done already, and your existing commitments. A typical timeline may be around one year from the date on which the book contract is signed, but this varies greatly depending on individual circumstances.
  • Many publishers prescribe a minimum and maximum length for the finished book (normally around 80,000 words) but this varies between publishers, and there is increasing variety in length.
  • A book proposal should also include a concise overview expressing the unique selling point of your book, a chapter-by-chapter summary, a list of competing titles in the same area as your proposed book (and what makes your book distinct from these) and the potential market for your book (academics, students, researchers, others?). Some of this can be more challenging with edited collections if you are planning a call for proposals, but both publishers and peer reviewers need to see what you are planning to include to assess the proposal fully.

Some further writing advice from a publisher’s perspective offered by Routledge, but widely applicable across many academic publishers, is:

  • Take your time writing

It is obvious to those assessing a proposal if it has been rushed. Use the proposal as an opportunity to best advertise yourself, your author voice, and your ideas. Ensure you answer all questions on the template provided by the publisher or series editor fully – missing out on questions can imply to the publisher that your idea is not fully developed.

  • Be clear and accessible in your language

While the editor you submit your proposal to at the publisher will work within your subject area, eg education, they are unlikely to be an expert in your specific topic. Make sure you spell out acronyms or technical terms the first time you use them and reference the work you are building upon.

  • Think about the market/intended audience for the book

Publishers need to know that there is a clear route to market for your book, in addition to its academic merit. Make sure you express who you think your reader will be and how they are going to use your book. What are the key objectives of your book, and why is it needed? Making this clear in your proposal shows that you are serious about writing a book and that you have a good awareness of your key market and what else has published in the area.

  • Recommend potential reviewers

The publisher may ask you to recommend peer reviewers as part of the proposal stage, generally requesting that they are at a different institution to you and spanning a range of locations if you are aiming at an international audience. Routledge does not guarantee to contact all of these people – and their peer review process is anonymised so you won’t know this for definite – but they provide another indication of who you are writing for. This can help the publisher search for other potential reviewers and ensure your book is correctly positioned within their publishing programme.

  • Supply abstracts, table of contents, and a description of the book wherever possible

At the formal proposal stage, you should have a good idea of what the book will be about. Supplying this material can be more difficult when it comes to edited collections particularly if you are planning a call for proposals, but the publisher needs to see what you intend to include to assess the proposal fully – as do peer reviewers.

If you are considering proposing a book for inclusion in the SRHE/Routledge Book Series Research in Higher Education, please contact Rachel Brooks (r.brooks@surrey.ac.uk), Sarah O’Shea (sarah.oshea@curtin.edu.au) or Clare Loughlin-Chow (SRHE Director, clare.loughlin-chow@srhe.ac.uk).

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

Professor Sarah O’ Shea is a national and international recognised educator and researcher, who applies sociological perspectives to the study of higher education equity. Sarah has also held numerous university leadership positions, which have directly informed changes across the Australian higher education sector, particularly in the field of educational equity. She is a prolific writer, with over 80 publications including books, book chapters, scholarly journal articles, media articles and commissioned reports produced in the last decade.


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The health of higher education studies – cause for optimism?

By Rachel Brooks

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

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

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

Source: UKRI Gateway to Research database

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

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

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

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

 Total number of outputsHE-focussed outputsPercentage
REF201455195029
REF2021527273014

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

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

 Total number of ICSHE-focussed ICSPercentage
REF20142143215
REF20212264721

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

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

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

Source: British Journal of Sociology of Education website

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

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

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

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

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SRHE News on Publishing: reports from April 2023

by Rob Cuthbert

One of the benefits of SRHE membership is exclusive access to the quarterly newsletter, SRHE News, www.srhe.ac.uk/publications/srhe-newsletter. SRHE News typically contains a round-up of recent academic events and conferences, policy developments and new publications, written by editor Rob Cuthbert. To illustrate the contents, here is part of the April 2023 issue on recent developments in Publishing. If you would like to see a sample issue just email rob.cuthbert@uwe.ac.uk or rob.gresham@srhe.ac.uk.

Open access

John Sherer (North Carolina) blogged for The Scholarly Kitchen on 23 March 2023 about a recent initiative to publish open access monographs in history, reporting technical problems, author resistance but also much greater take-up/use, with about three times as many reported individual engagements as even a successful paywalled monograph.

An article on 6 March 2023 by Alexander B Belles and colleagues from Penn State in the Journal of Science Policy and Governance made recommendations about how to handle  the US Office of Science and Technology Policy requiring that all federally funded scholarly research be accessible to the public immediately upon publication. The article said: “While this open access policy will ultimately benefit society by increasing the availability of data and research outputs, it could place a heavy burden on researchers due to the relatively high cost of open access alongside an academic culture that tends to favor publishing in high impact subscription journals. We … offer recommendations for agencies, universities, and publishers to mitigate the impacts on researchers.” One recommendation was to consider cancelling publisher subscriptions and divert funds to author processing charges.

Jack Grove reported for Times Higher Education/insidehighered.com on 16 March 2023 on the suspiciously remarkable expansion of Swiss open-access publisher MDPI, which published no fewer than 240,500 articles in 2021, “just slightly fewer than Springer Nature and Elsevier’s combined open-access total that year, levying an average article processing charge of 1,258 Swiss francs ($1,364) per paper.” Jack Grove had reported for Times Higher Education on 15 March 2023 that analysis by economist Paolo Crosetto (National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment, France) showed “the number of MDPI’s special issues continued to rise sharply in 2022. Focusing on 98 MDPI journals with an impact factor, there were 55,985 special issues with a closing date in 2023, as of 23 February, Dr Crosetto told Times Higher Education. That compares with 39,587 open special issues identified at the end of March 2021, although only 10,504 of these eventually published anything. In 2022, 17,777 special issues published content.” Mark Hanson (Exeter) blogged about the predatoriness of MDPI on 25 March 2023.

Web of Science reported on 20 March 2023 that it had this year already disqualified some 50 journals, including an MDPI flagship journal, from having an impact factor in future. Christos Petrou of Scholarly Intelligence blogged for The Scholarly Kitchen on 30 March 2023 about the recent delisting of 50 journals, its implications for publishers, including MDPI, Hindawi and Wiley (which recently acquired Hindawi), and the consequences of the ‘guest editor’ model which underpins the recent growth of MDPI and other journals.

Shaping the field of lifelong education

The editors of theInternational Journal of Lifelong Education looked back on 40 years of the journal  to develop themes which had shaped the field. They chose “citizenship and its learning; learning in, through and for work; and widening participation and higher education”. The article by John Holford (Nottingham) and his co-editors was part of the journal’s retrospective issue 41(6) (2 November 2022).

Books with DOIs are more discoverable on Google Scholar

Lettie Y Conrad (independent) and Michelle Urberg of EBSCO blogged for The Scholarly Kitchen about their funded study to find how metadata contributes to the successful discovery of academic and research literature via the mainstream web. “Initial results indicated that DOIs have an indirect influence on the discoverability of scholarly books in Google Scholar — however, we found no direct linkage between book DOIs and the quality of Google Scholar indexing or users’ ability to access the full text via search-result links. Although Google Scholar claims to not use DOI metadata in its search index, the results of our mixed-methods study of 100+ books (from 20 publishers) demonstrate that books with DOIs are generally more discoverable than those without DOIs.

Why journal submissions get rejected

Alex Edmans (London Business School) reflected on his experience as editor of the Review of Finance and analysed his reasons for rejecting nearly 1000 submissions, for SSRN on 9 February 2023.

The ethics of peer review

The endless lament of journal editors about finding reviewers continued, as Dirk Lindebaum (Grenoble Ecole de Management) and Peter J Jordan (Griffith) mused in Organization (30(2) 396-406) on reviewer disengagement: “… an audit culture in academia and individual incentives (like reduced teaching loads or publication bonuses) have eroded the willingness of individuals to engage in the collective enterprise of peer-reviewing each others’ work on a quid pro quo basis. … it is unethical for potential reviewers to disengage from the review process … we aim to ‘politicise’ the review process and its consequences for the sustainability of the scholarly community. We propose three pathways towards greater reviewer engagement: (i) senior scholars setting the right kind of ‘reviewer’ example; (ii) journals introducing recognition awards to foster a healthy reviewer progression path and (iii) universities and accreditation bodies moving to explicitly recognise reviewing in workload models and evaluations. … the latter point … aligns individual and institutional goals in ‘measurable’ ways. In this way, ironically, the audit culture can be subverted to address the imbalance between individual and collective goals.”

Identity theft prompts scientists worldwide to contemplate legal action

Jack Grove reported for Times Higher Education/insidehighered.com on 10 February 2023 that many leading scientists had been wrongly named as authors or editors on AI-generated papers and predatory journals. Some were considering legal action, which might be supported by UKRIO.

The gaming of citation and authorship

Stuart Macdonald (Leicester) wrote a truly terrifying analysis of the extent of misrepresentation in academic publishing, in Social Science Information (online 7 February 2023): “Many authors in medicine have made no meaningful contribution to the article that bears their names, and those who have contributed most are often not named as authors. Author slots are openly bought and sold. The problem is magnified by the academic publishing industry and by academic institutions, pleased to pretend that peer review is safeguarding scholarship. In complete contrast, the editors of medicine’s leading journals are scathing about just how ineffectual is peer review in medicine. Other disciplines should take note lest they fall into the mire in which medicine is sinking.”

APCs are a heavy burden for middle-income countries

Alicia J Kowaltowski (São Paolo) and colleagues from Brazil blogged for The Scholarly Kitchen on 9 March 2023 about the way author processing charges can be a major problem for middle-income countries like Argentina, Brazil, India, Mexico, and South Africa.

Predatory journals and the mislocated centres of scholarly communication

Franciszek Krawczyk and Emanuel Kulczycki (both Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland) argued in their article in Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society (2021, 4(1)) that so-called predatory journals may have a significant role in enabling otherwise marginalised scholars to maintain their academic careers despite a location on the periphery of mainstream academic debate. “Knowledge production is an important factor in establishing the geopolitical position of countries … we introduce the term “mislocated centres of scholarly communication” to help better understand the emergence of predatory journals, and journals that bear similarities to them, in geopolitical peripheries. Mislocated centers of scholarly communication are perceived in the peripheries as legitimized by the center but are in fact invisible or illegitimate in the center. Thus, we argue the importance of viewing these mislocated centers as the result of unequal power relations in academia. … predatory journals are a geopolitical problem because the geopolitical peripheries of science are much more often harmed by them than the center. Unlike predatory journals, mislocated centers of scholarly communication are not necessarily fraudulent but rather they are geopolitical roles imposed on some journals by a dynamic between center and peripheries.”

Routledge/Taylor & Francis acquire US publisher Stylus

The founder of Stylus Publishing announced in an email to authors on 2 March 2023 that the publisher will be sold to Taylor & Francis and operate as part of its Routledge division, as Doug Lederman reported for insidehighered.com on 3 March 2023. “Founded in 1996, Stylus’ publishing focuses on higher education, covering such areas as teaching and learning, student affairs, professional development, service learning and community engagement, study abroad, assessment, online learning, racial diversity on campus, women’s issues, doctoral education, adult education, and leadership and administration.” The publisher seems mainly to produce practical guides for US HE, with no obvious impact more widely.

Rob Cuthbert is the editor of SRHE News and Blog, emeritus professor of higher education management, Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and Fellow of SRHE. He is an independent academic consultant whose previous roles include deputy vice-chancellor at the University of the West of England, editor of Higher Education Review, Chair of the Society for Research into Higher Education, and government policy adviser and consultant in the UK/Europe, North America, Africa, and China. He is current chair of the SRHE Publications Committee and of the Editorial Advisory Board for Studies in Higher Education.

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Oppenheimer

by Paul Temple

A movie about the life and work of J Robert Oppenheimer, called simply Oppenheimer, with Cillian Murphy in the title role, is due to be released in the UK this summer. It looks as if the movie will deal mainly with the three years of Oppenheimer’s life when he led the Manhattan Project’s scientific team which produced the first atomic bomb in 1945, but his life story holds many other points of interest for those of us studying higher education. Oppenheimer was primarily a university teacher, researcher, and administrator, before the war mostly at Berkeley and after the war as the Director of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, where his staff included Einstein, Bohr and Dirac.

A particular point of historical interest is that Oppenheimer’s academic career spanned the period during which Europe, as a result of self-inflicted wounds, ceded world scientific leadership to the United States. When Oppenheimer graduated from Harvard in 1925, young American scientists wanting to work with the world’s best researchers crossed the Atlantic as a matter of course. As a theoretical physicist, Oppenheimer’s choice was between Germany, particularly Göttingen and Leipzig, and England, particularly Cambridge. Cambridge didn’t work out well, so in 1926 he went to work with Max Born, one of the leading figures in quantum mechanics, at Göttingen, receiving his doctorate there just a year later. There were presumably no wasted words in his 25-page thesis.

Several factors came together to allow America to build an atomic bomb in a stunningly short period. The crucial phase of the Manhattan Project, from when the first scientists arrived at the newly-created Los Alamos laboratory (a collection of army huts) to the “Trinity” test in the New Mexico desert on 16 July 1945, lasted a mere 28 months. But the Manhattan Project built on the best available physics and engineering research, created in American universities in the 1930s – Berkeley and Chicago in particular – largely with public funding for the purest of research. Through the 1930s, for example, Berkeley seemed to have no particular difficulty in obtaining funding to build ever more powerful cyclotrons (the first particle accelerators, allowing the production of radioactive isotopes), but with no practical aim in view: nobody seems to have asked them for an impact statement.

America also took full advantage of talent sucked in from Europe, particularly Jewish refugees from Germany, Hungary and Italy. Britain also took in foreigners: Rudolf Peierls and Otto Frisch, both German-Jewish refugees, worked at Birmingham University in the 1940s and made a vital contribution to building the bomb by showing that the amount of uranium-235 needed to sustain a chain reaction was a matter of kilograms, not tons as had been thought – thus making the bomb a practical proposition.

A lot of things supported the Manhattan Project’s success, but large-scale, long-term funding for blue-skies research, together with a policy of grabbing talent from wherever it could be found, and a sophisticated manufacturing economy, were all crucial. Hard to decide which of these factors is the least likely to apply in Britain today.

Oppenheimer’s loss of his security clearance in 1954 was devastating for a man with a strong sense of national duty. There are several ironies here. One is that, while Oppenheimer’s politics were certainly left-wing, he was notably clear-eyed about the Soviet Union, concluding as early as 1947 that negotiations with Stalin over the control of nuclear weapons would be a waste of time. And, just as past service to the Soviet state was no guarantee of one’s future safety, so the fact that Oppenheimer had given America the bomb (“What more do you want, mermaids?”, a friend asked at his Security Board hearing) did not protect him from the FBI’s unshakeable obsession about his political unreliability (of course, they missed the actual Soviet spies). There is a depressing contrast between this cold war paranoia and the open, international culture which Oppenheimer had known before the war. Princeton’s refusal to bow to pressure from Washington to sack him must have been a consolation of sorts.

There was a reflective silence in the control bunker immediately following the “Trinity” explosion. Oppenheimer later said that he thought of the line from Hindu scripture (he read Sanskrit),”Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”. It seems not to be entirely clear whether he actually uttered the words; someone present recalls him saying, “Well, I guess it worked”.Let’s see how the movie handles this era-defining moment.

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

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Irregulation: is the Office for Students fit for purpose?

by Rob Cuthbert, SRHE News Editor

The House of Lords Industry and Regulators Committee has decided to investigate the OfS. The Committee, with a remit “to consider matters relating to industry, including the policies of His Majesty’s Government to promote industrial growth, skills and competitiveness, and to scrutinise the work of UK regulators”, published 12 questions on which it invited evidence. The first three questions nail it:

  1. Are the OfS’ statutory duties clear and appropriate? How successful has the OfS been in performing these duties, and have some duties been prioritised over others?
  2. How closely does the OfS’ regulatory framework adhere to its statutory duties? How has this framework developed over time, and what impacts has this had on higher education providers?
  3. What is the nature of the relationship between the OfS and the Government? Does this strike the right balance between providing guidance and maintaining regulatory independence?

Michael Salmon, News Editor for Wonkhe, said on 3 March 2023: “This is much of what sector groups have been calling for, and reflects concerns raised in OfS’ recently published review of its engagement with universities.” The HE sector’s ‘mission groups’, memorably labelled ‘gangs’ by the late David Watson, wrote collectively to the new Education Select Committee chair Robin Walker on 16 January 2023 to ask for a proper review of the Office for Students: “… there is growing concern that the OfS is not implementing a fully risk-based approach, that it is not genuinely independent and that it is failing to meet standards that we would expect from the Regulators’ Code.”

The concerns are not limited to people within the sector. Ian Mansfield, now at Policy Exchange, former special adviser in the DfE to Gavin Williamson and Michele Donelan, wrote for Times Higher Education on 16 February 2023 complaining that “The OfS has thus far failed to live up to the ambition of its creators to be light-touch and proportionate. … However, universities must take their share of responsibility. Despite being part of a mass participation system, receiving significant taxpayer funding, too many do not accept the basic fact that they should be regulated.” Lawyer Smita Jamdar of Shakespeare Martineau tweeted: “I come across v few institutions who resist being regulated. I come across more who are unhappy about the lack of pretty basic safeguards for procedural fairness. People like Mansfield who have egged the OfS on to rush to start investigations carry some (much?) of the blame.” She then wrote in Times Higher Education on 8 March 2023 that “the Office for Students’ published approach to monitoring the risk of breaches of registration conditions demonstrates that it lacks basic safeguards around transparency, fairness and accountability.” Sometimes if you are attacked from all sides you might be in the right place, but the OfS will struggle to argue that case: consider those three questions from the Lords Committee.

Are the OfS’ statutory duties clear and appropriate? How successful has the OfS been in performing these duties, and have some duties been prioritised over others?

This goes to the heart of the statute establishing the OfS, the Higher Education and Research Act 2017 (HERA).  HERA explicitly aimed to institutionalise a market for higher education because former Universities Minister David Willetts believed that market competition would ‘drive up quality’. One of his  successors Jo Johnson continued in that mistaken but fervently held belief as he steered HERA to become law. However the ‘disruptive’ innovators encouraged as new entrants have mostly created more problems than solutions, despite some small but distinctive successes like the Dyson Institute.

There is no space here to explore the failure of this kind of market, but one repeated motif in policy pronouncements before and since might be summarised as ‘Why won’t they do what we want?’. The answer is not that universities resist regulation (though some may do) but, more surprisingly, is that ‘You can’t buck the market’. There has always been intense competition between HE providers, for reputation and for the things which flow from that – students and research income – but often the competition is not overtly financial. Policymakers failed to understand institutional realities then, and even more so now. Policymakers introduced £9000 fees in the mistaken belief that a spectrum of fees would emerge reflecting quality differences. Anyone in any university could have told them, as many did, then that no self-respecting university would charge less than £9000, for the real reputational fear of declaring ‘low’ quality. The Higher Education Funding Council for England no doubt did advise just that, but HEFCE was of course abolished by HERA. Now we have a regulator which seems as ill-informed about institutional realities as policymakers continue to be.

Institutions actually respond rapidly to market forces and regulatory threats. At one end of the market, conditional unconditional offers by some universities were a predictable and rational response to accentuated competition for students. A combination of shame and regulatory threat forced their abandonment. At the other end, the declining real income from home undergraduate students drives expansion of international student numbers with higher fees at the same time as well-qualified home applicants are rejected – a saga which is yet to play out but may have toxic consequences for government. And there are growing lacunae of provision in some geographical areas and in some subjects, as market behaviour which makes sense for institutions delivers irrational distribution of provision across the country. This is market failure – because we have the wrong kind of legally-enacted market, and the wrong kind of regulation. The OfS’s duties may be clear, but they are not appropriate.

How closely does the OfS’ regulatory framework adhere to its statutory duties? How has this framework developed over time, and what impacts has this had on higher education providers?

Andrew Sentance (Cambridge Econometrics) argued in The Times on 14 February 2023 that there has been a broad failure of regulation since privatisation and it was time for a complete overhaul. The OfS may be an example, but it is probably untypical because it was so likely to fail. The history of OfS deserves to be written as a case study in regulatory failure, and one chapter will surely start with former Director of Fair Access Les Ebdon’s accurate prediction that “I can tell you exactly what the OfS will do. It will do whatever the government of the day wants it to do.” OfS shortcomings were at first masked by the skills and knowledge of its first chair, Sir Michael Barber, and first CEO Nicola Dandridge. Barber had been in and around government and HE for many years, and though not popular in HE was deeply thoughtful and knowledgeable both about the sector’s performance and about the nature of regulation. Dandridge had been CEO of Universities UK with a broad appreciation of the contribution of the whole range of the HE sector. They were respected and trusted, or at least given the benefit of any doubt, as they sought to respond to the growing range of issues which the government laid at the door of the OfS, now including unexplained grade inflation, harassment and sexual misconduct, mental health and well-being, freedom of speech and increasing the diversity of provision.

The shortcomings of the OfS might even have been overcome through evolutionary change, but the government, with Gavin Williamson then still Secretary of State for Education, doubled down on its earlier mistakes when it replaced Barber and Dandridge (see below), destroying the relationship between the OfS and the sector as it struck entirely the wrong balance for a supposedly independent regulator.

What is the nature of the relationship between the OfS and the Government? Does this strike the right balance between providing guidance and maintaining regulatory independence?

The notes to the 2017 Act say: “This Act creates a new non-departmental public body, the Office for Students (OfS), as the main regulatory body, operating at arm’s length from Government, and with statutory powers to regulate providers of higher education in England.” (emphasis added). It was rumoured that Barber sought a second term as OfS chair but was denied. Former UUK chair Sir Ivor Crewe (former VC, Essex) was interviewed, as Sonia Sodha and James Tapper reported for The Observer on 14 February 2021: “Perhaps it was the long passage in Professor Sir Ivor Crewe’s book The Blunders of Our Governments about the way ministers’ mistakes never catch up with them that led Gavin Williamson to reject the expert as the new head of the Office for Students. Or maybe the education secretary was put off by the section of the 2013 book, written with the late Anthony King, dealing with how ministers put underqualified, inexperienced people in charge of public bodies. The job of independent regulator of higher education in England was instead handed to James Wharton, a 36-year-old former Tory MP with no experience in higher education who ran Boris Johnson’s leadership campaign.”

The Education Select Committee questioned Lord Wharton of Yarm on 5 February 2021 and endorsed his appointment, which was announced by OfS on 8 February 2021. Rob Merrick reported for The Independent on 2 February 2021 that Lord Wharton had been subject to ‘hard questioning’, in the course of which he said he didn’t see why he could not retain the whip, nor why his role as Boris Johnson’s campaign manager should raise any conflict of interest issues. So the ‘independent’ regulator was to have a partisan chair who would retain the government whip. Conflict of interest issues raised themselves almost immediately, as Lord Wharton was revealed to be a paid adviser to a company seeking to build a cable connection through land at the University of Portsmouth, which had also made donations to several Conservative MPs.

Wharton’s appointment was greeted with incredulity in HE, but with no signs of embarrassment on his part; he even brazenly secured the appointment of Rachel Houchen, the wife of a friend and political colleague, to the OfS Board, which has just two people with extensive and current HE institutional experience, one from Oxford and one from UCL. Chris Parr of Research Professional News elicited the surprising information from the OfS on 13 March 2023 that the OfS Chair has only visited five universities since his appointment more than 2 years ago – Nottingham, King’s College London, Cambridge, Sheffield Hallam University and The Engineering and Design Institute in London.

OfS, ‘having regard to ministers’ as statute demands, started to leave HE realities behind. DfE wrote frequent letters to the OfS and the OfS jumped to respond. An OfS consultation document issued on 26 March 2021 put into practice the ‘instructions’ received earlier from Secretary of State Gavin Williamson, proposing to steer more funds to STEM subjects and, among other things, halve additional funding for performing arts, media studies and archaeology courses. WonkHE’s David Kernohan gave his critical analysis on the same day. OfS announced on 30 March 2021 that after the first phase of a review of the NSS, commissioned by Universities Minister Michele Donelan, there would be ‘major changes’ including dropping all references to ‘student satisfaction’. Consistent reports that 85% or more of students in most universities are satisfied with their experience would be embarrassing for a government determined to prove otherwise.

Not a buffer, an irregulator

In the past funding councils were statutorily responsible for in effect providing a buffer between HE and government, to regulate excesses on either side. There is no danger of ‘provider capture’ now that the arm’s-length relationship with government has such short arms. However the limitations of the OfS are being increasingly exposed, not least by the remaining Lords Committee questions, especially No 4: Does the OfS have sufficient powers, resources and expertise to meet its duties? How has its expertise been affected by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education’s decision not to continue as the OfS’ Designated Quality Body?

The QAA withdrew as DQB because the OfS expectations were incompatible with QAA’s broader remit and international roles and indeed the requirements of the European Association for Quality Assurance (ENQA) – which makes it unlikely that an international provider in Europe would agree to take its place as DQB. The OfS as ‘interim’ quality body has lived up to its threat to put ‘boots on the ground’; even though repeated tweaks of its Key Performance Measures have not yet produced any persuasive identification of ‘low quality courses’.

Nor has OfS shown that it will take any notice of widespread HE opinion, as UUK’s Charlotte Snelling reported in despair in her Wonkhe blog on 31 October 2022. On 9 March 2023 OfS announced a consultation on how it should have its investigations funded. The OfS has powers to make such charges following orders laid in Parliament only in December 2022, and “This consultation is not seeking views on the powers that the Regulations give the OfS or whether we should seek to recover the costs of our investigations. We are also not seeking views on matters relating to the OfS’s approach to monitoring registered providers, which may lead to us opening or conducting investigations.” The OfS plans to recover all staff and other costs attributable to the investigation, which it is entitled to do by those orders. It is a sham ‘consultation’, since it is clear what is intended and it is wholly predictable that the OfS will do almost exactly what is proposed.

The role of buffer was condemned as ‘backward-looking’ by Jo Johnson in his recent evidence to the Lords Committee; for good measure he also described QAA as a legacy from a previous era, even though he made clear the undesirability of OfS being more than an interim quality body. But we might at least expect the OfS to show some understanding and appreciation of the difficulties which institutions face, especially with rapidly declining levels of real income from tuition fees. Instead OfS put its fees up by 13%: Gloucestershire VC Stephen Marston, a former senior civil servant who also worked in HEFCE, said in Times Higher Education on 16 January 2023 that the increase was unacceptable. John Morgan reported in THE on the same day that the ‘shameful’ 13% rise would push the largest universities’ fees above £200,000. OfS chief executive Susan Lapworth blogged shamelessly on 26 January 2023 about how OfS plans to ‘refresh its engagement’ with universities and other providers.

To sum up, in the words of Paul Ashwin (Lancaster) and former Secretary of State Charles Clarke:

“Overall, we have a situation in which the OfS has become more interventionist to protect ‘the student interest’, apparently as defined by ministers and certain sections of the media, while its expertise to understand what such interventions involve has fallen significantly. Moreover, it is very unclear what forms of intervention the OfS considers could be effective in changing university behaviours in the desired direction. Together, these points represent a serious challenge to the legitimacy of the OfS as a regulator.”

Effective regulation in higher education depends on the willing, or at least grudging, consent of the regulated, but that consent has been deliberately dismantled. Instead the Office for Students is collapsing in an orgy of partisanship and wilful disregard for the real interests of higher education and its students.

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