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University autonomy and government control by funding

by GR Evans

A change of government has not changed the government’s power to intrude upon the autonomy of providers of higher education, which is constrained chiefly by its being limited to the financial. Government can also issue guidance to the regulator, the Office for Students, and that guidance may be detailed. Recent exchanges give a flavour of the kind of control which politicians may seek, but this may be at odds with the current statutory framework.

As Secretary of State for Education, Gillian Keegan sent a Letter of Guidance to the Office for Students on 4 April 2024. She stated her priorities, first that ‘students pursue HE studies that enable them to progress into employment, thereby benefitting them as well as the wider economy’. She also thought it ‘important to provide students with different high-quality pathways in HE, notably through higher technical qualifications (HTQs), and degree apprenticeships’ at Levels 4 and 5. These ‘alternatives to three-year degrees’, she said, ‘provide valuable opportunities to progress up the ladder of opportunity’. As a condition of funding providers were to ‘build capacity’ with ‘eligible learners on Level 4 and 5 qualifications via a formula allocation’.  The new Higher Technical Qualifications were to attract ‘an uplift within this formula for learners on HTQ courses’. ‘World leading specialist providers’ were to be encouraged and funded ‘up to a limit’ of £58.1m for FY24/25.

The change of Government in July 2024 brought a new Secretary of State in the person of Bridget Phillipson but no fresh Letter of Guidance before she spoke in the Commons in a Higher Education debate on 4 November, 2024. Recognising that many universities were in dire financial straits, she  suggested that there should be ‘reform’ in exchange for a rise in tuition fees for undergraduates which had just been announced. That, she suggested, would be needed to ensure that universities would be ‘there for them to attend’ in future.

However, commentators quickly pointed out that Phillipson’s announcement that there would be a small rise in undergraduate tuition fees from £9,250 to £9,535 a year would not be anywhere near enough to fill the gap in higher education funding. The resulting risks were recognised. When the Office for Students reviewed the Financial sustainability of higher education  providers in England in 2024 in May 2024 it had looked at the ‘risks relating to student recruitment’ by providers in relation to the income from their tuition fees.

Phillipson was ‘determined to reform the sector’. She called for ‘tough decisions to restore stability to higher education, to fix the foundations and to deliver change’ with a key role for Government.  Ministers across Government must work together, she said, especially the Secretary for Education and the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology in order to ‘deliver a reformed and strengthened higher education system’. This would be ‘rooted in partnership’ between the DfE, the Office for Students and UK Research and Innovation’.

“… greater work around economic growth, around spin-offs and much more besides—I will be working with my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology on precisely those questions.”

In the debate it was commented that she was ‘light on the details’ of the Government’s role’.  She promised those for the future, ‘To build a higher education system fit for the challenges not just of today but of tomorrow’. She undertook to publish proposals for ‘major reform’.  There were some hints at what those might include. She saw benefits in providers ‘sharing support services with other universities and colleges’. Governing bodies, she said, should be asking ‘difficult strategic questions’, given the population ‘changing patterns of learning’ of their prospective students. The ‘optimistic bias’ she believed, needed to be ‘replaced by hard-headed realism’. ‘Some institutions that may need to shrink or partner, but is a price worth paying as part of a properly funded, coherent tertiary education system.’ She saw a considerable role for Government. ‘The government has started that job – it should now finish it.’

Like her predecessor she wanted ‘courses’ to provide individual students as well as the nation with ‘an economic return’. She expected providers to ‘ensure that all students get good value for money’. Other MPs speaking in the debate pressed the same link. Vikki Slade too defined economic benefit in terms of the ‘value for money’ the individual student got for the fee paid.  Laura Trott was another who wanted ‘courses’ to provide individual students as well as the nation with ‘an economic return’. Shaun Davies asked for ‘a bit more detail’ on ‘the accountability’ to which ‘these university vice-chancellors’ were to be held in delivering ‘teaching contact time, helping vulnerable students and ensuring that universities play a huge part in the wider communities of the towns and cities in which they are anchor institutions’.

Government enforcement sits uncomfortably with the autonomy of higher education providers insisted on by the 2017 Higher Education and Research Act. This Act created the Office for Students as ‘a non-departmental public body’, ‘accountable to Parliament’ and receiving ‘guidance on strategic priorities from the Department for Education’. Its ‘operations are independent of government’, but its ‘guidance’ to providers as Regulator is also heavily restricted at s.2 (5) which prevents intrusion on teaching and research. That guidance may not relate to ‘particular parts of courses of study’; ‘the content of such courses’; ’the manner in which they are taught, supervised or assessed’; ‘the criteria for the selection, appointment or dismissal of academic staff, or how they are applied’; or ‘the criteria for the admission of students, or how they are applied’.

This leaves the Office for Students responsible only for monitoring the financial sustainability of higher education providers ‘to identify those that may be exposed to material financial risks’. Again its powers of enforcement are limited. If it finds such a case it ‘works with’ the provider in a manner respecting its autonomy, namely ‘to understand and assess the extent of the issues’ and seek to help.

Listed in providers’ annual Financial Statements may be a number of sources of funding to which universities may look. These chiefly aim to fund research rather than teaching and include: grants and contracts for research projects; investment income; donations and endowments. The Government has a funding relationship with Research England within UKRI (UK Research and Innovation). UKRI is another Government-funded non-departmental public body, though it is subject to some Government policy shifts in the scale of the funding it provides through the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.

Donations and endowments may come with conditions attached by the funder, limiting them for example to named scholarships or professorships or specific new buildings. However  they may provide a considerable degree of financial security which is not under Government control. The endowments of Oxford and Cambridge Universities are substantial. Those made separately for their Colleges. may be very large, partly as a result of the growth in value of land given to them centuries ago. Oxford University has endowments of £1.3 billion and its colleges taken together have endowments of £5.06 billion. Cambridge University has a published endowment of  £2.47 billion, though Cambridge’s Statement for the Knowledge Exchange Framework puts ‘the university’s endowment ‘at nearly £6 billion’.  Cambridge’s richest College, Trinity, declares endowments of £2.19 billion.

The big city universities created at the end of the nineteenth century are far less well-endowed.  Birmingham had an endowment of £142.5 million in 2023, Bristol of £86 million. Of the twentieth and twenty-first century foundations, Oxford Brookes University notes donations and endowments of £385,000 and Anglia Ruskin University of £335,300. The private ‘alternative’ providers of higher multiplying in recent decades have tended to have a variety of business and commercial partnerships supporting their funding. Categories of funding provided by such gifting remain independent of Government interference.

The Review of Post-18 Education and Funding (May 2019) chaired by Philip Augur stated ‘Principles’ including that ‘organisations providing education and training must be accountable for the public subsidy they receive’, and that ‘Government has a responsibility to ensure that its investment in tertiary education is appropriately spent and directed’. ‘Universities must do more to raise their impact beyond their gates’, Phillipson said, so as ‘to drive the growth that this country sorely needs’ including by ‘joining with Skills England, employers and partners in further education to deliver the skills that people and businesses need’.

In the same Commons debate of 4 November Ian Roome, MP for North Devon, was confident that in his constituency ‘universities work in collaboration with FE sector institutions such as Petroc college’. Petroc College offers qualifications from Level 3 upwards, including HNCs, higher-level apprenticeships, Access to HE diplomas, foundation degrees and honours degrees (validated by the University of Plymouth) and ‘in subjects that meet the demands of industry – both locally and nationally’. Roome saw this (HC 4 November 2024) as meeting a need for ‘a viable and accessible option, particularly in rural areas such as mine, for people to access university courses?’ Phillipson took up his point, to urge such ‘collaboration between further education and higher education providers’. Shaun Davies spoke of the £300 million the Government had put into further education, ‘alongside a £300 million capital allocation’, invested in further education colleges’.  

However in an article in the Guardian on 4 November 2024,Philip Augur recognised that ‘the systems used by government to finance higher and further education are very different’. ‘Universities are funded largely through fees which follow enrolments’, in the form of student loans of £9,250, now raised to £9,535. ‘Unpaid loans are written off against the Department for Education’s balance sheet’. At first that would not be visible in the full  government accounts until 30 years after the loan was taken out. Government steering had become more visible following the Augur Report, with the cost of student loans being recorded ‘in the period loans are issued to students’, rather than after 30 years.  

By contrast the funding of individual FE colleges is based on annual contracts from the Education and Skills Funding Agency, an executive agency of the DFE for post-18 education. They may then spend only within the terms of the contract and up to its limit. The full cost of such contracts is recorded immediately in the public accounts. This makes a flexible response to demand by FE colleges far from easy. Colleges may find they cannot afford to run even popular courses such as construction, engineering, digital, health and social care, without waiting lists for places. The HE reform Phillipson considered in return for a rise in tuition fees had no immediate place in FE.

Government funding control maintains a pragmatic but very limited means of means of giving orders to universities. This depends on regulating access to taxpayer-funded student loans. The Office for Students measures a provider’s teaching in terms of its ‘positive outcomes’. These are set out in the OfS ‘Conditions’ for its Registration, which are required to make a provider’s students eligible for loans from the Student Loans Company. Condition B3 requires that a provider’s ‘outcomes’ meet ‘numerical thresholds’ measured against ‘indicators’: whether students continue in a course after their first year of study; complete their studies and progress into managerial or professional employment.

An Independent Review of the Office for Students: Fit for the Future: Higher Education Regulation towards 2035 appeared in July 2024. The Review relies on ‘positive outcomes’ as defined by the OfS’s ‘judgement’,  that ‘the outcome data for each of the indicators and split indicators are at or above the relevant numerical thresholds’. When such data are not available the OfS itself ‘otherwise judges’.

The government’s power to intrude upon the autonomy of providers of higher education continues to be constrained, but chiefly by its being limited to the financial, with many providers potentially at risk from their dependence on government permitting a level of tuition fee high enough to sustain them.

GR Evans is Emeritus Professor of Medieval Theology and Intellectual History in the University of Cambridge.


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How can PhDs support solutions to local challenges?

by Rachel Handforth and Rebekah Smith-McGloin

Recent news headlines highlight the range of social and economic challenges faced by cities and counties across the UK (BBC, 2024; Financial Times, 2024; Guardian, 2024), reflecting wider predictions of ongoing economic challenges for the UK as a whole (OECD, 2024). Recent local election results seem to indicate public desire for change in their communities – and whilst we await the national democratic process later this year – the devolution process to combined local authorities indicates a positive shift towards increased funding, resources and power for those working to achieve positive change in their local communities.

What is the role of universities in all this? And how might the highest-level qualification that they offer hope to address any of the complex, systemic issues faced by local communities, and those that live and work within them?

The answer to these questions is not clear-cut, but exploring the ways in which the doctorate might lend itself to addressing locally relevant challenges – in theory and in practice – may offer a vision for how universities might enact their civic mission, and consider themselves ‘truly civic’. Yet whilst undergraduate curricula often contain elements of civic engagement through service learning, volunteering, and policy discussions (McCunney, 2017), work on civic and community-informed practice has been slow to emerge at doctoral level.

The last decade has seen an increase in the number of doctoral researchers in the UK (Smith-McGloin and Wynne, 2022) and in the proportion of doctoral graduates working beyond academia (Vitae, 2022). Yet the capacity of the doctorate to contribute to positive place-based change has not been fully explored. Indeed, a recent report from the National Civic Impact Accelerator highlights the ongoing positive economic and social impacts of doctoral graduates; boosting research productivity across sectors, contributing to cutting edge research and development, as well as adding to research capacity through a highly skilled workforce.

Existing literature on doctoral education and wider engagement with communities focuses predominantly on praxis in the context of industrial and professional doctorates (see Boud et al, 2021; Terzioğlu, 2011; Wildy, Peden and Chan, 2015). Too often, doctoral education is still conceptualised as an instrumentalist tool of neoliberal higher education, producing highly-skilled postgraduate researchers and knowledge for the economy. For example, professional doctorates are viewed as a mechanism by which the university can realise its potential, through close interaction with industry and government, to deliver innovation and economic development in a knowledge society.

At the last Society for Research in Higher Education conference in December 2023, we presented our early thoughts on how place-based partnership programmes such as the Public Scholars Initiative and Co(l)laboratory might seek to address socioeconomic challenges, and legitimise broader conceptions of scholarship within doctoral education. Following Gibbons et al’s (1994) consideration of knowledge production modes in relation to university knowledge transfer, and drawing on recent literature relating to modes of knowledge production (Liyanage et al, 2022; Miller et al, 2018; Peris-Ortiz, 2016), we considered how discussions around doctoral education and the public good (Deem, 2020) may be reimagined in the context of these programmes.

Our own experience of leading and working within Co(l)laboratory, a new Nottingham-based doctoral training programme which recruits a diverse range of candidates to co-created research projects, developed with local employers to address place-based issues, has shown the great potential of doctoral education to drive positive change locally. We have seen in practice how programmes such as Co(l)laboratory can act as a node in a wider civic knowledge and innovation system, and produce an expansive network currently involving two universities, 12 civic agreement partners, 30 community organisations, as well as current doctoral students and supervisors on 20 distinct research projects. This new model for doctoral training positions the doctorate as an agile, socially responsive and community-engaged catalyst to enable local people to tackle local problems.

Whilst it is clear that the complex and persistent challenges faced by communities across the UK require significant regional and national investment to resolve, the capacity of place-based doctoral education, shaped by civic partners and their local universities, should not be underestimated.

Dr Rachel Handforth joined Nottingham Trent University as Senior Lecturer in Doctoral Education and Civic Engagement in January 2023 to work on the Co(l)laboratory programme, working with local employers to build a community-informed model for developing place-based PhD research projects. Her research interests include gender inequality in higher education, and belonging, access and participation in doctoral education. She was recently funded by the Society for Research in Higher Education to explore public attitudes to, and engagement with, doctoral research programmes.

Dr Rebekah Smith McGloin is Director of Research Culture and Environment and Director of the Doctoral School at Nottingham Trent University. She provides strategic leadership in the area of inclusive research culture, environment and doctoral education. She is currently principal investigator on two major projects in the field of inclusive doctoral education; the Universities for Nottingham Co(l)laboratory Research Hub and Equity in Doctoral Education through Partnership and Innovation. She is an executive committee member and trustee of the UK Council for Graduate Education.  She was a member of the UKRI Bioscience Skills and Careers Strategy Panel (2015-2022) and an expert panel reviewer for the UK Concordat for Researchers (2019). Her research interests lie in higher education management, postgraduate research student experience, widening participation and access to higher education.


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Graduate outcomes: Beyond numbers, towards quality?

by Tej Nathwani and Ghislaine Dell

with a foreword and afterword by SRHE Network Convenors Tracy Scurry and Daria Luchinskaya

Foreword

As many of us working with graduate employment statistics will know, it’s difficult to find up-to-date large-scale data of graduates’ experiences of work. In the SRHE event Exploring graduate outcomes: Do we need to look beyond earnings and occupation?, Tej Nathwani (HESA) introduced a new graduate outcomes measure capturing subjective aspects of job quality, while Ghislaine Dell (Head of Careers at Bath University and member of the AGCAS Research and Knowledge Committee) reflected on the implications from a practitioner perspective. In this follow-up blog, Tej and Ghislaine comment on the issues in capturing subjective graduate outcomes and outline directions for future research. HESA is keen to get your feedback on its measures: see the end of the blog for how to get in touch.

Capturing job quality in HESA’s Graduate Outcomes survey

Tej Nathwani

Since the financial crisis, there has been a fundamental rethink about the way we measure economic and societal progress, with greater attention now given to subjective forms of data. At the individual or micro level, this has resulted in growing international interest in the quality of work – essentially those parts of our employment that correlate with our wellbeing. From a UK perspective, Scotland led the way in bringing this matter to the forefront with the formation of the Fair Work Convention. Not long after, we saw the Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices published, which recommended the dissemination of regular data on eighteen job quality indicators covering seven broad dimensions.

Graduate outcomes in the UK have historically been assessed solely on the basis of earnings and whether individuals find themselves working in professional or managerial occupations. Yet, research examining the aspirations of higher education students indicates that they want a career that uses their skills, aligns with their ambitions and that can enable them to make impact. Under the Fair Work Convention framework, these aspects embody fulfilling employment. Furthermore, funding and regulatory bodies also want to see all graduates find such work.

With no data currently available on this matter, this clearly represents an information gap in graduate labour market statistics. As an organisation that adheres to the Code of Practice for Statistics, HESA have therefore started to conduct research to fill this space. This has involved using three questions in the Graduate Outcomes questionnaire relating to these features of employment to form a single composite measure that captures fulfilment (or the ‘job design and nature of work’ as it is also commonly referred to). Our ambition is to introduce this into our official statistics/open data in forthcoming years.

Indeed, with the importance of job quality set to grow, one pathway we are currently exploring for the future development of the Graduate Outcomes survey is the addition of new questions on other elements of decent work, as identified by the Measuring Job Quality Working Group.    

Ghislaine Dell

Students make career decisions for very personal and subjective reasons. Recent research from Cibyl shows us that the most frequently looked for qualities in students’ career choices are interesting work, career progression, good work-life balance, and training & development. This matches very well to the proposed new job quality indicator. The Government’s continued emphasis on degrees offering good return on investment is at odds with what the workforce of the future are seeking. Notably, Tej’s analysis showed that, after about £25,000, higher salary does not increase graduates’ reported wellbeing, but more fulfilling work, as captured by the new measures, does. From a governmental and individual perspective, then, knowing what jobs are ‘good jobs’ is important for a thriving society. An indicator which focuses on fulfilment could enable students to make a more informed choice between possible career directions.

However, there is a potential issue around the way in which we can capture this. For example, if we take ‘I am utilising what I learnt in my studies in my work’. Many graduate jobs are discipline-agnostic, and so a chemist, for example, would not be using ‘what they learnt’ in terms of Chemistry, in a financial services job. HESA’s cognitive testing of its survey questions provides a starting point for understanding how respondents are likely to approach these statements. However, further development of the phrasing of these questions is arguably necessary to ensure that the explanation of ‘skills mismatch’ isn’t simply attributable to graduates working in a field different to the one they studied.

 A key challenge will be to work on improving response rates so that each provider can report on this new measure with confidence. Currently, the subjective “graduate voice” questions in Graduate Outcomes are not compulsory, they rarely form part of the official narrative and minimal time is devoted to analysing and understanding the responses. If we are truly to maximise the potential of this measure, these issues need to be addressed.

The new measure both fills an information gap and provides a lever for inclusion of job quality into official statistics augmenting its importance for governments and providers.

Afterword

The lively discussion that followed this SRHE event, organised by the Employability, Enterprise and Work-based Learning Network, reflects the genuine interest and excitement in being able to gather job quality statistics at scale for the first time. HESA is plugging the long-standing information gap, enabling new research directions to take off in practitioner, academic and policy communities and providing better careers information, advice and guidance to students and graduates. There is still work to be done to improve the measures and scope to expand the coverage of job quality indicators in particular extending understanding of how students interpret and understand these questions. Your feedback, whether based on experience or research, can help in the future development of this measure.

Feedback on the types of statistics users would like to see incorporated into HESA open data based on the new measure are most welcome, as are views on potential amendments/additions to the Graduate Outcomes survey. Please send your thoughts to official.statistics@hesa.ac.uk.

For more information about the Employability, Enterprise and Work-based Learning Network and future events please see: Employability, Enterprise and Work-based Learning | SRHE

For more information about AGCAS and the Research and Knowledge Committee please see: Research and Knowledge from AGCAS

Contributors

Tej Nathwani is a Principal Researcher (Economist) at HESA, which is now part of Jisc.

Ghislaine Dell is Head of Careers, University of Bath and member of AGCAS’ Research and Knowledge Committee.

SRHE Network Convenors: Dr Daria Luchinskaya is a Lecturer at the University of Strathclyde Business School and Professor Tracy Scurry is a Professor of Work and Employment at Newcastle University Business School.


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New evidence on the challenges and consequences of precarious work for university students

by Claudio Morrison and Janroj Yilmaz Keles

Introduction

A paper for the Symposium on ‘Inequalities in HE during Covid-19’ (SRHE Conference, 6 December 2023, Birmingham) provides new evidence on the ‘social suffering’ that university students endure due to precarious employment. Based on findings from the project ‘Learning from Labour: Critical Pedagogy for Working Students’ carried out at Middlesex University in 2022-2023, the study explores the educational and employment challenges faced by working students in UK post-92 universities (MDX News, 2023). Researchers Janroj Keles, Claudio Morrison and Parisa Dashtipour surveyed students at their university to understand their work experiences, challenges, employment rights awareness, and workplace difficulties. The preliminary findings of the research are summarised in an extensive report (Morrison, Dashtipour, and Keles, 2023).

Headline news has reignited debates about how financial hardship and challenging labour market conditions are squeezing students’ study-life balance, and alarmingly raised claims that part-time jobs may disproportionally disadvantage less privileged students (BBC News 2023). This directly contradicts widely held beliefs that these jobs offer valuable benefits of labour market flexibility and resilience. The Middlesex study reveals how thousands of university students in the workplace may regularly face discrimination, unpaid hours, threats of dismissal and shifts changing at short notice. The study further reveals a concerning lack of awareness among students regarding their employment rights, including benefits like maternity leave.

Academic debates and research background

The issue of ‘incompatibility’ between work and studying is neither new nor it is unique to the UK. In the UK conditions shifted significantly after the 1990s reforms with the creation of post-92 universities, the replacement of grants with loans and tuition fees and a diversified student body. Early research by Moreau and Leathwood (2006) on post-92 students concluded that students from working class background were disproportionately impacted by the lack of state support, as the ‘benefits of flexible labour predominantly accrue to the employer’ (2006: 37). Since austerity, even ‘white, middle-class students of traditional age’ face a ‘double deficit’ of financial shortfall and increasing pressure to gain employability skills (Hordósy, Clark and Vickers, 2018: 361). Studies covering EU countries show that around 70% of university students are active in the labour market above the accepted ten-hour threshold (Lessky and Unger, 2022). This ‘time-consuming’ employment is particularly prevalent among business students with first-in-family background; this is explained by increasing participation of underrepresented groups, greater appreciation of work experience and higher costs of living and is associated with higher drop-out rates. Research on student-workers by employment scholars remains limited (Rydzik and Bal, 2023). Several researchers highlight the multiple vulnerabilities experienced by students as a peripheral casualised workforce (Alberti et al, 2018; Ioannou and Dukes, 2021, Rydzik and Kissoon, 2022). Mooney (2016), for example, criticizes the fact that hospitality management takes a ‘dispassionate’ attitude toward casually employed students, failing retention. UK research further highlights sexist and discriminatory attitudes in the industry (Ineson et al, 2013; Maxwell and Broadbridge, 2014). Recent research identifies multiple effects of insecurity induced by precarity arguing for ‘student-workers as a conceptually distinct category of workers impacted in particular ways by labour flexibilization’ (Rydzik and Bal, 2023). However, there is some disagreement regarding the idea that all jobs involving precarious labour have negative outcomes. Other studies have questioned slippages between ‘the concepts of precarious work and precarious workers’ (Campbell and Price, 2016: 314) and between precarity as ‘waged work exhibiting several dimensions of precariousness [and], precarity [as] the detrimental effect of labour-market insecurity on people’s lives’ (Antonucci, 2018: 888). Students may avoid the short-term effects of insecure, low-paid jobs by exercising choice (Antonucci 2018). According to Whittard et al (2022: 762) ‘students possess skills attractive to employers, they may receive training and, in some cases, employment opportunities after graduation’. Additionally, Grozev and Easterbrook (2022: 259) argue that ‘the experience of working alongside studying can help to reaffirm students’ commitment to their studies and make them resilient learners.’ In sum, research so far has highlighted the economic and motivational pressures pushing low-income students towards low-paid/low skills precarious jobs. A limited amount of research has detailed both the potential incompatibilities between these jobs and education and the long-term risks associated with precarity. However, student agency and their ability to strategize remain contested. The Middlesex study contributes to these debates by adding evidence on the structural constraints that student workers face in the ‘labour process’ which encompasses work organisation, workplace power structures and ensuing social relations. This ultimately sheds light on what it truly means to be a precarious worker in this specific context.

Method

The research aimed to adapt and adopt critical pedagogy to the post-92 HE to raise the quality of learning experienced by working students and their agentic power in the workplace (Neary et al, 2014). Following an engaged research approach, the research used multiple methods, including a survey, interviews, in-class discussions and reflective essays. Academics across the University employed student-centred, research-engaged learning strategies to stimulate critical reflection on students’ work experiences and socio-political backgrounds (Dashtipour and Vidaillet, 2020). Their accounts illustrate work experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic, the problems encountered, coping strategies and their knowledge of employment rights.

Findings

The research presents a picture in line with existing data on students’ employment during the pandemic. Its findings, however, suggest that the social suffering of student-workers is underestimated and consequently there is a stronger connection between ‘bad’ jobs and poor educational outcomes than previously thought. The study sample included females (61%) students living at home (34%), international/overseas students (44%), British (32%) and EU-settled residents (18%). Among surveyed students, 90% reported ‘not having enough money to live on without working’. In particular, fifty per cent work part-time and a third work in zero hours, freelance or informal jobs. Further, findings reveal how 68% of respondents have their work schedule changed at short notice, 28% do not always or ever see a payslip, 22% complain about unpaid extra work, and 17% claim some of their wages are paid cash-in-hand to avoid taxation. There is widespread evidence of discrimination and harassment and poor working conditions: almost 30% claim experiencing discrimination at work (almost 10% do so frequently), and 24% reported bullying; 22% claim threats of dismissal and 12% of disciplinary action; 20% reported accidents and injuries at work. Lack of knowledge of employment rights is one of the main reasons for difficult relationships with employers and it appears to exacerbate precariousness in the workplace.

Labour process analysis identifies the structural constraints that make such workplaces toxic and exploitative environments. Poignant respondents’ accounts describe a disorganised but highly exploitative work regime which relies on employees’ precarious conditions for its reproduction. Management strategies include lengthening of working time, deskilling and effort intensification combined with functional flexibility. Due to their short-term commitment, lack of experience and rights awareness as well as their desire for flexible hours, students become dependable workers. However, student-workers are no mere victims of unscrupulous employers and exploitative work designs. Resistance to unfair conditions also materialises either by withdrawing labour (turnover) or as workplace small-scale individual (foot-dragging, work-to-rule) and collective (solidarity, grievances) resistance.

The authors are concerned that these workplace issues may have an impact on students’ performance. Morrison, the project’s Principal Investigator, argues that student jobs are psychologically and physically taxing, as such immediately interfering with their ability to benefit from learning. Such experiences also lower their labour market expectations. The causes appear to lie in their lack of control over the conditions of their work and their poor awareness of labour rights. Precarious employment and exploitative business models make such problems a structural feature of these jobs. Keles, a co-investigator, exposes the dark side of student work for overseas students:

“Overseas students are trapped in a cycle of exploitation and bear the brunt of exploitative work. They typically work under unfavourable conditions, such as long hours – up to 30 per week – low pay and usually unsocial hours. Moreover, a significant proportion of oversees students reported that they have experienced bullying and undervaluing at these toxic work environments. In addition to increasing students’ vulnerability and mental health issues, these precarious employment conditions also lead to a number of other problems during their studies like poor academic performance”.

Drawing on extensive teaching experience, the researchers are adamant that these conditions may significantly contribute to low attendance, missing deadlines, requesting extensions, and even failing to turn in their assessments on time at the university.

Implications

Overall, the study emphasises that it is not poor education that allegedly prevents students from succeeding in the labour market, but rather it is the latter, due to the social suffering it causes, that prevents students from making the most of their learning opportunities.  Post-92 universities should not be unfairly blamed for failing students’ employability. However, recognition of the significant challenges students face should lead universities as well as students and educators to turn these struggles into an opportunity for collective, social and pedagogic change. Therefore, while advocating changes in employing sectors and in university funding to reduce students’ reliance on low pay/low skills jobs, the authors urge universities, unions, and civil society to act towards improving student’s agency and bargaining power by raising their labour and employment rights knowledge and awareness of workplace collective conditions.

Universities constantly and rightly encourage students to gain work experience to increase their employability, they should also support working students by including employment rights as part of the taught curriculum, providing topical advice services and offering additional well-being support. Initiatives like Hospitality Now (Lincoln University, 2024) or the Hertfordshire Law Clinic (Hertfordshire, 2024) show this is both a timely and feasible approach.

Anyone interested in viewing the report and/or sharing experiences of supporting working students is welcome to contact the research team C.Morrison@mdx.ac.uk, J.Keles@mdx.ac.uk.

Claudio Morrison is a Senior Research Fellow in Employment Relations and HRM at Middlesex Business School. Over the last 20 years he has carried out ethnographic research in Post-Socialist Eastern Europe investigating the working lives and resistance practices of labour migrants and industrial workers. Current work includes the development of alternatives to mainstream ethics and the promotion of critical pedagogies and reflective learning in western academia.

Janroj Yilmaz Keles is an Associate Professor in the Department of Law and Social Sciences, Faculty of Business and Law at Middlesex University, researching on peace and conflict, gender, political violence, migration and (digital) social movements. He is one of the co-investigators of GCRF HUB – Gender, Justice and Security and  the Nuffield Foundation funded  the Afghan resettlement in England: outcomes and experiences project. He served as an editor for the British Sociological Association’s journal Work, Employment and Society from 2018 until 2022.His monograph Media, Conflict and Diaspora (I.B. Tauris, 2015), was well received by the academic community.


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How professional digital ePortfolios can enhance employability and professional identity

by Jodie Pinnell

Graduate employability helps UK universities to attract students, so strategies to connect learning to employment are increasingly valuable. One proven method encouraging undergraduate students to consider life beyond graduation is to build employability into summative assessment, and digital ePortfolios are one such approach. An ePortfolio is an online resource created by students that details professional experiences linked to academic study. It culminates in a structured collection of learner work that is primarily framed by reflection and serves as an online record of achievement, showcasing skills, professional experiences and credentials. My research investigated digital ePortfolios in the undergraduate curriculum in Childhood Studies at the University of Portsmouth.

Closely related to employability, ePortfolios showcase applicant credentials and digital competence, allowing universities to assess students creatively, and allowing hiring organisations to determine applicants’ skills for entering the job market (Ring et al, 2017[RC1] ). This is relevant in a climate where graduates compete for jobs, and degree programmes are perceived as a ‘product’ with an emphasis on value for money with students as customers (Modell, 2005). As pressure mounts for universities to compete for student recruitment, action is needed to improve graduate employability metrics.

Although ePortfolios may not be a novel approach in undergraduate programmes, their integration as a central element of curriculum and assessment has not been fully explored. My study investigated how ePortfolios affected students’ interactions with their university experiences by enhancing professional identities and reflective, lifelong learning. Data collected for the project relied upon students’ perceptions through recorded online interviews, adopting a phenomenological approach, eliciting meaning through reflective, subjective understandings. Findings showed that reflective work in ePortfolios can be challenging through exposing vulnerabilities, whilst also positively playing a role in the ‘bigger picture’ of students’ development – ePortfolios facilitated digital skill development and evolving professional identities.

In the data collection process, discussions encompassed ePortfolio development linked to students’ compulsory work placements embedded in Childhood Studies degree programmes. Participants were in 2 groups; current students and graduates, with data collection focused on specific contexts and circumstances (Willig, 2008[RC2] ) and reflective, subjective understandings (Finlay, 1999[RC3] ). I took an idiographic stance (Burrell and Morgan, 1999[RC4] ), collecting data covering the perceiver’s angle of perception (Willig, 2008[RC5] ). Participants in the study were in 2 groups; 5 current students and 4 graduates, sampled voluntarily. The interviews conducted were semi structured and the key themes of the findings were employability, reflection, professional identity, digital skills and the student experience.

ePortfolios “develop engaged, reflective, lifelong learners” by collecting valuable evidence of career-based skills, and promoting “professional digital identities” (McKay & Watty, 2016[RC6] ). This study recognised this shift in identity for students, with findings outlining how ePortfolios “help you to reflect and develop as a professional person,” and that students did not “feel like a student when […] writing this” (Graduate Participant).This is arguably caused by the facilitated connections between practical learning and reflective summative assessment: “I’ve got this theory and understanding of things from uni and I can apply that. And everything makes so much more sense which moving forward has meant Oh, my gosh! I can work even better now” (Graduate Participant). As students reflected on professional experiences they valued the connections between theory and practice, with ePortfolios aiding reflection on an individual’s strengths and weaknesses. This in turn improved the quality of work and addresses multiple identities (Ring et al, 2017, p 226[RC7] ). Embedding ePortfolios in the curriculum as a summative assessment enforced accountability for students’ professionalism, leading to an increased level of perceived value from degree study. The requirement for students to write reflective accounts and build connections between experiential and theoretical learning leads to “heightened awareness and preparation for professions” (Svyantek, Kajfez & McNair, 2015, p137[RC8] ). When students had an idea of their professional trajectories, this led to valuable consideration of career plans: “You’ve got clarity in your writing as well, which is probably a nice feather to the bow when you were reflecting on [your career]” (Student Participant). As ePortfolios prompted students to present their professional personas for large audiences to “intentionally curate their digital presence” (Svyantek et al, 2015, p 146[RC9] ), the development of professional identity aided career planning.

Reflection is key for undergraduate Childhood Studies degrees, with a need to embed this in the curriculum to be effective. “Danger lies in [reflection] being a separate curriculum element with a set of exercises” (Bolton & Delderfield, 2018[RC10] , p 1), and with ePortfolios, reflective writing characterises their creation. The meaning of this reflection was evident in the findings: “This is the only assessment that you go and do something real, and then you have to bring it back to our lovely, fluffy theory of ‘Oh, this is how things should be,’ and no one else really makes you do that” (Student Participant). This recognised integrative thinking for students, encouraging the management of complexity and problem-solving by connecting ideas akin to professional experiences (Svyantek, et al, 2015[RC11] ). Reflection brings challenges, however, with vulnerability associated with articulating learning from experience. Findings showed: “[There was a] vulnerability that you felt when you submitted those reflections” (Graduate Participant); the cause arguably in revealing more of the ‘self’ than other assessment methods (Lewis & Gerbic, 2017). Accompanying this is the requirement to adopt alternative ways of thinking that encompass purposeful goal-directed tasks that personalise the learning experience (Lewis, 2017).

The integration of ePortfolios in undergraduate Childhood Studies degree programmes positively affected students’ perceptions of their professional identities, employability and digital competence. Reflecting on work placement experiences was challenging for participants and vulnerability was exposed in recounting experiences for assessment purposes. ePortfolios have made a positive impact on undergraduate Childhood Studies degree programmes, taking into account wider university contexts and individual learning experiences.

Jodie Pinnell is a Senior Lecturer in Childhood Studies in the School of Education, Languages and Linguistics at the University of Portsmouth. She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy UK. Follow Jodie on Twitter @jodieEdu


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Work-based learning and assessment during Covid-19

by Nick Mapletoft and Andy Price

Nick Mapletoft and Andy Price

This is one of a series of position statements developed following a conference on ‘Building the Post-Pandemic University’, organised on 15 September 2020 by SRHE member Mark Carrigan (Cambridge) and colleagues. The position statements are being posted as blogs by SRHE but can also be found on The Post-Pandemic University’s excellent and ever-expanding website. The authors’ statement can be found here.

The purpose of this blog is to provide an insight into how an alternative provider of higher education, an English private university centre (University Centre Quayside (UCQ)) specialising in work-based learning (WBL), continued to deliver to degree apprentices throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. WBL is a particular branch of higher education that is based upon work and should benefit the employer, which in itself creates tensions. The post considers the impact on apprentices, who work for different employers throughout England including NHS frontline workers, through remote tutorials and remote assessment. It also considers varying employer responses from abandoning or postponing apprentice starts, to maximizing the opportunity for off-the-job training for staff on furlough and starting a programme in specific response to the pandemic.  

UCQ delivers its fully integrated Chartered Manager Degree Apprenticeship (CMDA) and BA Hons in Professional Management via a modular approach, with subject specific modules lasting seven weeks. Each module consists of two days of taught sessions delivered by a Module Lead with up to twelve students in attendance, supported by one to one tutorials and work based assessment via a Professional Development Assessor. Whilst for most students the university campus is an inspiring and invigorating place to learn, it is not uncommon for WBL students to do most of their learning at work, or at a business venue. Up until February 2020 all taught sessions were delivered face to face at venues throughout England, tutorials were often conducted remotely, work-based assessment was undertaken at the employer’s premises.  

When the Covid-19 situation started to unfold, UCQ began successfully transitioning to 100% online delivery through the principles of user centred design (ease of use), Human Factors and agile team working. The curriculum itself was largely unchanged, however different pedagogical techniques were necessary to better facilitate online delivery. Module Leads continuously improved online delivery through an iterative process of continuous feedback  from students and their employers. 

For the delivery of remote lectures, UCQ initially set up additional GoToMeeting accounts, avoiding Zoom due to published security breaches. Some client (employer) firewalls prevented students from joining GoToMeeting sessions, and student feedback requested more virtual small group working and more interactivity between the learners (as we would expect in a normal physical learning environment). Scholars continue to debate the importance of the social setting and interaction on an individual’s learning, with classrooms typically being focused on some social interaction. Replicating a synchronous learning model with strong social and personal interaction is however one of the hardest aspects to replicate on-line. Microsoft Teams was considered to be the best solution to facilitate the desired interaction. All UCQ staff and students now have Microsoft Office 365 accounts including Teams. Teams benefits from additional privacy settings to obscure the background, where there was a potential safeguarding implication with children being home schooled through the lockdown and the Summer. The same technology was used to capture work-based assessments, for example observing a CMDA student chairing a virtual meeting.

Apprentices’ employers were impacted by Covid-19 in different ways depending on their market sector and the attitudes of their leaders. Those in the hospitality and some service industries were unable to work from home, with staff put on furlough. UCQ sought to continue to engage furloughed staff in the CMDA programme, maximizing the opportunity for off-the-job activities. One large employer in facilities management embarked upon a national apprenticeship promotional campaign to extoll the advantages of apprenticeships to their furloughed workforce. Other employers aborted their enrolments, some because the pandemic resulted in uncertainty or loss of staff, others, for example in logistics, because they became too busy as a result of an increase in workload. Some potential students postponed their enrolments whereas some accelerated their applications as they saw their employer investing in them for the next 40 months as a reassurance.

UCQ’s students have managerial responsibilities which they needed to maintain during Covid-19. This meant that they faced challenges studying as a degree student, whilst simultaneously facing new tensions in their professional existence. As working from home was adopted by those that could, our managerial students needed to adopt new virtual team leadership roles. Anecdotally students started to show a heightened interest in academic areas of leadership and remote working, quickly developing new managerial skills in response to the Covid-19 situation. A core principle of the CMDA being the relating of theory to practice, meant that students now needed to grasp the issues created by Covid-19 as they emerged. Some students fed back to UCQ staff that the CMDA programme had provided a welcome  intervention and stimulating area of focus throughout the pandemic. Others described how the skills and knowledge they had acquired were helping them to cope as managers through rapid application, contextualisation and critical reflection of new skills and knowledge. 

Some students asked for further consideration but there was no formal grading safety net and all modules still needed to be completed in full and on-time to ensure progression, as the CMDA standard needed to be met in full. However, a core principle of the UCQ CMDA delivery is to work with students in terms of the pressure of their extant management roles on their academic responsibilities and to have a responsive and flexible approach to successful assignment completion. This would also include a fair and equitable response to any issues of grade erosion. Close monitoring of attainment showed an overall increase in assignment marks and a continuous improvement in progression.

In an attempt to understand the effect on students, UCQ sought student feedback at the start of the pandemic and then after six months, whilst closely monitoring results and progression. Feedback showed a high level of satisfaction in the UCQ experience, with many students preferring the remote delivery model as it saved them travel time and expense, it also resulted in UCQ staff being easier to contact as they were no longer travelling long distances.

Summary of key findings

There are substantial differences in the way that employers have responded to the pandemic and the resulting effect on their investment in staff learning and assessment. Apprentices have responded differently too, with some having withdrawn from the programme, some postponed their start date, some have taken a break-in-learning, whilst the majority report to have been better able to focus whilst working from home and to have found studying on the CMDA a positive distraction (from Covid-19) and professional support in their new ‘crisis’ management roles.

Nick Mapletoft holds a professional doctorate from the University of Sunderland, and graduate and post graduate qualifications in computing, leadership and management, business and enterprise, and education. His post-doctoral work centres on work-based learning (WBL) approaches and pedagogies, and the WBL university. He is the Principal and CEO of the University Centre Quayside, an approved boutique provider of higher education via degree apprenticeships.

Andy Price has over twenty years’ experience in higher education and is presently Programme Leader for the CMDA at UCQ. He has held various academic and leadership roles elsewhere in the sector including Head of Enterprise Development and Education at Teesside University and Assistant Director of the Institute of Digital Innovation. Andy is a long-standing champion of work-based learning and has led significant curriculum development in this area

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Asserting the nation: the dominance of national narratives in policymakers’ constructions of higher education students

by Rachel Brooks

In 2010, the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) came into being. It represents an attempt to standardise many aspects of higher education across the continent to facilitate the movement of staff and students across national borders, and ensure that the region of Europe is a competitive player in the global market for higher education. Scholars have suggested that it has tended to foreground values more commonly associated with an Anglo-American model of higher education (such as marketisation and competition) rather than those that have traditionally underpinned higher education in continental Europe (including collegial structures of governance and the autonomy of academic staff). It is thus often argued that higher education systems across Europe are becoming more similar, with greater homogeneity observed in their approaches to teaching, methods of governance, and underpinning values.

This blog draws on interviews with policy influencers in six countries (Denmark, England, Germany, Ireland, Poland and Spain) to consider the extent to which convergence is evident among the policy community within Europe, particularly in relation to how they understand higher education students. Do they, for example, see all higher education students, wherever they study in the EHEA, as broadly similar, or do they differentiate between those in their own nation-state and other parts of the continent? Analysing such discourses employed by policy actors is important, not only in teasing out the extent to which European higher education is indeed homogenising and whether distinctions are made between students of different national origins, but also because the language used by policymakers can have a significant impact on the ways in which social groups are understood and society more generally is shaped.

It was striking in many of the interviews that distinct ‘national narratives’ were drawn upon quite frequently by policy influencers to explain what were believed to be key characteristics of higher education students from their particular country – even if the available empirical evidence suggests that the characteristics were, in practice, shared by students in many other parts of Europe. An example of this is the construction of students as employment-focussed.

A common theme across the dataset was that, over recent decades, students had become increasingly employment-focussed. This was evident, for example, in national policy documents where the construction of the higher education student as a ‘future worker’ was a common trope across all six countries. Policy influencers also talked at length about how the role of the student had increasingly come to be understood in relation to the labour market, and how steps had been taken to provide better information to prospective students about employment destinations and earnings of graduates from their chosen discipline, with the intention of guiding them towards degrees perceived as having better economic returns. However, while such themes were common across the six countries, they were typically discussed and explained in national terms, often with reference to very specific national histories.

In Ireland, for example, the close relationship between higher education and employment was discussed by several interviewees. In the first extract below, a civil servant responsible for higher education policy explains this in terms of Ireland’s experience of unemployment:

Ireland’s very big on employment [within higher education policy] you see because we’ve had such a long history of unemployment and under-employment, it’s deep in the policy DNA here, in a way it mightn’t be in other countries.  Like we are all about how do we get jobs, how do we keep jobs, how do we fill jobs! How do we … that’s our central core mission.

Notable here is the comment she makes about the likely difference from other nations. She goes on to say that this relationship between education and work is not contested in Ireland because of the manner in which it has been viewed historically, and the national consensus about the labour market gains that follow from higher education. These sentiments were echoed by others. Two other Irish interviewees emphasised the way in which education was a key part of the nation’s history and culture, not least because it was seen as the most effective route out of poverty and into well-paid employment. The perceived distinctiveness of the Irish experience was thus often explicit in many of these narratives.

The Polish respondents also commented on the close relationship between higher education and employment but, in this case, it was not always evaluated entirely positively. A government interviewee believed that Polish students focussed primarily on the labour market outcomes of their study, and that this differentiated them from their Western European counterparts:

I think that the Polish student population, perhaps along with the student populations of other post-Communist countries, are markedly different than their counterparts in, in Western Europe where the markets, you know, this whole capitalism thing has been for hundred … for decades! And [in Western countries] … this attitude towards finding your … your success on the labour market perhaps is not as pronounced. 

He believed that Poland’s relatively late embrace of capitalism explained the keenness of Polish students to secure well-paid jobs on graduation and think of their higher education almost exclusively as a period of labour market preparation. Another government interviewee drew on a somewhat similar comparison to explain Polish students’ attitudes. As far as he was concerned, students’ expectations about the jobs they should be taking up on graduation were far too high, and they were often reluctant to work their way up within organisations. These were again attributed to Poland’s recent economic and political history:

In my opinion, the[ir] demands are too high. It might be because of the opening of the Polish borders after the fall of the Communist regime. When I was a student in the 1990s, it was not so easy to cross the border as a student and to spend one year or six months abroad. Now it is, and the living standard is of course much higher in Western countries, and being able to look at a better life – it might be the reason why students have become more demanding.

Thus, while Irish and Polish interviewees remarked upon very similar trends among their student populations – trends that were evident in the other four nations, too – these were explained through national narratives, emphasising the distinctiveness of their particular historical trajectory. Discussion of wider transnational influence was notably absent.

The recourse to ‘national narratives’ such as these (of which we have several other examples in our dataset), is significant because of the light it sheds on understandings of the EHEA. Despite assertions about the increasing convergence of higher education systems across Europe, the policy actors’ narratives suggest that, in some cases, national frames of reference have not yet been usurped by European ones. They are also significant because of the ways in which they conceptualise students. Words do more than name things, they impose limits on what can be said, and construct certain possibilities for thought. Thus, the emphasis on students as distinct from those in other parts of Europe may have a bearing on how they are understood by other social actors, and by students themselves.

Rachel Brooks is Professor of Higher Education in the Institute of Education at University College London. She is an executive editor of the British Journal of Sociology of Education, a member of the Governing Council of the Society for Research into Higher Education, and a member of the assessment panel for REF 2021 (sub-panel 23: Education).

This blogpost is based on an article recently published in Sociological Research Online. It draws on data from the Eurostudents project, funded by the European Research Council, through a Consolidator Grant to Rachel Brooks (grant number: 681018_EUROSTUDENTS).