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In defence of SoTL: anchoring educational evaluation and educational research

by Liz Austen

By the end of 2025 I had attended three HE related conferences: Euro SoTL, the Wonkhe Festival of HE and the SRHE Annual Conference. I presented on similar topics at all three events; what evidence do we generate to help us understand and act to enhance student experiences and outcomes in higher education? During the Wonkhe panel and my SRHE session, I defined two approaches at the disposal of HE practitioners:

Higher Education Evaluation: an approach which helps to understand and explore what works and doesn’t work in a given context and is of value to stakeholders. The aim of evaluation is to generate actionable evidence-informed learning, which encourages, informs and supports continuous improvement of process and impact (Evaluation Collective 2025)

Higher Education Research: to extend knowledge and understanding in all areas of educational activity and from a wide range of perspectives, including those of learners, educators, policymakers and the public (adapted from BERA, 2024)

At the Wonkhe panel, Clare Loughlin-Chow (CEO of SRHE) helpfully outlined the higher education research topics that were most prevalent in the SRHE journals. Omar Khan (CEO of TASO) then outlined the scope and priories of TASO, an affiliate member of the government’s What Works Network which focuses on higher education evaluation. My conceptual discussion of evidence generation brought the two together.

At EuroSoTL earlier in the year, my colleagues and I outlined our new institutional approach to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning:

Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL): to improve student learning through engagement in the existing knowledge of teaching and learning, developing contextual ideas and innovation in practice, reflecting on practice, applying methodological rigour, working in partnership with students, and sharing of scholarship publicly (adapted from Felton (2013))

When I attended SRHE in December 2025, SoTL appeared in only one session I attended and some of this discussion focused on the challenges of bringing SoTL into spaces for educational research. My hand in the air comment – that criticism of SoTL by educational researchers was an example of ‘academic snobbery’ – certainly raised a few eyebrows. This blog post considers the relationship between these three approaches and whether, for the good of our students, it’s time for some reconciliation.

Educational evaluation, SoTL and educational research

Educational research in higher education has developed over the last 60 years. Interestingly, research into teaching and learning is cited as the most theorised by this type of research (Tight, 2012). Higher education evaluation, sometimes considered as applied research, was recently propelled by the Office for Students’ agenda to ‘evaluate, evaluate, evaluate (Office for Students, 2022). SoTL has developed alongside HE research and evaluation, emerging from Boyer’s work in 1990.

The aims of each endeavour are distinct, tied by the notion of ‘enquiry’. Research seeks to build new knowledge, and evaluation seeks to provide judgment on a contextual problem. SoTL has a narrower focus on teaching and learning than the broader scope of research and evaluation but incorporates prior knowledge and contextual problem solving through focused enquiry (Gray, 2025). SoTL builds on the foundation of social sciences methodology and can integrate disciplinary methodology into practitioner’s teaching and learning enquiry (Riddell, 2026). Educational evaluation often asks questions of the effectiveness of interventions, but in some teaching and learning spaces, the evaluative language of ‘intervention’ isn’t appropriate (Austen (2025) in Austen and McCaig (2025)). Exploring what works through SoTL enquiry aligns better. Often the bridging term ‘pedagogic research’ is used as integral to SoTL (close to practice) but distinct from educational research (broader anticipated impact). Our chosen SoTL definition uses neither research nor evaluation terminology, but has component parts – knowledge, innovation, method, dissemination – that are central to all.

The essential agents in educational research, evaluation and SoTL are the same – individual students (as partners, as participants and as voice givers), individual staff (academic and professional services), institutional groups or clusters, collaborating HEIs, and third space organisations. Reasons for enquiry are also similar and include sector expectations and shared learning, the desire for institutional enhancement and impact, personal development and career progression. Or as Ashwin & Trigwell (in Evans et al, 2021) note:  to inform a wider audience; to inform a group within context; to inform oneself. All research, evaluation and SoTL agents must navigate the practical and ethical considerations of ‘insider’ enquiry if they are exploring their own practices or within their institutional contexts (BERA, 2018; Barnett & Camfield, 2016).

Output pathways are also interconnected. The SoTL staircase (Beckingham, 2023) recognised the variety of outputs encouraged by SoTL and includes those traditionally aligned with research and evaluation (reports and journal articles). Research outputs may be guided by REF criteria, and evaluation outputs by readership. The conclusions in research articles frequently state that more research needed, and evaluation reports often sit unread in metaphorical desk draws. In comparison, SoTL practitioners benefit from publications which are close to practice, quicker to publish, and more likely to influence change.

Both educational evaluation and educational research are inherently theoretical, grounded by educational or pedagogic theory or a theory of change. SoTL is more action focused, less theoretical than research yet can be more exploratory than evaluation. In 2011, Kanuka questioned SoTL’s credibility due to the lack of theoretical underpinning or reference to existing scholarship. At times, I suggest that educational research can be positioned too far in the opposite direction. The presentations at SRHE were heavily theoretical and sometimes I was left thinking ‘so how would this work actually improve the learning experiences of students’? In contrast, the breadth of SoTL includes both theory and action, albeit in more pragmatic ways.

There are values and specific skill sets of educational researchers and evaluators (and often epistemological disagreements occur between the two). This commitment to identity can be excluding and may help to understand why SoTL has been challenged. Canning & Masika (2022) caution us on the ‘threat to serious scholarship’ posed by SoTL, which they believe risks devaluing research into higher education learning and teaching. Their criticism of ‘anything goes’ I would frame as an important approach to inclusion. Their criticism of the ‘watered-down version of teaching and learning research’ I frame as SoTL’s recognition of the developmental, particularly in building staff confidence. Where confusion over definitions and scope still occur, I question whether institutional SoTL has been well grounded or well led.

Conclusion

There is clearly a divide between higher education research and SoTL. There are few recent SRHE blog posts which reference SoTL at all and one that does advises against flag-in-the-sand nomenclature (Sheridan, 2019). Having spent a lot of time in these circles, I believe higher education evaluators are more agnostic, but I include them in this discussion as they bring a new dynamic to this debate.

In this blog I have identified the ways in which research, evaluation and SoTL have their own agendas and yet have much in common. I argue that SoTL emerges as a grounding anchor between higher education research and higher education evaluation. SoTL borrows from both. SoTL feeds into both. SoTL is more than both (Potter, 2025). SoTL’s inherent value is the ability to build a community which improves student experiences and outcomes in an enquiry led and timely way.

For more details on the approach to SoTL at Sheffield Hallam University see: https://lta.shu.ac.uk/scholarship

Reference

Riddell, J (2026) ‘Hope circuits in practice: how the scholarship of teaching and learning fuels pedagogical courage and systemic change’ Guest Lecture, Sheffield Hallam University

Liz Austen is Professor of Higher Education Evaluation and Associate Dean Learning, Teaching and Student Success at Sheffield Hallam University. She has worked as an independent Evaluation Consultant on HE sector contracts and is a regular keynote speaker on all things evaluation in HE. Her focus is on evidence informed practice across the student lifecycle. Liz also leads a cross sector HE network called the Evaluation Collective.


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A topic modelling analysis of higher education research published between 2000 and 2021

by Yusuf Oldac and Francisco Olivos

We recently embarked upon a project to explore the development of higher education research topics over the last decades. The results were published in Review of Education. Our aim was to thematically map the field of research on higher education and to analyse how the field has evolved over time between 2000 and 2021. This blog post summarises our findings and reflects on the implications for HE research.

HE research continues to grow. HE researchers are located in globally diverse geographical locations and publish on diversifying topics. Studies focusing on the development of HE with a global-level analysis are increasingly emerging. However, most of these studies are limited to scientometric network analyses that do not include a content-related focus. In addition, they are deductive, indicating that they tried to fit their new findings into existing categories. Recently, Daenekindt and Huisman (2020) were able to capture the scholarly literature on higher education through an analysis of latent themes by utilising topic modelling. This approach got attention in the literature, and the study’s contribution was highlighted in an earlier SRHE blog post. We also found their study useful and built on it in our novel analysis. However, their analysis focused only on generating topics from a wide range of higher education journals and did not identify explanatory factors, such as change over the years or the location of publication. After identifying this gap, we worked towards moving one step further.

A central contribution of our study is the inclusion of a set of research content explanatory factors, namely: time, region, funding, collaboration type, and journals, to investigate the topics of HE research. In methodological terms, our study moves ahead of the description of the topic prevalence to the explanation of the prevalence utilizing structural topic modelling (Roberts et al, 2013).

Structural topic modelling is a machine learning technique that examines the content of provided text to learn patterns in word usage without human supervision in a replicable and transparent way (Mohr & Bogdanov, 2013). This powerful technique expands the methodological repertoire of higher education research. On one hand, computational methods make it possible to extract meaning from large datasets; on the other, they allow the prediction of emerging topics by integrating the strengths of both quantitative and qualitative approaches. Nevertheless, many scholars in HE remain reluctant to engage with such methods, reflecting a degree of methodological conservatism or tunnel vision (see Huisman and Daenekindt’s SRHE blog post).

In this blog post, our intention is not to go deep into the minute details of this methodological technique, but to share a glimpse of our main findings through the use of such a technique. With the corpus of all papers published between 2000 and 2021 in the top six generalist journals of higher education, as listed by Cantwell et al (2022) and Kwiek (2021) both, we analysed a dataset of 6,562 papers. As a result, we identified 15 emergent research topics and several major patterns that highlight the thematic changes over the last decades. Below, we share some of our findings, accompanied by relevant visualisations.

Glimpse at the main findings with relevant visuals

The emergent 15 higher education topics and three visibly rising ones

Our topic modelling analysis revealed 15 distinct topics, which are largely in line with the topics discussed in previous studies on this line (eg Teichler, 1996; Tight, 2003; Horta & Jung, 2014). However, there are added nuances in our analysis. For example, the most prevalent topics are policy and teaching/learning, which are widely acknowledged in the field, but new themes have emerged and strengthened over time. These themes include identity politics and discrimination, access, and employability. These areas, conceptually linked to social justice, have become central to higher education research, especially in US-based journals but not limited to them. The visual below demonstrates the changes over the years for all 15 topics.

  • The Influence of funding on higher education research topics

Research funding plays a crucial role in shaping certain topics, particularly gender inequality, access, and doctoral education. Studies that received funding exhibited a higher prevalence of these socially significant topics, underscoring the importance of targeted funding to support research with social impact. The data visualisation below summarises the influence of reported funding for each topic. The novelty of this pattern needs to be highlighted because we have not come across a previous study looking into the influence of funding existence on research topics in the higher education field.

  • The impact of collaboration on higher education research topics

Collaborative publications are more prevalent in topics such as teaching and learning, and diversity and social relations. By contrast, theoretical discussions, identity politics, policy, employability, and institutional management are more common in solo-authored papers. This pattern aligns with the nature of these topics and the data requirements for research. Please see the visualised data below.

We highlight that although the relationship between collaboration and citation impact or researcher productivity is well studied, we are not aware of any evidence of the effect of collaboration patterns on topic prevalence, particularly in studies focusing on higher education. So, this finding is a novel contribution to higher education research.

  • Higher education journals’ topic preferences

Although the six leading journals claim to be generalist, our analysis shows they have differing publication preferences. For example, Higher Education focuses on policy and university governance, while Higher Education Research and Development stands out for teaching/learning and indigenous knowledge. Journal of Higher Education and Review of Higher Education, two US-based journals, have the highest prevalence of identity politics and discrimination topics. Last, Studies in Higher Education has a significantly higher prevalence in teaching and learning, theoretical discussions, doctoral education, and emotions, burnout and coping than most of the journals.

  • Regional differences in higher education research topics

Topic focus varies significantly by the region of the first author. First, studies from Asia exhibit the highest prevalence of academic work and institutional management. Studies from Africa show a higher prevalence of identity politics and discrimination. Moreover, studies published by first authors from Eastern European countries stand out with the higher prevalence of employability. Lastly, the policy topic has a high prevalence across all regions. However, studies with first authors from Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean showed a higher prevalence of policy research in higher education than those from North America and Western Europe. By contrast, indigenous knowledge is most prominent in Western Europe (including Australia and New Zealand). The figure below demonstrates these in visual format.

Concluding remarks

Higher education research has grown and diversified dramatically over the past two decades. The field is now established globally, with an ever-expanding array of topics and contributors. In this blog post, we shared the results of our analysis in relation to the influence of targeted funding, collaborative practices, regional differences, and journal preferences on higher education research topics. We have also indicated that certain topics have risen in prevalence in the last two decades. More patterns are included in the main research study published in Review of Education.

It is important to note that we could only include the higher education papers published up to 2021, the latest available data year when we started the analyses. The impact of generative artificial intelligence and recent major shifts in the global geopolitics, including the new DEI policies in the US and overall securitisation of science tendencies, may not be reflected fully in this dataset. These themes are very recent, and future studies, including replications with similar approaches, may help provide newly emerging patterns.

Dr Yusuf Oldac is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Education Policy and Leadership at The Education University of Hong Kong. He holds a PhD degree from the University of Oxford, where he received a full scholarship. Dr Oldac’s research spans international and comparative higher education, with a current focus on global science and knowledge production in university settings.

Dr Francisco Olivos obtained his PhD in Sociology from The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He joined Lingnan University in August 2021. His research lies in the intersections between cultural sociology, social stratification, and subjective well-being, using quantitative and computational methods.


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Five challenges for policy research on higher education

by William Locke

Higher education research has grown in recent decades. For example, the number of journal articles published on higher education has increased five-fold in the last twenty years (Seeber, 2023). More is known about higher education than ever before, but there does not seem to be a corresponding growth in higher education policymaking being influenced by this expanding evidence base (Schendel and Knobel, 2024). Indeed, higher education seems to be more or less in crisis – and even under attack – in democratic as well as authoritarian systems, and in rich as well as middle- and low-income countries. Here, I offer five interrelated challenges for policy research on higher education. No doubt, there is more to be said about each of these, and there are other challenges that could be added. Perhaps readers might like to make suggestions in the comments.

1. How to expand international connection and collaboration in an increasingly fragmented and divided world?

Schendel and Knobel (2024) argue for greater collaboration among higher education scholars in different countries and regions, and between researchers and policymakers. They also argue for the translation of knowledge from academic discourse to more accessible forms and between languages, especially to and from the lingua franca of English. They call for connections to be made between different evidence bases, contexts and ways of understanding. These collaborations and connections should not just be among scholars from countries in the ‘West’, but arise from the formation of equitable partnerships between researchers based in the Global South and North, and among those based in expanding and emerging systems. These would allow an exchange of non-Western perspectives and indigenous knowledges within the higher education research and policy communities and “a more global, multi-national, transnational or cosmopolitan optic” (Brooks, 2023, Brooks & Waters, 2022).  Journal editors, for example, should be more sensitive to the location of researchers and the substantive focus of their research (Brooks, 2023).

2. How to place local and national research in regional and international contexts for a potentially global readership?

There is also evidence that higher education research has become more international in scope in recent years (Brooks, 2023; Daenekindt & Huisman, 2020; Kehm, 2015; Kwiek, 2021; Tight, 2021). However, it is important to distinguish between an increasing number of studies of the internationalisation of higher education – often limited to student mobility between nations – and an international or comparative perspective, which may focus on national, or even local, issues but place these within a broader context. Clearly, the collaboration of researchers from different countries and regions already mentioned can help this comparative and contextualised approach, provided there is a well-developed understanding of the differences between the objects of study as well as the similarities. Loosening the dominance of the English language in international higher education research networks will help to achieve this contextualised comparison.

3. How to encourage contributions from a wider range of disciplines and theoretical approaches?

Higher education is not just a topic of study for higher education researchers. As an ‘open access’ field (Harland, 2012), it is also a focus for disciplines such as sociology, economics, business studies, political science, psychology and even geography.  As in other porous areas of the social sciences, this is to be welcomed as a way of incorporating new perspectives, concepts, theories and methodologies into the field.  While this may have led to a certain lack of interaction and integration initially (Macfarlane, 2012; Tight, 2014), the trend towards interdisciplinary scholarship can bring these different perspectives together in creative ways. After all, it is likely that more holistic, multi-disciplinary and innovative approaches will be needed to understand and address current and future challenges, such as artificial intelligence, decolonising the curriculum, academic precarity and populist critiques of universities. Topic-based networks of scholars – where the focus of study rather than the discipline is prime – can encourage this. A major task, however, is to provide space for indigenous knowledges and new ways of knowing that may challenge traditional disciplinary hierarchies and ‘Western’ epistemologies.

4. How to focus on deeper, longer-term issues without losing immediate relevance for policymaking?

On the one hand, we might ask how evidence-based higher education research is? Some of what is submitted for publication is description, commentary, impressionistic interpretation and, even, polemic. We might also ask what form might an acceptable evidence base take? Policymakers tend to look for unambiguous findings that provide clear-cut guidance for decision-making – hard data of a quantitative rather than a qualitative kind. Yet, in education, meaningful quantitative studies are harder to accomplish than in some other areas of public policy. Systematic reviews of literature and randomised control trials do not work as well in education as in medicine, for example. Do we actively seek to build the evidence base? Or do we risk creating fragmented knowledge produced by a series of short-term, small-scale, barely connected projects, based on different and incompatible theoretical and conceptual foundations or employing methodologies that cannot be scaled up?

We should also acknowledge that higher education researchers are investigating their own world. They are interested parties in the object of their studies. Their research agendas are likely to be influenced by these ‘interests’. (Many readers will be familiar with doctoral students researching areas relating to their own experiences, for example, as students or higher education employees). Researchers are often on the receiving end of many of the policies and their impacts. As a result, too much research on higher education has been based on the assumption of a golden age which is being dismantled, rather than from a forward-looking perspective that seeks to meet broader, emerging societal needs.

So, we should recognise the limitations of this expanding higher education research. To date, much of it has been small scale, short-term and dependent on consultancy-style funding. It has had a fragmented and weak institutional base. It has tended to focus on the ‘public life’ of higher education, on strategic issues and their impact, rather than the ‘up close and personal’ issues that can be uncomfortable to investigate. Some of it is only just becoming “disinterested research on reasonably long timescales, with open agendas and based on reflective and critical intellectual values and practices” (Scott, 2000: 124).

On the other hand, how realistic (or idealised) are our conceptions of policymaking and implementation? It is rarely feasible simply to extrapolate the policy implications from a given set of findings, which may simply analyse a problem rather than propose a solution. “It is not a linear, rational-analytical process of examining all the evidence, ‘reading off’ the policy implications of this and then formulating well-designed interventions guaranteed to achieve the outcomes desired” (Locke, 2009: 124). If we are to understand policymaking, and the place of research evidence within it, we have to acknowledge “…the messy realities of influence, pressure, dogma, expediency, conflict, compromise, intransigence, resistance, error, opposition and pragmatism in the policy process” (Ball, 1990: 9). There are many other factors than research findings to take into account in the world of policymaking, not least politics and political expediency (for example, unifying the party, ideology, public opinion and budgets). “A better understanding of the policy-making process and the factors that facilitate or inhibit the take-up of research findings is needed, including the role of the commissioners of research and how findings are presented to, and understood by, policymakers” (Locke, 2009: 125). 

We should also be thinking about the relations between research, policy and practice.  After all, there are gaps between policy and practice: the infamous unintended consequences of policy implementation. However, there is also the danger of slipping into a utilitarian, ‘what works’ frame. The relations between research, policy and practice are empirical matters, themselves open to research and investigation. Studies of policymaking and implementation can enlighten us about the successes and failures of particular policies in specific contexts, and the factors that influence these.  Perhaps we should be aiming for policymaking that is influenced and informed, rather than driven, by evidence? 

5. How to explore the policy implications of research findings in ways that can be useful to policymakers?

The higher education research and policy communities are not always so separate. Research commissioned by policy bodies makes up quite a large proportion of funded higher education research. Most higher education researchers want their research to have impact, and policymakers (at least below ministerial level) want evidence on which to base their policymaking. There is some movement between these worlds, but there should be more and think tanks play a critical role in mediating between the worlds of research and policy. Finally, networked governance suggests we should be looking at audiences beyond government and parliament, to include wider public engagement with research findings, which is essential to democracies.

But how far should this constructive engagement go? It is naïve to think that educational research can solve problems on its own. The relationship between research and policy has been characterized as indirect and more about ‘sensitising’ policymakers to problems than solving them. Research might be seen more as a means of helping policymakers reconsider issues, think differently, reconceptualise what the problem is, and challenge old assumptions. This suggests a more serendipitous and loose relationship between research and policy. So, perhaps we need to be more modest in our aspirations for evidence-informed policy and practice and adopt a greater degree of realism about what can be achieved.

This is an abridged version of the editorial from the latest issue of Policy Reviews in Higher Education.

William Locke is a founding Joint Editor of the journal and a recovering academic. Recently retired, he is a former Director of the Centre for the Study of Higher Education (CSHE) at the University of Melbourne, Director of the Centre for Higher Education Studies (CHES) at the UCL Institute of Education and Deputy Director of the Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE). He has also had senior policy roles at the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and Universities UK.


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Narratives at SRHE 2023 – more than just mere rhetoric

by Adam Matthews

It’s January 2024 and I am sitting down to write up my reflections on the SRHE Conference 2023. At the time of writing, the UK news agenda is being dominated by what is being described as one of the biggest miscarriages of justice the country has ever seen – 736 post office workers between 1999 and 2015 were prosecuted for false accounting or theft based on information from an IT system called Horizon. The system was not fit for purpose and the reporting of accounting shortfalls have found to be incorrect. The Post Office scandal has captured the public imagination thanks to a dramatisation of the events on mainstream terrestrial TV.

What has this got to do with an academic conference on higher education?

The power of media, narrative story and the broader humanities have the capacity to convey stories through genres such as drama and comedy in compelling and accessible ways. My own work is concerned with discourse and narratives on the idea and purpose of a university and its role in society. I contributed to two presentations at SRHE 2023 which both involved an analysis of narratives – the first being political party manifestoes from 1945 to 2019 and the second an analysis of Knowledge Exchange Framework policy. Both of these presentations and my wider interests look at discourse and narratives as data in higher education policy and practice.

The telling of the compelling Post Office scandal story in an accessible format has reached millions of screens, sparking conversation in workplaces and around dinner tables. This surge in public feeling has kicked off further investigations into the miscarriage of justice which involves a complex network of state and private actors over many years. This shows how narratives can reach many diverse audiences to begin to unravel the personal stories as well as the complexities involved. The SRHE conference theme for 2023 itself looked to unpick connections and complexity between Higher Education Research, Practice, and Policy.

Connected research, policy and practice was a key theme in both keynotes, the first online from Professor Nicola Dandridge and the second kicked off the in person 3 day event in Birmingham at Aston University – a panel discussion and plenary on re-shaping Tertiary Education with Professors Huw Morris, Ellen Hazelkorn, Chris Millward, and Andy Westwood, chaired by Professor Sir Peter Scott.

The complexity in making connections across research, policy and practice was clear as the speakers challenged researchers of higher education to come up with answers to the sector’s issues and challenges as well as re-shaping the sector into one which is tertiary rather than just higher. Browsing the conference programme at the sessions to come showed hugely diverse topics and methods used in higher education research. It certainly is complex to respond to the challenge of research providing the answers or even more challenging the answer.

The growing direction of travel towards tertiary is thankfully not a singular path. Like other potential futures, the panel showed a plurality of potential paths, all bound up with a plurality of perspectives, values and ambitions as well as the key aspect of funding. The panel on tertiary education came up with at least three perspectives on our tertiary futures, from conservative through to radically progressive.

Research findings cannot be put into a large language model artificial intelligence machine to spit out the answer but there is much more scope for researchers, policy-makers and practitioners to collaborate. Geoff Mulgan’s recent book When Science Meets Power analyses in detail how politics, policy, research and findings are muddled and muddied and lays out how scientists, politicians and bureaucrats need to acknowledge their strengths, knowledge (epistemic humility) and democratic values to make expert knowledge and politics work together.

Narrative might be something that can help to make sense of some of this complexity in both analysis but also in making a change at policy and practice levels.

The first of my own two presentations at the conference looked at political discourse of higher education in UK elections from 1945 to 2019. Debbie McVitty and I looked at the political narratives and discourses of Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat party political manifestoes to track how higher education was written about and in what context. Broadly, the Labour Party used ‘higher education’ more than the other two parties but all three had similar frequency when writing about the sector when it came to the word ‘university’. We observed spikes in frequency of ‘higher education’ and ‘university’ in 1966, 1987, 2001 and 2010. The first three elections were incoming second and third term governments which might hold some clues for 2024 in the UK. The context in which manifestoes talk about higher education has changed and broadened over the 74 year period. In 1945 and for the majority of the remainder of the 20th century, higher education and universities were mentioned in the context of education, health, science and innovation and youth. Progressively following the turn of the millennium in line with growth in student numbers, political parties began broadening the scope and influence of universities. We saw themes linked to universities in the context of lifelong learning, the economy, immigration, the European Union, public services, apprenticeships and equality. In short, as universities have grown in size and number, politics has looked to them do and achieve more for society and adds to the complex role of higher education in society. As we look ahead to 2024 and the biggest election year the world has ever seen it will interesting to see how universities are positioned politically in the UK and all over the world.

Globally, universities are not being depicted in a positive light in a range of contexts. The UK Government has questioned the value of some degrees describing them as ‘rip offs’ to be cracked down on. Politically, polarisation is a key concern for the health of our democracies and those gaining a degree and those that do not has been sighted as a contributing factor in such division, often under the veil of meritocracy. Hostility towards universities has entered into the culture wars with curriculum and pedagogy being attacked by politicians in the US and in Europe. And currently there is controversy on free speech and conflict at prestigious universities in the US as leaders have been forced to stand down over handling of  the Gaza-Israel conflict culminating in allegations of plagiarism in their own research.

More positive narratives could be found in my second presentation with Vanessa Cui from Birmingham City University. We looked at the narratives of the Knowledge Exchange Framework (KEF) – a regulatory policy exercise from UKRI. Universities are required, in a similar way to teaching and research excellence frameworks to submit narrative statements alongside quantitative measures. We looked at these statements to see how universities told the story of knowledge exchange (often described as third mission) outside the more structured activities of teaching and research. We found a wide range of activity carried out by universities which contributed to both the local economy as well as public and community engagement. Characters in these narratives included students and graduates, university staff, local authorities and public services, publics, businesses and other education institutions. Activities ranged from collaborating with local people on research projects and providing learning opportunities to responding to and contributing to large scale events such as the Commonwealth Games and City of Culture organisation. Moreover, universities clearly played an important role during the Covid-19 pandemic, not just in developing vaccines but providing services and support in collaboration with many different organisations and communities.

For both of these projects we are using the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) as a broad methodological framing for policy narratives and responses, assuming:

  • A constructing of social reality
  • A bounded relativity (beliefs, norms, ideas, strategies, context)
  • Narratives have generalizable structural elements
  • Policy narratives operate at three levels (macro, meso, micro)
  • Narratives play a central role in communicating information

In previous work I have analysed similar regulatory narrative responses using computational text analysis (corpus-assisted discourse analysis) as a method of analysing corpora running into the millions of words. This we combined with the NPF and plan to develop this methodological integration in further work.

Objective and positivist measures are a big part of much of the English regulatory landscape, TEF takes data from the national student survey and continuation, completion and progression indicators to evidence student experience and student outcomes. The REF, KEF and TEF ask for narrative statements alongside the numbers as evidence and to ultimately provide outcomes. Vanessa and I concluded with regard to KEF that universities have a narrative challenge in crafting texts which tell the story of the idea and purpose of their institutions to regulators but also then to students and publics.

Narratives play a key role in human communication. This echoes the importance of narrative and story outlined above and the impact of drama and stories to public consciousness. Narratives and storytelling also play a key role in marketing, from BT selling the gift of family communication to the addictive quality of R Whites Lemonade. The marketisation of a higher education in the neoliberal era has been widely researched and theorised. But in responding to the call from the keynotes and others working with the sector at SRHE 2023, to make the case for higher education and universities, maybe we need to adopt some of the narratives used in the big neoliberal marketised machine. Again, how does the university, tell its story and purpose to a wide range of stakeholders?

Researchers in higher education are analysing and crafting narratives in diverse and creative ways. Charlie Davis presented his work on academics of working-class heritage creating narratives through stories and comics. Social science fiction narratives can allow us to explore ideas and different conceptualisations and visions of the future. These approaches are drawing upon research data, literature and theories but in new and futures-orientated and playful ways. Justyna Bandola-Gill presented her study on narrative CVs – a relatively new approach to research funding whereby researchers craft their own story rather than a list of achievements. And Josh Patel got into the detail of the Robbins report pulling out the ambitious and verging on poetic narrative from the neoliberal economist Lionel Robbins’ vision of expanded public university education – Josh urged us all to go and read a very accessible and hopeful narrative from 1960s higher education policy.

Narratives are not going away. In the latest 2023 publication of TEF statements, institutions could submit up to 25 pages as part of their provider submission (up 10 pages from the previous round) and new to the latest set of statements are panel decision narratives and (optional) student submissions. In December 2023 this provided half a million words each from panels and students and 1.8 million words from providers. A by-product of such an exercise is a unique corpus of texts which provide an insight into how a range of institutions are responding to policy in describing their own practice in diverse ways. This provides a huge amount of learning for the sector.

Narratives play a central role in communicating information and constructing reality. From a research perspective we can analyse these texts as policy stories and wider discourse on what is constructed as a social reality. Narratives involve characters, context, morals of a story and plot lines. Rhetoric is the ancient art of persuasion. Aristotle broke this down into ethos (speaker’s status, character, credibility and authority), pathos (appealing to emotions, values and beliefs of the reader) and logos (logic, reasoning and argument).

As well as using these tools for analysis, universities and higher education researchers can use them to create narratives which surface the purpose and ideals of education to politicians, policy-makers, funders and publics. We may need them, as hostilities towards the university grow.

Many people knew about the Post Office Horizon IT system injustices but they were hidden away in reports and information based news articles – telling the personal stories of those involved on prime time TV captured a public imagination and support. Mr Bates vs the Post Office has been viewed almost 15 million times (at the time of writing) and has led to more than 100 new potential victims coming forward.

Maybe higher education needs to tell its stories and narratives to the wider world in equally accessible and creative ways.

Adam is a Senior Research Fellow in education systems and policy at the University of Birmingham. Adam’s work looks at universities as part of tertiary education systems and the role that they play as key sites of knowledge production and dissemination in wider society. This includes how technologies and media have and are shaping, knowledge production and access.


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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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Exploring a ‘Sense of Belonging’ and Why It Matters in Higher Education

By Gill Mills and Caroline Jones

This was the first time we had attended an SRHE Event: we were optimistic and excited to experience and develop new knowledge aligned to the subject area of, ‘A sense of belonging within Higher Education’ and we were not disappointed. The SRHE venue provided an intimate but not intimidating environment where we were exposed to speakers covering a range of different elements that linked into the common theme. There was initial insight into the issues of admissions; clearing and contextual data from research delivered by Mansor Rezaian, from the Queen Mary University, then a qualitative exploration of non-traditional students’ journey into an elite university from Debbi Stanistreet of the University of Liverpool. Following these opening speakers there were opportunities for participant questions and answers and whilst we did not pose questions we found great value in listening to the elaborate and interesting discussions that took place. This part of the event created an academic community feel with professionals from across institutions, faculties and disciplines debating contextual dilemmas and experiences.

The latter part of the day Continue reading →

Ian Kinchin


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From ‘evidence-based’ to ‘post-truth’: is this a trend in higher education?

By Ian Kinchin

Is there a trend within higher education that parallels the general trend in society, from ‘evidence-based’ to ‘post-truth’? There has been a trend (that I have been aware of for several months, though it has probably been going on for very much longer) of a move away from research and data towards a justification of claims in the media by using statements such as, ‘a lot of people think that’. This trend has been played out very publicly in elections in the UK and in the US in the past year, where it seems that if you say something often enough and loud enough, then it will be accepted as part of the canon. Maybe that has always been so? But when we have Government ministers on the TV telling us that we shouldn’t listen to experts because sometimes they can get things wrong, it does sound like Homer-Simpson-reasoning.

We seem to be witnessing a similar trend in higher education where ideas seem to be distorted to fit political and economic aims. If you are really cynical, you might go back through press cuttings and see a move from ‘evidence-based’ to ‘student-centred’ to ‘post-truth’. I am not arguing against student-centredness here, but I am aware of the ways that is can be miss-represented so that the phrase ‘but the students want it’ seems to trump other arguments without any real analysis of what or why. But there is a question (probably many) here about what students want, which students want it and why students want it – whatever ‘it’ might be. Continue reading →

Jeroen Huisman


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Research on higher education policy

By Jeroen Huisman

Research on higher education in general, apparently, is alive and kicking. Tight (2012) calls higher education “big business” and other authors refer to the massification of higher education (read: more students, more staff, potentially more researchers interested in higher education) but also to the increasing important of higher education and research in contemporary society to signify increasing interest in higher education research.

The growth is also evidenced by an increase in journals focusing on higher education (Altbach, 2009) and in the growth of research centres on higher education (Rumbley et al., 2015). Although that growth may be uneven: with considerable growth in new economies in e.g. Asia and Latin America and stabilisation in (Western) Europe and the US, Rumbley et al (2015, 7) argue that “higher education is fast moving from the margins to the centre of much discussion and debate among policymakers around the world”.

Elsewhere (Huisman, 2015), I argued that behind this growth there are patterns of diversity Continue reading →

Vicky Gunn


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Learning Analytics, surveillance, and the future of understanding our students

By Vicky Gunn

There has been a flurry of activity around Learning Analytics in Scotland’s higher education sector this past year. Responding no doubt to the seemingly unlimited promises of being able to study our students, we are excitedly wondering just how best to use what the technology has to offer. At Edinburgh University, a professorial level post has been advertised; at my own institution we are pulling together the various people who run our student experience surveys (who have hitherto been distributed across the institution) into a central unit in Planning so that we can triangulate surveys, evaluations and other contextual data-sets; elsewhere systems which enable ‘early warning signals’ with regards to student drop-out have been implemented with gusto.

I am one of the worst of the learning analytics’ offenders.  My curiosity to observe and understand the patterns in activity, behaviour, and perception of the students is just too intellectually compelling. The possibility that we could crunch all of the data about our students into one big stew-pot and then extract answers to meaning-of-student-life questions is a temptation I find too hard to resist (especially when someone puts what is called a ‘dashboard’ in front of me and says, ‘look what happens if we interrogate the data this way’). Continue reading →


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Knowledge brokers in UK universities: From bewilderment to belonging?

By Christine Knight and Claire Lightowler

Christine Knight photo

Christine Knight

Claire Lightowler photo

Claire Lightowler

In 2010, Dr Claire Lightowler and I were invited to take part in a symposium on Changing academic and professional identities in higher education at the SRHE Annual Conference, organised by Professor Rob Cuthbert. This was my entrée into the world of higher education research.

Following a PhD in food studies, of all things, in 2008 I had found myself working in a new kind of role in the academic social sciences – that of knowledge broker, with a remit to support the use, impact and dissemination of research. Claire had found herself in a similar position, and when we first crossed paths at a professional networking event in Edinburgh, it was a relief to find someone who shared some of my bewilderment. Continue reading →