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Institutional constraints to higher education datafication: an English case study

by Rachel Brooks

‘Intractable’ datafication?

Over recent years, both policymakers and university leaders have extolled the virtues of moving to a more metricised higher education sector: statistics about student satisfaction with their degree programme are held to improve the decision-making processes of prospective students, while data analytics are purported to help the shift to more personalised learning, for example. Moreover, academic studies have contended that datafication has become an ‘intractable’ part of higher education institutions (HEIs) across the world.

Nevertheless, our research (conducted in ten English HEIs, funded by TASO) – of data use with respect to widening participation to undergraduate ‘sandwich’ courses (where students spend a year on a work placement, typically during the third year of a four-year degree programme) – indicates that, despite the strong claims about the advantages of making more and better use of data, in this particular area of activity at least, significant constraints operate, limiting the advantages that can accrue through datafication.

Little evidence of widespread data use

Our interviewees were those responsible for sandwich course provision in their HEI. While most thought that data could offer useful insights into the effectiveness of their area of activity, there was little evidence of ‘intractable’ data use. This was for three main reasons. First, in some cases, interviewees explained that no relevant data were collected – in relation to access to sandwich courses and/or the outcomes of such courses. Second, in some HEIs, relevant data were collected but not analysed. Such evidence tends to support the contention that ‘data lakes’ are emerging, as HEIs collect more and more data that often remain untapped. Third, in other cases, appropriate data were collected and analysed, but in a very limited manner. For example, one interviewee explained how data were collected and analysed in relation to the participation of students from under-represented ethnic groups, but not with respect to any other widening participation categories. This limited form of datafication, in which only some social characteristics were datafied, was not, therefore, able to inform any action with respect to the participation of widening participation students generally. Indeed, across all ten HEIs, there was only one example of where data were used in a systematic fashion to help analyse who was accessing sandwich courses within the institution, and the extent to which they were representative of the wider student population.

Constraints on data use

Lack of institutional capacity

In explaining this absence of data use, the most commonly identified constraint was the lack of institutional capacity to collect and/or analyse appropriate data. For example, one interviewee commented that they did not have a very good data system for placements – ‘we are still quite Excel- based’. Excel spreadsheets were viewed as limited as they could not be easily shared or updated, and data were relatively hard to manipulate. This, according to the interviewee, made collection of appropriate data laborious, and systematic analysis of the data difficult. Interviewees also pointed to the limited time staff had available to analyse data that the institution had collected.

Prioritisation of ‘externally-facing’ data

Several interviewees described how ‘externally-facing data’ – i.e. that required by regulatory bodies and/or that fed into national and international league tables – was commonly prioritised, leaving little time for information officers to devote to generating and/or analysing data for internal purposes. One interviewee, for example, was unclear about what data, if any, were collected about equity gaps but believed that they were generally only pulled together for high-level reports ‘such as for the TEF’.

Institutional cultures

A further barrier to using data to analyse access to and outcomes of sandwich courses was perceived to be the wider culture of the institution, including its attitude to risk. An interviewee explained that the data collected in their institution was limited to two main variables – subject of study and fee status (home or international) – because of ‘ongoing cautiousness at the university about how some of that data is used and how it’s shared with different teams’.

In addition, many participants outlined the struggles they had faced in gaining access to relevant data, and in influencing decisions about what should be collected and what analyses should be run. Several spoke of having to ‘request’ particular analyses to be run (which could be turned down), leading to a fairly ad hoc and inefficient way of proceeding, and illustrating the relative lack of agency accorded to staff – typically occupying mid-level organisational roles – in accessing and manipulating data.

Reflections

Examining a discrete set of activities within the UK higher education sector – those relating to sandwich courses – provides a useful lens to examine quotidian practices with respect to the availability and use of data. Despite the strong emphasis on data by government bodies and HEI senior management teams, as well as the claims made about the ‘intractability’ of HEI data use in the academic literature, our research suggests that datafication is perhaps not as widespread as some have claimed. Indeed, it indicates that some areas of activity – even those linked to high profile political and institutional priorities (in this case, employability and widening participation) – have remained largely untouched by ‘intractable’ datafication, with relevant data either not being collected or, where it is collected, not being made available to staff working in pertinent areas.

As a consequence, the extent to which students from widening participation backgrounds were accessing sandwich courses – and then succeeding on them – relative to their peers typically remained invisible. While the majority of our interviewees were able to speculate on the extent of any under-representation and/or poor experience, this was typically on the basis of anecdotal evidence and their own ‘sense’ of how inequalities were played out in this area. Although reflecting on professional experience is obviously important, many inequalities may not be visible to staff (for example, if a student chooses not to talk about their neurodiversity or first-in-family status), even if they have regular contact with those eligible to take a sandwich course. Moreover, given the status often accorded to quantitative data within the senior management teams of universities, the lack of any statistical reporting about inequalities by social characteristic, as they pertain to sandwich courses, makes it highly likely that such issues will struggle to gain the attention of senior leaders. The barriers to the effective use of metrics highlighted above may thus have a direct impact on HEIs’ capacity to recognise and address inequalities.  

The research on which this blog is based was carried out with Jill Timms (University of Surrey) and is discussed in more detail in this article Institutional constraints to higher education datafication: an English case study | Higher Education

Rachel Brooks is Professor of Higher Education at the University of Oxford and current President of the British Sociological Association. She has conducted a wide range of research on the sociology of higher education; her most recent book is Constructing the Higher Education Student: perspectives from across Europe, published (open access) with Policy Press.


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A new mission for higher education policy reviews

by Ellen Hazelkorn, Hamish Coates, Hans de Wit & Tessa Delaquil

Making research relevant to policy

In recent years there has been heightened attention being given to the importance of scholarly endeavour making a real impact on and for society. Yet, despite a five-fold increase in journal articles published on higher education in the last twenty years, the OECD warns of a serious “disconnect between education policy, research and practice”.

As higher education systems have grown and diversified, it appears with ever increasing frequency that policy is made on the slow, on the run, or not at all. Even in the most regulated systems, gone is the decades-long approach of lifetime civil servants advancing copperplate notes on papyrus through governmental machines designed to sustain flow and augment harmony. In the era of 24-hour deliberation, reporting and muddling through, it may seem that conceptually rooted analysis of policy and policymaking is on the nose or has been replaced by political expediency.

Nothing could be further from the truth. There has never been a more important time to analyse, design, evaluate, critique, integrate, compare and innovate higher education policy. Fast policy invokes a swift need for imaginative reflection. Light policy demands counterbalancing shovel loads of intellectual backfilling. Comparative analysis is solvent for parochial policy. Policy stasis, when it stalks, must be cured by ingenious, ironic, and incisive admonition.

Governments worldwide expect research to provide leaders and policymakers with evidence that will improve the quality of teaching and education, learning outcomes and skills development, regional innovation and knowledge diffusion, and help solve society’s problems. Yet, efforts to enhance the research-policy-practice nexus fall far short of this ambition.

Policy influencers are more likely to be ministerial advisory boards and commissioned reports than journal articles and monographs, exactly opposite to what incentivizes academics. Rankings haven’t helped, measuring ‘impact’ in terms of discredited citation scores despite lots of research and efforts to the contrary.

Academics continue to argue the purpose of academic research is to produce ‘pure’ fundamental research, rather than undertake public-funded research. And despite universities promoting impactful research of public value, scholars complain of many barriers to entry.

The policy reviews solution

Policy Reviews in Higher Education (PRiHE) aims to push out the boundaries and encourage scholars to explore a wide range of policy themes. Despite higher education sitting within a complex knowledge-research-innovation ecosystem, touching on all elements from macro-economic to foreign policy to environmental policy, our research lens and interests are far too narrow. We seem to be asking the same questions. But the policy and public lens is changing.

Concerns are less about elites and building ‘world-class universities’ for a tiny minority, and much more about pressing social issues such as: regional disparities and ‘left-behind communities’, technical and vocational education and training, non-university pathways, skills and skills mismatch, flexible learning opportunities given new demographies, sustainable regional development, funding and efficiency, and technological capability and artificial intelligence. Of course, all of this carries implications for governance and system design, an area in which much more evidence-based research is required.

As joint editors we are especially keen to encourage submissions which can help address such issues, and to draw on research to produce solutions rather than simply critique. We encourage potential authors to ask questions outside the box, and explore how these different issues play out in different countries, and accordingly discuss the experiences, the lessons, and the implications from which others can learn.

Solutions for policy reviews

Coming into its ninth year, PRiHE is platform for people in and around government to learn about the sector they govern, for professionals in the sector to keep abreast of genuinely relevant developments, and for interested people around the world to learn about what is often (including for insiders!) a genuinely opaque and complex and certainly sui generis environment.

As our above remarks contend, the nature of contemporary higher education politics, policy and practice cannot be simplified or taken for granted. Journal topics, contributions, and interlocutors must also change and keep pace. Indeed, the very idea of an ‘academic journal’ must itself be reconsidered within a truly global and fully online education and research environment. Rightly, therefore, PRiHE keeps moving.

With renewed vim and vigour, the Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE) has refreshed the Editorial Office and Editorial Board, and charged PRiHE to grow even more into a world-leading journal of mark and impact. Many further improvements have been made. For instance, the Editorial Office has worked with SRHE and the publisher Taylor and Francis to make several enhancements to editorial and journal processes and content.

We encourage people to submit research articles or proposals for an article – which will be reviewed by the Editors and feedback provided in return. We also encourage people to submit commentary and book reviews – where the authors have sought to interrogate and discuss a key issue through a policy-oriented lens. See the ‘instructions for authors’ for details.

Read, engage, and contribute

This second bumper 2024 issue provides six intellectual slices into ideas, data and practices relevant to higher education policy. We smartly and optimistically advise that you download and perhaps even print out all papers, power off computers and phones, and spend a few hours reading these wonderful contributions. We particularly recommend this to aspiring policy researchers, researchers and consultants in the midst of their careers, and perhaps most especially to civil servants and related experts embedded in the world of policy itself.

SRHE and the Editorial Office are looking ahead to a vibrant and strong future period of growth for PRiHE. A raft of direct and public promotion activities are planned. PRiHE is a journal designed to make a difference to policy and practice. The most important forms of academic engagement, of course, include reading, writing and reviewing. We welcome your contribution in these and other ways to the global PRiHE community.

This blog is based on the editorial published in Policy Reviews in Higher Education (online 16 November 2024) A new mission for higher education policy reviews

Professor Ellen Hazelkorn is Joint Managing Partner, BH Associates. She is Professor Emeritus, Technological University Dublin.

Hamish Coates is professor of public policy, director of the Higher Education Futures Lab, and global tertiary education expert.

Hans de Wit is Professor Emeritus and Distinguished Fellow of the Boston College Center for International Higher Education, Senior Fellow of the international Association of Universities.

Tessa DeLaquil is postdoctoral research fellow at the School of Education at University College Dublin.

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Higher education as a politicians’ playground

by Rob Cuthbert

Higher education has always been something of a playground for junior politicians; HE ministers usually serve only short terms, and many are practising for bigger jobs. (Liz Truss and Boris Johnson were both briefly shadow HE ministers.) The Coalition period was an exception, with David Willetts serving for four years and evidently deeply engaged and interested in HE. Since he left in 2014 the political game-playing has sadly degenerated, becoming ever more disconnected from the real issues facing the HE sector.

In 2024 fifty or more universities have declared or are likely to declare redundancies, as their funding position becomes ever more perilous. Student fees have been frozen at £9250 for a decade, and their real value has declined to the extent that they are now worth no more than the £6000 which applied in 2012 before the fee went to £9000. According to Mark Corver of DataHE: “… universities have lost, in real terms, around a third of their income since 2012. Most of that has happened recently. Universities have lost the equivalent of almost £3 billion from their annual UG teaching funding in just the past 18 months.”

The long-running dispute in half the sector over changes to the Universities Superannuation Scheme might have recently been resolved, but there are now major concerns about the cost of the Teachers’ Pension Scheme in the other half. UUK chief executive Vivienne Stern and UCEA chief executive Raj Jethwa wrote to Minister Robert Halfon on 18 March 2024 asking for more flexibility in whether post-92 universities must offer TPS membership to their staff, noting that 27% of post-92s had declared redundancies in 2022-2023 and 46% had done so since August 2023. TPS contributions rose sharply on 1 April 2024 as Tom Williams reported for Times Higher Education on 18 March 2024.

Pay disputes have led to repeated strikes and action short of strikes, especially marking and assessment boycotts, affecting the whole sector. This, coupled with Covid, has meant increased workloads for academic and professional staff in major and repeated reconstruction of teaching programmes, with many universities relying increasingly on a precariat of staff on short-term contracts. Negotiations between employers and staff are inevitably complicated by the wide range of institutional fortunes, which makes affordable resolution for everyone difficult to achieve. Covid and employment disputes have brought massive disruption for students, with class actions for compensation continuing as an additional looming threat to HE budgets. Problems with student mental health have reached epidemic proportions, affected not only by the pandemic and loan-driven student debt but also the spiralling cost of university and private student accommodation, which is in short supply in many places.

In 2024 we do expect a general election, but we don’t expect the massive problems for UK HE to be an election issue. Voters mostly care much more about cost of living, the energy crisis, climate change, wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the NHS … and even within education, universities rank well behind schools and nursery places as topics for political debate. As Tom Williams reported for Times Higher Education on 16 May 2023, HE Minister Robert Halfon declared that “… the sector was in a “fairly strong” position – compared with much of the economy given the current financial difficulties – and implied management may be to blame at universities faring badly, rather than his government’s funding system.” Halfon resigned unexpectedly on 26 March 2024, so after 14 years of Coalition and  Conservative government we have our ninth new HE Minister, Luke Hall. It is the eleventh such appointment, since both Jo Johnson and Chris Skidmore served twice, and only four of the 11 appointments lasted for more than a year. There is a striking contrast with appointments as Schools Minister, the role in which Nick Gibb has served for most of the last 14 years, despite being sacked and reappointed by successive prime ministers.

For most of the Coalition period the Universities Minister was David (now Lord) Willetts, who was perhaps the main architect of the Higher Education and Research Act (HERA) 2017, eventually steered into law by Jo (now Lord) Johnson. HERA legislated for the HE ‘market’ and created a new regulator, the Office for Students (OfS). The policy sought to drive up quality through competition, with an influx of new ‘alternative’ providers; the Act made extensive provision for failing HE institutions to go out of business. Willetts’ special adviser, Nick Hillman, later became an effective Director of HEPI, but his HEPI blog of 14 February 2024 asked ‘Whatever happened to all those alternative providers?’,  while still defending the policy to which he contributed. A more plausible view is that the HERA version of the ‘market’ in HE had been tried and comprehensively failed. Against the success of a few new providers like the Dyson Institute there have been many more seeking to provide mostly lower-level courses, mostly in business, mostly in London. Operating an HE institution is a complex, difficult and long-term activity, and after relaxing requirements for entry to the higher education ‘market’, government was forced to crack down on the more egregious excesses of some of the new alternative providers. ‘Driving up quality through competition’ has been shown up as a fantasy; what always worked much better was relying on the intrinsic motivation of people in HE to do the best for their students, in what has always been vigorous competition with other institutions. Self-regulation is of course inadequate: HE institutions need external quality assurance and control, but the OfS chose to do away with the QAA, the designated quality body, by setting conditions which jeopardised QAA’s international credibility and forcing QAA to step down. Instead the OfS has set up its own quality arrangements in an apparently long-term plan which goes against all the expectations when HERA was enacted. 

That was the good news. A new government was entitled to try a new policy for HE, as it did. It didn’t work, so what happened next? Not repeal, of course, but neither was it, as we might have hoped, adaptation of the new policy to make it work better. In the chaos and increasingly rapid turnover of the post-Brexit administrations, politicians in the DfE and elsewhere became obsessed with culture wars. They brought forward a major new piece of legislation which had nothing to do with HE finance, staffing issues, student problems, or even the supposed focus of ‘levelling up’. Obsessed by immigration numbers, government even doubled down on HE’s financial problems with visa restrictions seriously affecting international student recruitment, especially for postgraduate recruitment which for many years had underpinned the viability of STEM disciplines. It was convenient for government that the OfS continued to give reassurances about HE finance, but it was hardly surprising, since government had installed a Conservative peer as the OfS chair.

The new legislation was the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023, education’s contribution to armaments in the culture wars. There were, of course, problems in some, perhaps even many, HE institutions over what might and might not be said in different contexts. A HEPI blog by Josh Freeman on 13 October 2022 argued that there was a problem with self-censorship and ‘quiet’ no-platforming. In the US some prominent university presidents lost their jobs arguing with politicians about the need to protect diversity in HE debate. The war on woke has not perhaps reached that pitch in the UK yet. But the Act required OfS to appoint a free speech ‘tsar’, as it did, and OfS issued proposals on 14 December 2023 on how the free speech regime will operate, launching a consultation on 26 March 2024. The results are unconvincing to those on the ground in the institutions. Jim Dickinson blogged for Wonkhe on 6 March 2024 about the shambles which government has created with its free speech legislation: “We are literally less than six months away from OfS opening a complaints scheme under which one group of students will say another’s actions amount to antisemitism, while the other will say they are threatening their right to express legally protected anti-Zionist beliefs – both saying their free speech is threatened as a result, both arguing they are being harassed, and both reasonable in asserting that they were assured their free speech and protection from harassment was assured.” The Act may even rival the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 for its unworkability in practice.

The principal cheerleader for the new Act was Education Minister (and for two chaotic days in the fall of Boris Johnson, Secretary of State for Education) Michele Donelan, who continued to champion it even as she moved to become Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology in the Sunak administration. Donelan relied on a press release from right wing think tank Policy Exchange to pick a fight with UKRI about the members of its Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Committee. The release was written by Donelan’s former special adviser Iain Mansfield. UKRI suspended its Committee and their membership pending an inquiry, which exonerated the members, one of whom sued Donelan for libel and won £15000 damages, as Faye Brown reported for Sky News on 12 March 2024. The damages were paid by the government, prompting widespread disbelief; Leader of the House Penny Mordaunt even suggested that we should cut Donelan some slack because she had not taken the £16000 redundancy payment to which she was entitled  from her two days as Secretary of State for Education. It would all be deeply embarrassing, if government ministers were still capable of feeling shame.

The playground urgently needs more grown-ups, to do higher education policy as if higher education mattered.

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


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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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Research with international students: reflecting on an SRHE 2022 symposium

by Jenna Mittelmeier, Sylvie Lomer, and Kalyani Unkule

We were pleased to lead a symposium of international authors at the 2022 SRHE conference, focusing on Research with International Students: Conceptual and Methodological Considerations. This was an early session linked for our upcoming open access book of the same name, which we aim to publish in late 2023. This book, as well as our research resource website which led to it, focuses on developing critical considerations for researchers who focus their work on international students and their experiences in higher education.

Research with international students is a significant and growing area of research about higher education. This coincides with and derives from the exponential growth in international student numbers worldwide, making more visible an interest in their lived academic and social experiences. This is also an area that continues to attract newer researchers, particularly doctoral and student researchers who may have a vested interest in this topic as current or former international students themselves, and practitioner researchers who teach and support international students in their professional roles. Research on this topic is interdisciplinary (as with most other higher education research topics), attracting researchers from disciplines including education, sociology, psychology, human geography, business, and beyond.

Despite this growing interest, we note that there have been limited conversations about developing research with international students as a distinct interdisciplinary subfield. Similarly, there have been limited methodological guidance and considerations for how research might critically approach the wide-ranging topics that are being researched in this area. We have written previously about how these omissions perpetuate problems for this subfield and, ultimately, diminish the potential impact of research.

The most significant problem with research in this area is that it tends to frame international students through a deficit lens, depicting them as lower quality students who ‘lack’ skills necessary for success. This is seen through the large numbers of studies which attempt to ‘fix’ or ‘integrate’ international students into expected norms of study in their host institutions, making assumptions about their perceived lack of skills in areas such as critical thinking, language, or writing. International students are also often depicted through research as only experiencing challenges or problems, frequently described as vulnerable rather than capable, managing, or coping. At the same time, research tends to homogenise international students as a collective group or deduce their diversity only to nationality and macro-level cultures. These are among other conceptual concerns we have previously highlighted, which are rooted in limited criticality and nuance through research.

With these issues in mind, our aim in the symposium, as well as through our website and book, was to start a conversation about how research with international students might be designed better, more critically, and more ethically. In particular, we considered the nexus between conceptual criticality and practical methodological designs which can reposition and encourage new discourses about international students. Each of the four presentations highlighted how, within the book, we encourage researchers to develop stronger research designs in the future.

The first paper in the symposium was by Kalyani Unkule, whose presentation represented chapters in our upcoming book where authors re-conceptualise an idea or term that is often taken for granted in research with international students. Here, we argue for the ways that certain ideas within this research topic are often assumed to have a shared, collective meaning, which actually might be more nuanced or complex. Kalyani reflected on the meaning of the word ‘global’ and the tendency for binaries of local and global to limit our thinking in research and practice about international higher education. This is an important critique about the ways that ‘home’ and ‘international’ are seen as opposing binaries in research with international students, ultimately limiting the conceptual nuance of where students’ experiences and histories might intersect these two areas and be more ‘glocal’ in nature.

The second paper was by Tang Heng, whose presentation represented chapters which highlight problematic discourses that shape and frame research with international students. Her chapter focuses on stereotyping and how stereotypes about international students, often through methodological nationalism, are endemic in the ways that research is developed and designed. Tang focused particularly on how theoretical frameworks can perpetuate or relate to stereotyping, but in the book we also focus on other problematic threads through research on this topic: othering, dehumanisation, coloniality, and deficit narratives, among others. This highlights the issues that hold the research subfield back and represent areas for more critical development and reflection in future research.

This was followed by a paper from Vijay Ramjattan, whose presentation represented chapters in the book which show how common stereotypes and discourses about international students might be shifted away from individual deficiencies towards recognition of structural inequalities. Vijay’s presentation focused on deficit framings of language, where international students are often positioned as ‘lacking’ linguistic skills. However, this might be shifted instead to focus on structural oppression of multilingualism and multiple Englishes within institutions. This gives us one example of how researchers can conceptually move away from issues like biases, stereotyping, and deficit narratives by centring the structural roots that cause them.

Finally, the presentation by Samridhi Gupta and Thuy-Anh Nguyen shifted the focus towards practical research designs, demonstrating the section in our book which focuses on how research design choices can purposefully resist existing problems in knowledge creation with (rather than on or about) international students. Their presentation focused on co-designing research with international students, giving practical examples of two research methods which can be designed with students as partners. This demonstrates the ways that methodological choices are fundamentally intertwined with conceptual criticality, highlighting how the method we choose can resist and deconstruct the existing problems set out by previous presenters.

Together, our symposium aimed to open up new reflections and considerations for the historical trajectory of research with international students, considering new ways forward for the research subfield. Both the symposium and our upcoming book aims not to give answers for how to move that path forward, though, but rather to open up questions for individual researchers and the research community more broadly about where we might like to go from here. We ask, then: what should the epistemic space of research with international students look like?

More research resources on this topic can be found at https://researchintlstudents.com/. ‘Research with international students: Critical conceptual and methodological considerations’ will be published open access by Routledge, aiming for late 2023.

Jenna Mittelmeier is Senior Lecturer in International Education at the University of Manchester, in the Manchester Institute of Education (MIE). Her research expertise focuses on the experiences and treatment of international students within the broader internationalisation of higher education.

Sylvie Lomer is Senior Lecturer in Policy and Practice at the University of Manchester, in the Manchester Institute of Education (MIE). Her previous research focused on policies on international students in the UK, and now focuses more broadly on internationalisation in policy and practice in higher education, with a critical approach to pedagogy and policy enactment. 

Kalyani Unkule is Associate Professor at OP Jindal Global University in India. Her research complements her practice in intercultural dialogue and impact-driven projects in higher education internationalisation and spiritual learning.


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Gamekeepers, poachers, policy wonks and knowledge

by Adam Matthews

I was excited to attend SRHE’s event, Bridging The Gap: Improving The Relationship Between Higher Education Research And Policy on 4 November 2022. It was the first time I’d been to London since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. The event promised to bring together and bridge the gap between those making higher education policy and those researching it. The event description pitched the former, in government, thinking that academic research is too narrow, theoretical or impenetrable for their purposes focusing on critique rather than practical solutions. The latter were descried as thinking government only selectively engage with academic research evidence to support their desired arguments and outcomes. This then was quite a gap to be bridged.

SRHE put together two panels of highly experienced policy makers and academics – some having experience of both – described more than once as gamekeepers turned poachers. Maybe this is the start of, and one of many ways of, bridging that gap.

Sticking with the analogy, gamekeeping policy makers want to see accessible, broad and practically orientated research; the poachers are asking to be listened to even when the gamekeeper doesn’t like the answer. As the panel sessions developed it was clear that there are some vessels bridging the gap in the choppy waters below the unbuilt bridge – think tanks such as HEPI and Wonkhe (nicely described as a newspaper for people who work in universities). It was suggested several times that both were primary and vital sources of knowledge for policy makers and university leaders. HEPI’s Nick Hillman may be a little biased here but this does present a real challenge to higher education researchers and the influence of their work. Both HEPI and Wonkhe provide in many ways an insider’s view having former special advisers writing news, commentary and reports. Some (such as Peter Scott) have argued they are ideologically and politically influenced. Many voices are needed to help inform policy but, as was clear at the event, this isn’t a simple case of finding one possible solution.

Each panel member spoke from their own perspective on policy and systems, and education and students, expertly chaired by David Palfreyman and Nick Hillman. Policy levers mentioned were access, REF, TEF and system wide changes. These are areas I have engaged with in my own work on part-time access, the relationship between REF and TEF and the identity and practice of quasi-public university institutions. There was quite some frustration directed at ‘my lot’, the higher education researchers, for only being interested in complex writing, academic journal articles and not for writing blogs, starring in podcasts and simply presenting ‘the evidence’. In defence of me and my colleagues, we do try to do both. However, promotions and kudos sit firmly in citations and h-indexes rather than short form communication. Training in the form of a PhD often has little development in teaching, never mind media and blog posting; we needed to get to the magic 80,000 words!

I raised the very academic word of epistemology – knowledge and understanding and how different mediums and research methods produce different epistemic outcomes. Epistemology is something which academics in social science and humanities think and write a lot about – usually whole chapters in an 80,000-word thesis, and a field of study in its own right. Yes, I could have said knowledge and understanding instead of epistemology. This is an important point: understanding the gamekeeper, poacher and policy wonk is not always easy for each other and bridging gaps will take work, but this effort feels worth it for all parties. The event certainly made me realise how little I know about how policies are made, other than watching the West Wing over and over again. And as Leo McGarry says in the political drama: ‘There are two things in the world you never want to let people see how you make ’em – laws and sausages’. I am open to seeing how policy is made, not so much the sausages. More West Wing below.

Some ‘non-academic’ panel members conveyed a sense of frustration that knowledge wasn’t accessible in a neat package that could then be applied to policy. This epistemic cause-and-effect positivism defies the many different types of academic research – large scale quantitative, secondary data analysis, small scale qualitative, systematic reviews, speculative futures, developing theory, conference papers to develop ideas, public seminars … the list could go on. My point is that trawling ‘the literature’ won’t find the ultimate and objective truth or answer (my own epistemic position) but it might help. Another epistemic view of mine is that HE research in many cases isn’t an objective hard science.

In my own work, in particularly teaching, I have been working in interdisciplinary ways with Engineers, Computer and Data Scientists and Physicists. We speak in different disciplinary languages, epistemic languages with different knowledge and understanding of the world. Key to interdisciplinarity is integration. The Manifesto of Interdisciplinarity states:

The essential feature of interdisciplinarity is integration: interdisciplinary research and teaching should seek to synthesize the insights generated by the specialized research undertaken within disciplines.   

We all speak and work in our epistemic cultures, bodies of knowledge and experience that we know well. The key is integration – the bridge that this event has hopefully started to build. My experience of interdisciplinary teaching and learning is dialogue and centring around common goals and issues. Moreover, we should not underestimate long-term trusting relationships which allow for critique and admitting you haven’t a clue what your colleague is talking about!

The work of all parties is different and the outputs that we produce (policy, news articles, events, teaching, academic books and journals) are all designed for different audiences and purposes. The work of HEPI and Wonkhe is vitally important and it can move quickly, for example Nick Hillman and Mark Leach played out an insightful debate on student number controls, over 2 days and three pieces, highlighting no safe return to student number controls, the possibility of a different way of looking at number controls with some final words from Nick. The exchange offered an excellent resource on the debate of student number controls delivered quickly and from different perspectives. A more in depth, academic, peer reviewed piece of work on the same subject by one of the event organisers, Colin McCaig (Sheffield Hallam), equally adds to the knowledge base but in a different way. We do also need to consider academic freedom and distance between the game keepers and poachers and allow for critical analysis.

Yes, academics need to write in more creative ways to convey ideas and evidence but we also need book, thesis and journal length depth and analysis building on bodies of knowledge and literature – it’s what we do, but there are many forms of media to explore.

I am an avid reader of HEPI (and have written one blog for them) and Wonkhe – looking out for their references to policy wonking from political drama the West Wing. Writer Aaron Sorkin is a master of using dialogue to explore ideas and the SRHE event this November was a good starting point for dialogue on bridging the gap and improving the relationship between gamekeeping policy makers, HE-researching poachers and commentating policy wonks.

As Sorkin via President Bartlett reminds us, ten words are not enough …

The ten words and epistemic cause and effect of ‘This is what the research says, now make the policy’ is certainly not enough. I hope this is the first of many dialogues between policy makers, policy wonks and higher education researchers that I am involved in.

Dr. Adam Matthews is Lecturer in Education, Technology and Society at the University of Birmingham working across Social Sciences and Engineering and Physical Sciences. Adam’s research is focused on the idea of a university at system and policy level.


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But what do the numbers say? How the movement towards datafication might change English higher education

by Peter Wolstencroft, Elizabeth Whitfield and Track Dinning

“The simple truth is that the average student leaves university with £45,800 of debt and if they have nothing to show for it then we have failed them” (Hansard, 2021). The speaker of these words was the then Minister for Higher and Further Education, Michelle Donelan and the sentiment underpins many of the current mechanisms used for assessing quality in English HE. The publication by the Office for Students (OfS) of their new expectations for student outcomes (OfS, 2022a) has, once again, triggered a debate about how we measure the quality of a university education and its impact on the students that study in English universities. The stakes have never been as high, as the OfS state: ‘Universities and colleges that perform below these thresholds could face investigation to allow the OfS to understand the reasons for their performance. If, following investigation, performance is not adequately explained by a provider’s context, the OfS has the power to intervene and impose sanctions for a breach of its conditions of registration.’ (OfS, 2022a)

Since the Browne Report (2010) normalised the payment by students of increased fees for undergraduate programmes, universities have faced a balancing act between two separate imperatives that have influenced the relationship between students and universities. These two approaches are firstly, the educational imperative, that stresses the primacy of the learning experience and the student’s journey through their studies and secondly, the economic imperative, that requires organisations to ensure that their finances allow them to continue to operate. It can be argued that the growing dominance of the latter is rooted in the increased measurement of the sector and how this is used to define the quality of provision provided by any given university. In practical terms, what this means is that, for English universities, adherence to benchmarking figures and ensuring that targets are met may be a key driver in decision making at all levels of the organisation.

Whilst the datafication of education (Stevenson, 2017) is not a new concept, the new OfS guidelines are likely to exacerbate this approach, indeed it can be seen as a formalisation of an ongoing process. A key consequence of this shift has been a reimagining of the relationship between the student and the institution. Originally characterised by some in the post-Browne era as one akin to a customer purchasing a product, it evolved into the student being viewed as a consumer who uses a service but who is also an active participant in the learning process and from there to a co-creator of the process (Tomlinson, 2017). Whilst this apparent balancing of influence has generally been viewed as having a positive benefit in terms of the student experience, the shift exemplified by the new regulations means that the performance of students is increasingly measured in quantitative terms. The danger with this approach is that there is the potential for universities to focus on the quantitative measure of success alone, which would neglect all of the wider, but not measured, improvements in the student journey that have occurred since the Browne Report, such as the increasing amount of employer engagement and the amplification of the student voice.

Concerns increased with the publication of the latest expectations from the OfS and their focus on quantitative measures. Whilst other quality mechanisms such as the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) and Ofsted inspections rely on a mixture of quantitative measurement and a supporting narrative, the new guidelines focus largely on data and the outputs for each student. Targets are set for continuation and completion rates as well as graduate outcomes and these targets are aggregated in each of a phalanx of different subsections of students. Many concerns within the sector relate to the vague nature of the wording regarding non-achievement of the targets. Despite the assertion that “(the) OfS only makes a judgement that a provider is not compliant after considering the context in which it is operating” (OfS, 2022a), there is currently no guidance as to how this consideration will be achieved.

English universities have greeted the new guidance with some concern: for example, the latest intervention focuses partially on the salaries students receive fifteen months after completing their programme of study (known as ‘graduate outcomes’). This is controversial as it is a measure that attempts to compare very disparate programmes. The Complete University Guide (2022) quotes average salaries after fifteen months’ employment for accounting and finance as £25,000;  optometry is as low as £17,000 and music degrees average £21,000. In contrast medicine graduates earn an average £30,000. Aside from the issue of disparities in earnings, there is also a lack of accounting for regional disparities with Statista (2021) reporting the median annual earning for full-time employees in the North West being 30% lower than salaries in London. This inequality and its impact on graduate outcomes has already been cited in the decision by some universities to stop offering programmes despite their educational benefit (Weale, 2022).

The backdrop to the revised guidelines (commonly known as ‘B3’ after the subsection of the document it occupies) has been an ongoing discussion about the desirable outcomes of degree level education. The discussion has increasingly focused on how to root out supposed poor practice. If students invest significant amounts of money in their education then many assert with the HE Minister that they should get ‘value for money’ and a positive outcome when their studies are complete. Defining these points drives much of the current discussions. What constitutes a ‘low quality degree’ has been one facet of this discussion, but more pertinent is the achievement gap that exists between differing groups of students and differing programmes of study. Whilst this has always been known, increasing spending has meant that there has been greater scrutiny on groups and programmes perceived to be underachieving.

The revised guidelines focus on definitions; the changes might seem relatively minor when looked at in isolation, but when grouped with other changes in the sector they might have profound implications for university procedures. Universities previously had to ensure that benchmark figures for retention and achievement were met for whole cohorts, but the sector will now subdivide student groups using criteria such as gender, sex or background (OfS, 2022b) and explore the performance of each group. This is likely to change the approach for many universities, as often these subgroups are likely to be small in number, which means that one student’s failure to complete their studies is likely to have a proportionally greater impact on the university as a whole. There is therefore a considerable danger that universities which serve large numbers of disadvantaged students will be less inclined to take risks in admission: this will narrow, rather than widen, access and participation.

On the surface the definitions appear straightforward, with universities needing to make sure that a set percentage of their students continue with their studies, complete their studies and are in what is deemed ‘graduate employment’ within 15 months of graduation. However these figures may lead to a significant change in the way universities manage data and indeed, deal with students.

Under pressure to meet set benchmarks, universities are likely to focus even more attention on the definition of a student within HE. There is always a set period of time between a student registering and when they are included in official figures. This allows for ‘buyer’s remorse’ when students withdraw early on and it also allows people to transfer between programmes if they decide that their initial choice was not the one they want to pursue. Students who withdraw from a programme before the cut-off date are not taken into account in the final figures used when calculating retention figures. This change might affect English HE in the same way as it did when introduced to the further education (FE) sector. Within FE, students were not counted in final figures until they had been enrolled for 42 days. This meant that many organisations completed what became known as a ‘data cleanse’ before the cut-off date, a process where students who were deemed to be at risk of failing their programme were removed from their studies, or moved to a different award.

The danger when introducing new metrics is always that there will be unintended consequences. Whilst trying to measure the quality of a programme of study is clearly worthwhile, the primacy of the data could cause problems. The need to ensure that programmes of study are seen as high quality means that ignoring metrics is often foolhardy and can have detrimental effects on the whole university. Instead, careful analysis is likely, to ensure that programmes score as highly as possible in each category. This could lead to a range of ethical dilemmas regarding the amount of support students receive if they are in danger of failing in their studies.

Looking further down the timeline, the shift towards the datafication of the sector is likely to affect the validation of new programmes of study. Whilst employability has been a strand within many programmes for some years, potential graduate outcomes are likely to be viewed as critical to the acceptance of a programme of study, marking a significant shift away from a purely educational analysis of proposed programmes. The challenge is to make sure that programmes of study continue to be challenging and rewarding for students but that they also meet targets, close attainment gaps and ensure positive learning outcomes for graduates.

The new guidelines are another stepping stone in the balancing act between educational and economic imperatives. The new guidelines set clear targets but it is the unclear consequences of not meeting these targets that will cause universities most concern. Universities with large numbers of disadvantaged students might need a fundamental rethinking of their student population. If there is no allowance for the incoming student population when measuring outputs, universities will need to review the level of support they provide and face the ethical dilemmas involved. Without greater clarity from the OfS, failure to meet targets may mean that more programmes in subject areas with historically low graduate starting salaries will close, data will increasingly become the key determinant of educational decision making and the relationship between students and universities will once again be redefined.

Dr Peter Wolstencroft is a Deputy Director at Liverpool Business School, part of Liverpool John Moores University. He has held a variety of roles in the sector and together with his co-authors is dedicated to enhancing the student experience for all students and in particular for those for whom higher education is a new experience. He is the author of numerous articles on education and co-authored the bestselling textbook ‘The Trainee Teacher’s Handbook: A companion for initial teacher training’.

Dr Elizabeth Whitfield is an Assistant Academic Registrar: Student Experience at Liverpool John Moores University. She is also a senior fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and a member of the programme team for the postgraduate Certificate in HE at LJMU. Current project and leadership roles focus on the student experience, in particular student communications and digital support schemes.

Dr Track Dinning is a Deputy Director at Liverpool Business School, part of Liverpool John Moores University, a Senior Fellow of Higher Education Academy and a Certified Management and Business Educator.  Her research focuses on Entrepreneurial Education and she utilises her research to develop and enhance the curriculum in the field of employability and enterprise. She has a shared vision with her co writers to ensure a high quality student experience for every student.

References

Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (2010) Securing a Sustainable Future for Higher Education (“The Browne Report”). Available at:

Click to access bis-10-1208-securing-sustainable-higher-education-browne-report.pdf

(accessed 1st October 2022)

Hansard (2021) University Tuition Fees Debate, Volume 702

Office for Students (2022a) New Expectations for Student Outcomes Available at : OfS sets new expectations for student outcomes – Office for Students (accessed 1st October 2022)

Office for Students (2022b) Associations Between Characteristics of Students Available at: https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/data-and-analysis/associations-between-characteristics-of-students/ (accessed 18th October 2022)

Statista (2021) Media annual earnings for full-time employees in the United Kingdom in 2021, by region Available at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/416139/full-time-annual-salary-in-the-uk-by-region/ (accessed 8th October 2022)

Stevenson, H (2017) ‘The “Datafication” of Teaching: Can Teachers Speak Back to the Numbers?’ Peabody Journal of Education 92:4, 537-557 DOI:10.1080/0161956X.2017.1349492

The Complete University Guide (2022) What do graduates do and earn? Available at: https://www.thecompleteuniversityguide.co.uk/student-advice/careers/what-do-graduates-do-and-earn (accessed 8th October 2022)

Tomlinson, M (2017) ‘Student perceptions of themselves as ‘consumers’ of higher education’ British Journal of Sociology of Education 38:4, 450-467 DOI:10.1080/01425692.2015.1113856

Weale, S (2022) ‘Philip Pullman leads outcry after Sheffield Hallam withdraws English lit degree, The Guardian Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jun/27/sheffield-hallam-university-suspends-low-value-english-literature-degree (accessed 18th October 2022)


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New higher education institutions: a real chance to innovate?

by Katherine Emms

Since the 2017 Higher Education and Research Act, England has seen a surge of new higher education institutions adding to the traditional higher education  landscape. The Act made a number of major changes to the sector, one of which was the introduction of the Office for Students (OfS), which was given responsibility to grant degree-awarding powers to providers and the right to use ‘university’ in their title. The Act was intended to make it easier for more providers to enter the market, and in the words of the 2018 Universities Minister, Sam Gyimah, it was “designed to facilitate innovation, avoiding overly-prescriptive, process-focussed approaches that might place limitations on creativity”. The invitation was welcomed by a number of providers and now, a few short years later, some are already taking in their first cohorts of students. But are these institutions truly offering something different to students, facilitating innovation and diversification in a crowded marketplace, or just replicating existing models?

At The Edge Foundation we wanted to investigate the early experiences of these new higher education institutions (HEIs) and understand what their guiding principles and reasons for setting up were, as well as how they were interpreting their visions and putting these into practice. We have conducted a number of semi-structured interviews with founders and staff across several new HEIs, with more dialogue to follow as these institutions move through their early stages of operation.

Employability is increasingly seen as a responsibility of HE, not just as a separate task of the careers services but one which should be an integrated element within academic learning (Crammer, 2006). New HEIs have highlighted the gap between existing provision and employers’ needs, and see their offering as a way to address this issue, claiming that their innovative approaches could better support the employability of students. One way this has been tackled is through strong collaboration with employers from the outset of designing the course and its content. Some new HEIs emphasised the importance of a ‘backwards design’ which is demand (employer)-led rather than supply (academic)-led. Having industry experts involved in skills gap workshops and continuously having employer representatives as part of the validation process were some of the ways that supported this.

Most of the new HEIs we spoke to focus on broadness of provision in a number of senses. First and foremost, they set aside traditional subject silos and instead are looking to offer interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary degrees, or offer a broader notion to a single subject area (e.g. bringing the social science aspect into engineering). The arguments put forward were that complex world problems are not fixed within a single discipline and require a broad knowledge and skill set that spans disciplines in order to be solved. One way to support this broad provision is through staff recruitment at the new HEIs; staff are recruited partly from industry, partly from the world of academia, but ultimately having the right attitude and a team working ethos to work collaboratively across disciplines are considered key.

The broadness theme also plays out in terms of the development of the student. Looking beyond academic and knowledge-based learning, the development of the whole student is seen as core to their provision. All aspects are important – from ensuring the development of transferable skills that are integrated into the curriculum, to ensuring students take part in meaningful placements and have employer interactions to develop the ‘professional’ skills they need after graduation.

Another way these new HEIs are pushing back against traditional modes of delivery is through their focus on team work, and problem-based learning or project-based learning. Almost all our participants emphasised that their HEI has no lectures, instead focussing on students working together on authentic real-world issues often set by an external client, making them relevant to industry. Alongside this, exams are not the main form of assessment, instead a range of more ‘authentic’ methods were discussed including reflective portfolios, podcasts, blogs, and pitches to businesses.

These new HEIs vary across their stage of development, their size, mission, and delivery, although some common factors have been set out above. One thing that all the new HEIs have had to navigate was the registration and policy landscape. Some of these were partnering with or being ‘parented’ by an established university to go through the process and some were going at it alone. This brought differing issues and seemed to influence the degree of innovation they could deliver. To some extent working within the parameters of another university can stifle the innovation by having to fit their delivery into traditional and established ways. On the other hand, these established universities have the advantage of bringing credibility to the new HEIs, which can be beneficial both in terms of the registration process and the attractiveness to new students.

Ultimately these HEIs are new and are yet to see a full cohort of students graduate, therefore we have limited markers of success so far on which to evaluate them. Likewise it is difficult to see how innovative these providers are, as one stakeholder remarked: “innovative might be a great idea, but until it’s tested is much harder to understand whether it really is innovative”.Edge will continue with our research over the next year and beyond to understand more about the experiences of these new HEIs and their students.

Katherine Emms is a Senior Education & Policy Researcher at the Edge Foundation. Her main areas of research are in higher education, vocational education, skills shortages in the economy and employability skills. Current and published research can be seen here: https://www.edge.co.uk/research/research-team/kat-emms/. Twitter @kat_emms

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English higher education policy: hope and pay

by Rob Cuthbert

The long-awaited Cabinet reshuffle offers a faint hope for some improvement in HE policymaking in England: there is of course plenty of room for it. Former Secretary of State Gavin Williamson never recovered from the A-levels debacle of 2020, having already been held in low esteem before then. His standing in the HE sector was at a record low after a series of increasingly frenetic measures which seemed more like attempts to curry favour with the Conservative Party and the right wing press than coherent policy initiatives. Those measures included T-levels in post-16 education, a consultation on initial teacher training reform, the Free Speech Bill working its way through Parliament, comments on post-Covid behaviour by universities, rumoured moves on HE tuition fees, and various initiatives taken by the Office for Students in response to the Secretary of State’s frequent ‘guidance’ letters.

Announcing his departure on Twitter, Williamson said it had been a pleasure to serve in the role and that he was proud of the “transformational reforms” he had led in post-16 education. FE and schools begged to differ. A coalition of influential education bodies had written to Gavin Williamson about his T-level proposals on 29 July 2021 saying: “It is impossible to square the government’s stated ambition to ‘level up’ opportunity with the proposal to scrap most BTECs, including all larger versions of the qualifications that are deemed to overlap with A levels or T levels (86% of respondents to the review disagreed with your proposal to remove funding for qualifications on this basis) … Many young people will be adversely affected by this proposal, but disadvantaged students have the most to lose, a conclusion that your Department’s own equalities impact assessment supports.” We can hope that the new DfE team will think again.

Similarly, the consultation on ITT has been universally criticised. Oxford and Cambridge suggested in response that they might pull out of ITT provision, and two senior former inspectors savaged the recent Ofsted inspections purporting to justify proposed reforms. Anna McKie reported for Times Higher Education on 3 August 2021, and Terry Russell and Julie Price Grimshaw blogged about ITT inspections in July 2021 for Teach Best: “The reports show that the evidence base for the judgements made are flimsy in the extreme, repetitive, poorly written, hyper-critical, demoralising and humiliating. It is totally unacceptable that programme leaders across the whole sector, who have turned themselves inside out for two years in order to ensure that trainees get the best possible deal, can be treated like this. We know that some course leaders have suffered illness and extreme anxiety as a direct result of these inspections. Already we are seeing providers taking the decision to close.” A strongly negative response from MillionPlus on 20 August 2021 called for the ‘reform’ to be ‘paused’: “If change is forced through in spite of a near-unanimous sector backlash, it is likely that numerous modern universities, currently the backbone of initial teacher training, will re-consider their provision in this area. This could critically damage the pipeline of new teachers into the profession, potentially hitting hardest the very regions and communities the government has pledged to level up.” Caroline Daly (UCL) blogged for UCL on 13 August 2021: “This is no time for a mass experiment on teacher education”. We might hope that the new DfE team will quietly let this one disappear.

The Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill currently before Parliament embodies the culture wars so popular in the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph, and is reported on more fully elsewhere in this issue of SRHE News. Whatever its supposed merits, we can but hope that the slavish desire to cater to right wing prejudice will be tempered somewhat in the new DfE team.

The installation of Lord Wharton as chair of the Office for Students, and his refusal to stop taking the Tory whip in the Lords, meant that OfS was never going to be the kind of independent regulator required by statute; recent OfS initiatives have reinforced those feelings. The preliminary OfS consultation on a range of quality and standards issues during the winter of 2020-21 was followed by a further consultation published on 21 July 2021. This made detailed proposals about new regulatory requirements, saying: “the UK Quality Code, including its common practices, advice and guidance, risks creating a homogeneous approach to quality and standards assurance that stifles innovation and overly focuses on policy and process rather than outcomes for students. By contrast, our intention is to establish an approach to regulation that protects all students through the articulation of a clear minimum baseline for quality and standards in the regulatory framework, while enabling competition, student choice, provider autonomy and innovation to develop freely above the baseline.”

Picking their way through the weasel words, David Kernohan and Jim Dickinson of WonkHE summed up (on 20 July 2021) its intention as being to sweep away the existing Quality Code, “a longstanding agreed sector standard developed by the Quality Assurance Agency … on behalf of the UK Standing Committee for Quality Assessment (kind of the sector’s representative body on quality assurance). The code is short, clear, comprehensible … Everybody knows where they are with it (from PSRBs to providers), it is popular, UK-wide, and internationally recognised. And it’s symbolic – insofar as it is a piece of co-regulation.” The first consultation spoke of “up-to-date” content and “effective” assessment. Perhaps this was, as Kernohan and Dickinson said, “meant to give providers flexibility to make their own decisions  … [but] in practice it made them concerned that their definitions of these terms may not match the regulator’s own impressions.”

The Teaching Excellence Framework was evaluated in unflattering terms by the independent review reluctantly accepted by DfE as part of the Higher Education and Research Act 2017. That review, completed long ago but published much more recently, seemed to have put TEF in the deep freeze, but OfS now envisages a new-style TEF as an enforcement mechanism for its new ‘definitions’ of quality and standards. The WonkHE writers conclude: “As usual, there’s little on making students feel more powerful – but plenty for OfS.” The attempted reassurance in the OfS blog by Director of Regulation Susan Lapworth on 20 July 2021 failed to persuade, and the THE pronouncement on the same day by OfS chair Lord Wharton that “Good universities have nothing to fear from the OfS’ quality crackdown” smacked more of loyalty oaths than higher education standards.

Those suspicions were fuelled, to put it mildly, when OfS issued on 7 October 2021 probably its most fatuous review to date, about spelling, punctuation and grammar. This followed a series of media scare stories earlier in 2021 about universities supposedly being told that ‘cutting marks for bad spelling is elitist’, as the Mail on Sunday headline had it on 11 April 2021. Minister Michele Donelan duly deplored such alleged behaviour in the House of Commons, as Jim Dickinson noted in his WonkHE blog on 7 October 2021. OfS then conducted a review over Summer 2021 in “a small number of higher education providers … focused on spelling, punctuation and grammar in written assessment” identifying a “cause for regulatory concern”. There will always be stories and cases of daft behaviour by some universities, on issues like spelling, just as on issues like freedom of speech. They need to be dealt with proportionately and the regulator must decide whether there is a substantive case to answer for the whole sector. Here the OfS jumped to the remarkable conclusion that “The common features we have seen in the small number of cases in this review suggest that the practices and approaches we have set out in the case studies may be widespread across the sector.” This is not an independent regulator, this is a body in a hurry to do what it thinks the Minister wants. We can hope that the new DfE team might discourage such excessive compliance, led as it now is by someone who made a success of asking different people for their opinions.

Williamson’s last turn in HE was his speech at the Universities UK conference in Newcastle in September, when he urged universities to get back to in-person face to face teaching – speaking by videolink (!) as Times education editor Nicola Woolcock reported on 9 September 2021. Richard Adams, The Guardian’s education editor, described his speech as ‘combative’: Williamson “accused some universities of being more interested in “cancelling national heroes” and bureaucracy than improving the lives of students and staff, telling vice-chancellors they risk undermining public confidence in higher education.” He went on to attack universities with high drop-out rates and announced that “in the future institutions in England would not be able to count disadvantaged students enrolled on courses with high non-continuation rates towards meeting their access targets.” The Secretary of State’s willingness to take on the universities, albeit remotely, was not of course sufficient to save his job. We can hope that the faux outrage of the culture wars and the faux consultations on decisions already made might give way in future to something more approaching evidence-based policy and proper consultation.

The signs are that real politics might be re-emerging. The restructuring of the DfE entailed the abolition of the role of Minister for Apprenticeships and Skills. This seemed to run contrary to levelling up, as the FE News report on 15 September 2021 noted, with Toby Perkins, Labour’s Shadow Minister for Further Education and Skills, quoted as saying: “Skills shortages are holding our economy back. For all his warm words, the Prime Minister’s decision to scrap the dedicated skills minister shows he isn’t serious about reskilling our workforce for the future.” But the SoS has a track record in this area, so this at least sounds like a reasonable difference of opinion about how to achieve a policy objective.

More fundamentally, we are expecting what the media call an ‘overhaul’ of HE funding, as Richard Adams wrote in The Guardian on 9 July 2021. The options might include tuition-fee cuts, a cap on student numbers for some courses and minimum qualifications for HE entry, in a much-delayed response to the Augar review of tertiary funding. After Covid the government, of course, needs to find or save a great deal of money and the student loan system is a prime target. After long-running disagreements between No 10, DfE and the Treasury over how to achieve savings, there were straws in the wind as first Nick Hillman for HEPI on 10 June 2021 and then David Willetts (in HEPI Report 142) on 30 September 2021 spelt out the possibilities for savings, supposedly while ‘boosting HE spending’ according to Willetts. Consider these – however unpalatable – as the centrist Tory case for savings: it amounts to ‘make graduates pay more’. A different position would involve fee reductions, meaning funding cuts for institutions, student number caps and/or minimum entry qualifications, restricting access and HE numbers. The latter was more likely to have been adopted by the former DfE regime. We can hope there are higher chances now of the more ‘moderate’ course.

The new Secretary of State Nadhim Zahawi arrives with a better reputation than his predecessor, and there have been significant ministerial changes at DfE, not least the departure after a very long tenure of Nick Gibb as schools minister. However Michele Donelan remains and has been promoted as Universities Minister, adding post-16 responsibilities to her brief, and she will in future attend Cabinet. She remains something of a blank canvas, having until now loyally followed her SoS’s lead. More worryingly, former Gavin Williamson special adviser Iain Mansfield tweeted on 2 October 2021: “Delighted to be able to confirm that I will be staying on in Government, as Special Adviser to Michelle Donelan, Minister for Higher and Further Education”, as ResearchProfessionalNews had divined some weeks earlier. Mansfield was formerly a DfE civil servant known principally as the architect of the first version of TEF, later as an evidence-defying supporter of grammar schools. And of course Lord Wharton remains as chair of the OfS.

We can only hope that there will at least be something of a return to more sensible politics as the new ministerial team settles in. We can be fairly sure that hard times are coming for HE funding in the government spending review, with institutions, staff, students and graduates paying the price. So there it is, the short term future for higher education policy in England: hope and pay.

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

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Cronyism, academic values and the degradation of debate

by Rob Cuthbert

The pandemic has accelerated many trends which were already apparent, such as the switch away from the high street to online purchasing, and in HE the move to on-line, remote and asynchronous learning. The influence of social media has also accelerated, partly or wholly replacing the normal policy business of face-to-face discussion and debate. But perhaps the most significant change of all for HE has been the accelerating decline in the quality of regulation, governance and policy debate.

The Higher Education and Research Act 2017 may come to be seen as the high water mark of a particular kind of policymaking which has been ebbing rapidly ever since: the tide has gone out on deliberative and measured debate. A majority in HE strongly opposed marketisation, but the Act was the culmination of a long period of debate which at least gave credence to opposing views and saw them represented in discussion inside and outside Parliament. The market ‘reforms’ were promoted by ministers – David Willetts and Jo Johnson in particular – who had at least grudging respect from many in the system, because of their own respect for academe, however partial it sometimes seemed. And much though we might regret the marketisation changes and seek their reversal, we might also accept that they were enacted by a government which had a mandate for change explicitly endorsed by the electorate. But that was then.

In 2019 the government was returned with a sufficient majority to ‘get Brexit done’, which it did, much to the dismay of most in higher education. HE’s dominant Remainer sentiment no doubt helped to fuel disregard in Whitehall for HE opinion. What is often wrongly still called ‘debate’ has been polarised, accentuated by social media’s echo chambers during the lockdown. In the ‘culture war’ both sides have dug their trenches and hoisted the ‘no surrender’ flags. In HE this has diverted attention away from the real and massive problems of the student experience in the pandemic, and towards the misrepresented and overstated issue of free speech, academic freedom and diversity of opinion. The supposed justification for recent free speech initiatives in HE has been amply covered elsewhere, and is summarised in SRHE News 44 (April 2021).

In this culture war academics and academic institutions have their share of blame. The Policy Exchange ‘research’, cited in support for the Secretary of State’s recent announcements, shoddy though it was, nevertheless pointed to the issue of Remainer conformism in much British academic culture, in which some staff have self-censored their support for Brexit. I tried much earlier to parody this conformism, arguing that “perhaps the best thing to do was to accept the will of the people, freely expressed”. But democracy depends on the willing consent of the governed, and the governed in HE are increasingly unwilling to consent to changes in which their views are simply ignored. There is no shortage of comment on new policy initiatives; the HE sector is comparatively well-served by think tanks such as HEPI and WonkHE, as the recent CGHE seminar on ‘Universities in Medialand’ suggested. But there is little sign that government takes note of policy commentary which contradicts its current narrative, even when obvious contradictions are pointed out. Thus, for example, market forces must rule, except when students choose the ‘wrong’ universities. The student experience is paramount, except  when students report high levels of satisfaction – so the National Student Survey, until yesterday a crucial element for teaching excellence, must today be rubbished.

Nowhere has the contempt for opposing views been more obvious than in the appointment of a new Chair for the Board of the Office for Students. The notes to the 2017 Act establishing the OfS explained that: “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). The first OfS chair was Sir Michael Barber. It was rumoured that Barber sought a second term but was denied. Who might be appropriate to take on the role? Another respected figure with experience of HE and of working with government, able to sustain that arm’s length role for the Office? 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 selection panel had been criticised for its dominant reliance on government supporters rather than HE expertise, but the chair-designate was nevertheless still to have his appointment endorsed by the Parliamentary Education Select Committee.

The Committee’s approval was very likely but could not be taken for granted, and Nick Hillman made some sensible proposals in his HEPI blog on 12 January 2021 on ‘How to grill the prospective chair of OfS’. We’d have suggested grilling on both sides, but presumably Boris Johnson’s campaign manager only has one side. The Education Select Committee duly 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 proposed to retain the government whip. Conflict-of-interest issues raised themselves almost immediately, with wider ripples than expected. Lord Wharton had just been installed as Chair when he was revealed to be a paid adviser to a company seeking to build a cable connection through land at the University of Portsmouth. The company, Aquind, has a £1.2billion project to connect the electricity grids of the UK and France. It wants to put a cable across University of Portsmouth land, which the University opposes because of the disruption it would cause. Portsmouth Council and local Conservative and Labour MPs all oppose the project. Aquind director Alexander Temerko is a Conservative Party donor, whose website has several pictures of him with Lord Wharton, and also pictures him with the Prime Minister and Secretary of State Gavin Williamson. The planning dispute, involving possible compulsory purchase, has reached the Secretary of State for Business, but the previous incumbent Alok Sharma had to recuse himself from the case because his constituency party had received £10,000 from Temerko. Sean Coughlan told the story for the BBC on 19 February 2021, noting also that: “Conservative MP David Morris, another recipient of a donation, had to apologise to the House of Commons for a breach of paid advocacy rules after asking a question in support of the Aquind cable project.”

Lord Wharton’s appointment was greeted with incredulity in HE, but attracted little interest more broadly; in macropolitical terms the chair of OfS is a small bauble. And there were of course already many higher-profile reports of cronyism in government. The difficulty for HE is that the regulator may now be driven further and faster to unrealistic extremes. OfS, obediently pursuing its statutory responsibilities and ‘having regard to ministers’, is already in danger of leaving HE realities behind:

  • On 14 January 2021 the OfS wrote to universities and other HE providers, hard on the heels of a DfE letter to OfS, saying that the regulator expected institutions “to maintain the quality, quantity and accessibility of their provision and to inform students about their options for refunds or other forms of redress where it has not been possible to provide what was promised.” Universities are losing tens of millions every week during the lockdown, without the kind of support provided for many other sectors, and on student hardship “the government can never quite resist overselling the multiple purposes to which the money might meaningfully be put”, as David Kernohan and Jim Dickinson argued in their WonkHE blog on 2 February 2021.
  • The OfS consultation document issued on 26 March 2021 put into practice the ‘instructions’ received earlier from Secretary of State Gavin Williamson. It proposed 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 was quick off the mark with his critical analysis on 26 March 2021.
  • 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’. Of course, 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.
  • OfS Director Regulation Susan Lapworth blogged for WonkHE on 31 March 2021 about a new condition of registration which would allow OfS to step in where a provider was at risk of failure, not to rescue the provider but to prevent a ‘disorderly’ closure. OfS had consulted on the proposal, which was not supported by most respondents, but went ahead anyway. The condition affects only the failing provider. Two obvious problems: (1) failing providers might not be inclined or well-placed to take the protective measures which OfS deems necessary; (2) previous experience shows that students need help from other institutions to facilitate transfers, but the Condition is silent on other institutions. They will often be willing, but might be unable to help without further support.

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’ in the new framework, the risk now is that the arm’s-length relationship with government has very short arms. Recent US experience shows the danger of such closeness. The Obama administration’s tighter regulation of for-profit HE after well-publicised shortcomings were swiftly reversed by Donald Trump’s Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, but Joe Biden is now progressively restoring Obama’s closer regulation. Such to-ing and fro-ing simply creates a more disorderly system for students to navigate.

We can learn a better lesson from the US: Michelle Obama’s dictum “when they go low, we go high”. We need to reinforce our support for academic values across the sector by continuing to show respect for opposing views, and to win cases by argument rather than by seeing who can shout loudest on social media. We have examples in the way that, for example, Eric Lybeck (Manchester) has offered to debate free speech with the authors of the Policy Exchange report. We also need to broaden the base of explicit opposition, and not leave it to the usual suspects: in particular, we need university leaders to step up and speak out more than they do.

It is often true that leaders can be more persuasive in private conversations than public speeches, but in current circumstances leaders, especially vice-chancellors, need to be more concerned that they will lose the confidence of staff and students if they fail to speak out publicly. There are honourable exceptions, but too many vice-chancellors seem to be more interested in avoiding blame than speaking out about real problems. It is certainly not easy, operating in the space between government, staff or student disapproval and social media pile-ons from the left or right; just one past or present remark or action, if uncovered or reinterpreted, could be career-ending. But that is why our leaders are well paid – to pursue the best interests of the institution and the people in it, not to be silenced just because the  problems are very difficult, nor out of fear or self-interest. We have recently seen research leaders not hesitating to speak out about proposed cuts in research funding – and those cuts have now been reversed. We need more people, leaders and staff on all sides, to speak truth to power – not just playing-to-the-gallery ‘our truth’, but a truth people inside and outside HE will find persuasive.

Rob Cuthbert is an independent academic consultant, editor of SRHE News and Blog and emeritus professor of higher education management. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and of SRHE. His 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.