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How online learning can help tackle global injustices

by Sam Spiegel

How can online learning programmes help tackle systemic global injustices with creative pedagogies? How can universities build effective educational environments and pedagogies to support critical thinking and vigorously challenge contemporary forms of racism, colonialism and inequity?

These are some of the questions I have reflected on over the past almost 14 years of teaching at the University of Edinburgh. In 2011, I embarked with colleagues at the School of Social and Political Science to develop our school’s first fully online distance learning MSc postgraduate programmes, partnering with an interdisciplinary team spanning the three Colleges  of the University to co-create and co-teach the MSc in Global Challenges. Addressing global development, health and environmental inequalities, with case studies spanning an array of countries, this programme had students from all over the world. The insights and trajectories of our students have been deeply inspirational – many of our students have gone on to do PhDs, work with United Nations organisations, embassies, non-governmental and humanitarian organisations and work in other kinds of practitioner and research careers. In this blog I reflect on the philosophy of the teaching and learning approach we have nurtured – and associated critical conversations about pedagogy.

We had support from a Principal’s Teaching Award (PTAS) to explore student learning experiences and reflect on our teaching practices, and in 2016 we published an article: ‘Decolonising online development studies? Emancipatory aspirations and critical reflections–a case study’. At the time, it was one of the few critical pedagogy studies to think through ‘international development’ teaching and the risks of replicating colonial logics in online learning modalities (and how to try to counter these). It proposed a critical framework for analysis that took into account barriers to social inclusivity – including the politics of language – that shaped participation dynamics in the programme. It also considered debates regarding critical development course content, rethinking possibilities for bridging counter-hegemonic development scholarship with practice-oriented approaches in a range of social contexts. Our analysis unpacked tensions in tackling intertwined institutional and pedagogic dilemmas for an agenda towards decolonising online development studies, positioning decolonisation as a necessarily unsettling and contested process that calls for greater self-reflexivity.

Some years ago online learning initiatives were treated with suspicion as a technology craze that could not truly build effective communities of critical learners. This is no longer the case, generally speaking. Our online students have carved out sophisticated learning paths while interacting with ambitious courses – sometimes in live discussions and sometimes in asynchronous discussions that built incredible communities of practice. But there are important online learning-specific pedagogic points to keep in mind, as course instructors craft and adapt approaches to support individual and group learning.

One is the risk of re-entrenching problematic dynamics of imperial knowledge production, even when intentions are to do exactly the opposite. There is a need to ensure that online learning platforms grapple with colonial legacies and tendencies – including biases that are easily replicable in virtual technology platforms. It is increasingly recognised that ‘decolonising’ is not simply a matter of ‘bringing in’ authors from Global South countries in reading lists. It is also a matter of ensuring that the underpinning pedagogies, assignments, and learning strategies themselves tackle systemic biases that have often shaped the field of ‘international development’ – and doing so from the outset. This may mean inviting students into at-times uncomfortable conversations about ways of understanding histories of dispossession, or ways of thinking about and governing societies; and ensuring that early course activities trouble assumptions – including about what ‘development’ is/means to different people and whose values are prioritised or overlooked. Some students might not normally read the writings of those who fought during liberation wars against colonialism, for example, but might find such readings different and transformative. There are a range of other possibilities, too, from changing the way that case studies are framed – for example, starting with stories of heavily oppressed peoples instead of starting with the technocratic logics of United Nations and government reports.

Despite global talk of ‘decolonisation,’ there has been a tendency for globally renowned development academics from wealthy countries to dominate reading lists. We have tried in our courses to challenge this – and ensure that activity-focused coursework and online case studies challenge hegemonic assumptions in mainstream policy literature and development discourse. Some of the reflections on our pedagogy were also discussed in a wider influential review article by Shahjahan et al (2022) entitled ‘”Decolonizing” curriculum and pedagogy: A comparative review across disciplines and global higher education contexts’, which notes that ‘decolonization’ has been very differently treated by different educators. Our pedagogy work has also been part of a wider conversation in the scholarly literature on how “precautions need to be taken when incorporating non-Western knowledges into Western universities to avoid mishearing, misrepresenting, exploiting, and decontextualizing them” (Lau and Mendes, 2024; see also Spiegel et al, 2024).

Relatedly, there is a need to be cautious of ideas about “transfer of knowledge” and instead to embrace values built on reciprocal sharing of knowledge in educational practices (see also Parmentier, 2023). Furthermore, attempts at decolonising development education requires attention to the link between learning strategy and wider institutional practices, including heeding inequities in admissions processes and language barriers in higher education. Our work in developing new online learning pedagogies is just part of the story; we have also been interacting closely with university admissions offices on strengthening approaches to make admissions more inclusive. This has included greater recognition of practitioner qualifications and also, significantly, some modifications in how English language testing requirements were addressed in some of the countries affected. This was especially important in contexts where applicants had demonstrable English language proof, from institutional and/or university experiences, but lived far from test centres and could not afford testing.

Our article ‘Decolonising Online Development Studies?’ had a question mark in the title, alluding to the ambiguity of interpretation and the uncertainties that may play out over time. It was cited in other PTAS-awarded studies led by other staff members at UoE, supporting further analysis of specific techniques for building online learning communities (see Wood et al, 2021) How these ideas are to be taken forward is an ethically important conversation that relates to the very core of what education seeks to do, requiring ongoing attention to the interplay of values, philosophies, curricula and teaching techniques.

Dr Sam Spiegel is the director of the Global Challenges MSc programme at the University of Edinburgh, where he serves as the Deputy Director of Research for Knowledge Exchange and Impact at the School of Social and Political Science. He is also a senior lecturer at the Centre of African Studies and has published extensively with colleagues in Zimbabwe and in other regions of the world on migration, displacement, borders, critical pedagogy and social change.


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What is a ‘research culture’?

by GR Evans

Should  higher education providers foster a ‘research culture’? As the body responsible for research under the Higher Education and Research Act (2017), UK Research and Innovation offers its own definition. Such a ‘culture’ will encompass ‘the behaviours, values, expectations, attitudes and norms’ of ‘research communities’, influence ‘researchers’ career paths and determine ‘the way that research is conducted and communicated’.  The Royal Society adopts the same wording.

Nevertheless, agreed definition seems elusive. The British Academy points to ‘the impact and value research’ in the humanities and related disciplines ‘can deliver to policy makers and the wider public’. The Wellcome Trust is critical of ‘current practices’, which it says ‘prioritise outputs at almost any cost’ It encourages ‘curiosity-based ideas’, even if they fail to make discoveries. Cambridge University has an Action Research on Research Culture project in collaboration with the University of Edinburgh, Leiden University, Freie Universität Berlin and ETH Zurich, suggesting international reach towards defining such a culture.  A Concordat and Agreements Review (April 2023) formed a joint attempt to define ‘research culture’ initiated by Universities UK, UKRI and Wellcome. It found it was not sure ‘what a positive research culture looks like’ or what ‘research culture framework to adopt’.

Research is a relative newcomer to the work of English universities. Under the Oxford and Cambridge Act (1877). s.15, the  Commissioners who were to  frame new Statutes for each of the two universities were required to ‘have regard to the interests of education, religion, learning and research’. The inclusion of ‘research’ was still a recent arrival in universities. The prompting had come from German universities, whose influence in linking a doctorate with research had rather reluctantly been recognised. Research-based Doctorates of Philosophy began to be awarded in the USA, with Yale leading the way in 1861.

Oxford and Cambridge took note. Reform of their ancient doctorates was called for in any case. The award of doctorates in Divinity had ceased to depend on advanced scholarship, and had often became more or less honorific as new Bishops began to be granted an automatic Doctorate of Divinity. The transatlantic Doctorates of Philosophy were something new because they were expressly intended for award to younger scholars on the basis of a first research exercise. From the end of the nineteenth century Oxford and Cambridge experimented with postgraduate Bachelors degrees awarded on the basis of a piece of original research. Doctorates for young scholars came next and in 1921 Oxford granted its first DPhil and Cambridge its first PhD, both expecting original research. After some debate the existing ancient doctorates became ‘higher ‘doctorates, to be awarded to more senior scholars, normally on the basis of a significant body of published research. In all this lay the beginnings of an academic ‘research culture’, though well into the twentieth century the Fellows of Colleges did not usually have – or seek – doctorates. ‘Vacancies’ for academic jobs commonly express a preference for a candidate to have a postgraduate degree but do not  require  it.

The multiplication of English universities which began in the early nineteenth century was added to considerably from the end of the nineteenth century with the creation of the ‘redbrick’ universities in major cities. It began to be taken for granted that universities would be responsible for research as well as teaching. However when polytechnics became universities under the Further and Higher Education Act in 1992 they preserved contracts mainly concerned with teaching. That has remained the case with UCU’s ‘Post-1992 National Contract’. An institution may choose to add research to the contracts of its own academics. ‘Teaching-only’, ‘Teaching and Scholarship’ and ‘Teaching-focussed’ academic jobs have  become increasingly common.

Some universities now seek to fix the proportions of the time their teaching-and-research academics may spent on research. The private ‘alternative providers’ encouraged by Governments in the first decades of the twenty-first century have rarely made a significant effort to be research-active so far. with the Office for Students mentioning only one actively seeking research-degree-awarding powers. Cuts to contracted research time are threatened with the increasing pressure on university budgets,  Kent for example lowering it from 40% to 20%.

Doctorates continue to proliferate at DPhil/PhD level, but they may no longer require research as formerly understood. With many providers offering ‘Professional’ doctorates, leading for example to a Doctorate in Business, a Doctorate in Education, a Doctorate in Engineering,  the thesis may be replaced partly or wholly by professional experience and study may take place in conjunction with paid work as a required element.

‘Taught’ Masters degrees and even ‘taught doctorates’  have begun to multiply. For ‘Taught Doctorates’, advanced study may involve taught courses rather than, or in addition to, independent research. The ‘taught’ element may involve lectures on or exposition of the skills needed in research, or include elements in the content of the subject of the Doctorate.

Research expands to include ‘innovation’ and ‘knowledge exchange’

The definition of ‘research’ has been expanding to include ‘innovation’ and ‘knowledge exchange’, both now responsibilities of UKRI. ‘Innovate UK’ had its origins in the ‘Lambert’ Review of Business-University Collaboration (2003). This considered the ‘demand for research from business’ alongside the ‘dual support’ system of university funding, with infrastructure funded from the block grant and funding for research projects dependent on grants and the Research Councils. Lambert ‘proposed a number of principles that should be adopted to encourage world-class business research’. This encouraged the view that the ‘originality’ of research could include ‘innovation’.

Governments have actively encouraged ‘Knowledge Exchange’. The Knowledge Exchange Framework is now the responsibility of Research England within UKRI.It embraces a range of modes of ‘exchange’: partnerships involving collaborative research; contract research; consultancy; working with business; ‘continuing professional development’; intellectual property and its commercialisation; public and community engagement; local growth and regeneration, some but not all  having a defined ‘research’ element. In 2020 a Concordat for the advancement of Knowledge Exchange in Higher Education, was prompted in part to ‘deliver the UK Government’s R&D 2.4% target’ and also to ‘tackle challenges such as levelling up prosperity across the country’, as Amanda Solloway, then Minister for Science, Research and Innovation, put  in her Foreword in 2020.

In 2015 the creation of Degree Apprenticeships added a recognised further addition to ‘teaching’ in higher education, offering a form of  ‘professional’ or ‘technical’ research. Providers were to ‘specialise in working with industry and employers’. Their teaching would be: “hands-on and designed to prepare students for their careers. Their knowledge and research drive industry and the public services to innovate, thrive and meet challenges”.

However an apprenticeship is first and foremost an employment. The relationship with the exercise of degree-awarding powers has been found to carry a  heavy ‘regulatory burden’. Providers complain that they are ‘caught up in a tangle of regulation and unnecessary bureaucracy, which is hampering growth and innovation’. Degree apprenticeships have not yet caught on, for these reasons and because they are found to be ‘costly to deliver’.

Funding for them may be uncertain. The Apprenticeship Levy is a tax dating from 2015 and enforced by the  Finance Act (2016). Its operation is one of the responsibilities of the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA). It is paid by employers with a pay bill of over £3m, with Government contributing from it to the training costs for small businesses. However the Levy does not fund Degree Apprenticeships.

There have been calls for the Lifelong Loan Entitlement to include degree apprenticeships but the most recent Government Policy Paper (April 2024) embracing Higher Technical Qualifications (HTQs) and including ‘modules of technical courses of clear value to employers’, is still working with the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (IfATE) about the possible application of  the LLE when ‘qualifications submitted to the gateway are technical in nature’. There is therefore some way to go before degree apprenticeships can become accepted postgraduate qualifications expressly involving research and with reliable sources of funding.

Funding for an institutional ‘research culture’ goes beyond higher education providers

Taxpayer-funding for universities began to be allocated by the academic-led University Grants Committee (UGC) from 1919. It was to take the form of a block grant, which the recipient university might allocate as it chose. At the end of the twentieth century the UGC was replaced first, briefly, by a single Funding Council and then, under the Further Education and Research Act (1992) by four separate Funding Councils for the nations of the UK, with the Higher Education Funding Council for England taking over the task for England. The new Act stipulated the permitted application of taxpayer funding for higher education between teaching and research, or for the support of either.

Under the Thatcher Government public funding for higher education was reduced, leaving the University Grants Committee less to allocate from the 1980s. (Shattock, 1984; Shattock, 2008) The decision was taken to vary grants for funding according to the research performance of universities. The resulting ‘quality-related’ (QR) research ‘selectivity’ made it necessary to devise measurements of the research results to be rewarded. In 1986 the UGS sought statements from universities on their subject areas by cost, with samples of  five ‘outputs’ from each. Satisfactory research performance came to be shaped largely by measurements of this kind.

A further exercise in ‘research selectivity’ followed in 1989. When the UGC was replaced by the statutory Universities Funding Council, another exercise followed in 1992. Its findings prompted an application for judicial review from the Institute of Dental Surgery alleging that its performance had not been properly measured. The court accepted that the Institute had had independent status for grant purposes under Education Reform Act (1988), s.235(1) and the judgment gave a detailed description of the process which had been followed in arriving at the relatively low rating the Institute was challenging. It faulted the Funding Council for its failure to give reasons for a decision which would affect future funding for the Institute of Dental Surgery.  That prompted some rethinking of the procedure to be used for rating a higher education provider’s research so as to allocate funding selectively.

The Further and Higher Education Act of 1992 replaced the short-lived first single Funding Council with four national statutory funding bodies. The resulting Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) conducted its own Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) every few years,  amending the procedure and requirements each time, with  infrastructure ‘teaching and research’ funding duly allocated on the basis of  its results.

After the exercise of 2001 with its 68 Units of Assessment there was growing concern about the fairness of a method of assessment based on disciplinary or subject ‘units’. The Second Report of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee (April 2002) heard evidence to that effect and recommended that HEFCE ‘ensure that its quality assessment does not discourage or disadvantage interdisciplinary research’, arguing that ‘such research offers some of the most fertile ground for innovation and discovery’. That adjustment proved difficult to achieve.

The RAE was replaced in 2014 by the Research Excellence Framework (REF). Costing £246m in 2014, the REF proved to be vastly more expensive than the RAE, which had cost £66m for the 2008 exercise. It was last held in 2021 with Research England in charge instead of HEFCE. It is scheduled to be repeated in 2029.

The ‘Stern’ Report, Building on Success and Learning from Experience: an Independent Review of the Research Excellence Framework (2016), was commissioned to report on the REF of 2014. It recommended simplification of the REF submission requirements for HEIs, and rethinking of the use to be made by Government of the resulting data. It approved of continuing the long-established dual support system, with a non-hypothecated taxpayer-funded block grant dependent on institutional performance and separate project funding to be sought competitively from the Research Councils, charities and other funders.

Stern,arguing that assessment should better recognise the reality of the ways in which academic research was conducted in HEIs, used the expression  ‘research environment’ rather than ‘research culture’. In the light of the problems caused for ‘career choices, progression and morale’ for academic and research staff of selection of individuals for submission it recommended that ‘all research active staff should be returned in the REF’ and that ‘outputs’ should not be ‘portable’ to other institutions. It discouraged the hiring of ‘tall poppies’ to improve an institution’s standing in research and urged that peer review should be made more transparent. Like the RAE the REF has encouraged gaming in the recruitment of researchers. However, the REF added the criterion of ‘impact’, broadly conceived in terms of the benefit an institution’s research brought to the economy and society. That addition began to reshape public policy and  encourage the framing of a concept of an institutional ‘research culture’.

The separation of research from teaching

The ‘block grant’ lasted for nearly a century until the Higher Education and Research Act of 2017 abolished HEFCE and placed teaching and research in different Departments of State, allocating the responsibilities respectively to new bodies, the Office for Students and UK Research and Innovation. In future a much-reduced portion of teaching funding was to be allocated to providers by a new Office for Students, to supplement the income now available from higher undergraduate tuition fees. With the abolition of HEFCE, public infrastructure funding for research (laboratories and libraries) was to be allocated by Research England which was placed within  the new UK Research and Innovation. Project funding was to continue to be sought in the form of grants, including those from Research Councils  which were also moved within UKRI.

Uncertainty about the acceptability of the REF continues despite these radical organisational changes. UKRI published a review of ‘perceptions’ about the exercise of 2021. It found that views were mixed. Among the negatives were the institutional cost and negative effects of repeated measurement and the potential distortion of freedom to pursue an inquiry which might not turn out to improve the institution’s ratings, with damaging funding consequences. The review also had something to say on the effect the REF was felt to have on early career researchers. An international Agreement on reforming research assessment was arrived at in July 2022. This called for assessment to ‘reward the originality of ideas, the professional research conduct, and results beyond the state-of-the-art’.  There were calls for the abolition of the REF in England, or for changes to be made before it was held again.   

Public funding of research beyond higher education

In How we fund higher education providers (May 2023), Research England gives an account of its responsibilities in allocating the taxpayer funding of research. It is not limited to providers of higher education. Research England explains that it can fund  the research and ‘knowledge exchange’ activities not only of higher education providers (HEPs)’ and also ‘other organisations that carry out services in relation to research or knowledge exchange in eligible HEPs’.

Plans for completion of the next REF were deferred to 2029 in response to concerns raised about its content and purpose, in particular how it was to reflect the element of ‘People, Culture and Environment’. It was agreed that a ‘pilot’, still conducted in eight disciplinary areas, would be needed to settle the design of ‘indicators’. This agreement was initiated with the help of Technopolis and CRAC-Vitae (part of the Careers Research & Advisory Centre). Vice-Chancellors and other heads of research-active higher education providers funded by Research England were sent a letter explaining the plan and with a link to current expectations. However there were mixed views about the definition of ‘research culture’.

The need for ‘selectivity’ has continued to require ‘measurement’. This encourages an emphasis  on ‘research activity’ rather than the fostering of the still imperfectly-defined ‘research culture’.

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


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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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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 →