From an academic perspective, here are four priorities for any new government

A version of this blog appeared on WonkHE under the headline A manifesto for higher education from an academic perspective (09.06.24)

Debates about higher education policy have grown disconnected from frontline university staff. But academics in particular have something unique to bring to the table: first-hand experience of how day-to-day campus activities and cultures have been impacted by a programme of marketisation. Among our headline messages to any incoming government would be:

1. We can’t teach students who don’t have enough to live on. Only a Mickey Mouse funding model would leave young people unable to cover the cost of basic essentials like food, rent and heating. Yet the typical student now gets by at barely £2 per week over the destitution line, 27% of universities operate a food bank, and a staggering 54% of our students say their academic performance is suffering as a result. Some institutions offer hardship funds, but a closer look at the data shows that, in real terms, less help than ever is available. Nothing dims a student’s love of learning like having to work multiple zero-hours jobs. An obvious and relatively inexpensive starting point for policy-makers would be raising the parental income threshold below which students are eligible for the maximum maintenance loan. This has been frozen at £25,000 since 2008 (when many of our current undergrads were still in nappies).
2. Not everything we do needs to be measured. We all accept that universities should be fully accountable and transparent. However, in recent years the sector has been flooded with dubious ‘excellence’ frameworks and league table rankings. Many of these audits rely on the most tenuous of connections between available data and students’ day-to-day learning practices. For example, continuation and completion rates are assumed to reflect teaching quality, even though when a student drops out it is far more likely to be as a consequence of mental health issues or financial pressures than poor pedagogy. Similarly, graduate outcome data have been normalised as indicators of success even though they tell us much more about how society values and rewards different professions than what students actually gain from their higher education. These metrics are now routinely used against the sector to justify politically motivated attacks, such as crackdowns on ‘rip-off’ degrees and ‘low value’ institutions. Courses, departments, and even entire universities face closure on the back of apparent under-performance against methodologically bogus indicators. A return to professional trust would not only give academics more headspace to focus on teaching and research, it would free up institutional resources to better support those core activities.
3. We need bold, new thinking about how universities are funded. It is unfair to expect that academics continue performing at ‘world-leading’ levels while facing perpetual job insecurity. Goodwill has run out. The current funding model has failed in most respects, but many of its proponents continue to dominate the debate, and there’s a worrying sense that a few tweaks here and there can make everything okay again. Many staff and students now want a fundamental discussion about the extent to which market logic is appropriate for universities. Since the introduction of higher fees, we have watched in dismay as budget holders have squandered money on glassy new buildings and excruciating social media recruitment drives, with little if any positive impact on our students’ learning. Plenty of alternative models remain under-explored, from a genuinely progressive graduate tax to levies on graduate employers. But we also need to keep asking why our higher education cannot be reclaimed as a public (and therefore mostly publicly funded) good, as it is in so many other societies.
4. We need to change the ways that higher education – and our international students in particular – are talked about. The recent attempts to end the post-study work visa – dubbed the Deliveroo visa on the mistaken belief that it drives low wage immigration – encapsulates just how hostile some anti-university discourses have become. Not only are the attacks offensive to our hard-working, high-achieving international students, they are also economically illiterate: the current funding model can be made to work only if overseas student fees are set at a level that allows cross-subsidisation of pretty much everything else. Thanks in part to UK sector leaders finding their voice, the post-study work visa survived (albeit too late for the thousands of potential applicants that had already been put off from applying). A narrative that recognises our international students as human beings with dreams and hopes – and celebrates them accordingly – would make teaching them more enjoyable and over-charging them a little less unethical.

Despite being mismanaged and devalued in recent decades, higher education endures in the public imagination as a force for good, with almost all parents aspiring for their children to gain a degree. According to veracity indices, the proportion of Brits who trust university professors to tell the truth is 76% (compared with 51% for lawyers, 39% for bankers and 10% for government ministers). Any new administration would be well advised to place similar trust in academics, and work alongside them – not against them – to bring about the long-term stability that future generations of students deserve.

Cultures of university governance need urgent attention

This piece was first published by WonkHE on 23.01.24.

In recent years, the authority invested in governing bodies has been enlarged and formalised by the Office for Students. As well as providing oversight and guidance, and holding leadership teams to account where necessary, governing bodies are now responsible for ensuring that a range of financial, legal, and other regulatory requirements are met.

But despite the centrality of the governing body within their institution, most university staff would struggle to name any individual members. Indeed, few in the sector have a firm grasp of how governance works, and critical research remains relatively scarce. This is partly explained by the sheer complexity of the field: there are multiple governance models in the English sector alone, many determined by institutional statutes and ordinances, and each seemingly accompanied by its own terminology. But it is also partly because governing bodies tend to stay in the shadows, with openness rarely extending much beyond the periodic release of minutes somewhere on the university website.

Last year, I led a project that sought to lift the lid on governing bodies in English universities. The focus was on cultures and discourses, and how they interfaced with rules and regulations. Between us, my co-investigator Diane Harris and I interviewed current or former governors at over forty higher education institutions. The report, published today by the Council for the Defence of British Universities, confirms that members of the governing body make vital contributions to the running of their universities.

Many interviewees found the role inspiring and described it as a “privilege”. However, the report also raises important questions in several areas: governance protocols that seem needlessly complicated; decision-making practices that can be undemocratic; and power relations that seem to reinforce hierarchies and maximise compliance.

Who you know

A recurring concern for interviewees was that key decisions were taken by a small subset of governors – usually the chair and those senior lay governors charged with running subcommittees – often in lockstep with the vice chancellor and their senior management team. While recent progress in diversity was noted and celebrated, the tendency for positions of greatest influence to be held by wealthy, retired, white men from a corporate background was frequently noted.

Some interviewees mentioned informal dinners, pre-meetings and WhatsApp groups in which institutional strategy was debated but to which they were not invited, leaving formal committees “sort of stage-managed”. Those interviewees within the so-called “inner circle” tended to reject suggestions of cliquishness, countering that in a fast-changing policy environment executive decisions sometimes needed reaching swiftly and away from full meetings of the governing body.

For some interviewees, explicit hierarchies were felt to operate alongside more implicit and localised power dynamics. The agenda for meetings of the governing body was regarded as a crucial document, both in practice and symbolically. However, few interviewees understood how the agenda was set, by whom, or how it could be influenced. Governing body discourses tended to stress how full the agenda was, as reinforced by pre-reading packs that reportedly comprised several hundred pages. Some interviewees acknowledged that the expansion of governing body duties meant that meetings would inevitably become bloated by regulatory requirements, but others suspected that time management tactics were occasionally deployed to prevent discussion of sensitive but substantive issues. Governing body processes were described by one interviewee as “deliberately unclear” and insinuations were made that data and information were sometimes “filtered”.

Some interviewees expressed anxiety about what they regarded as the “hyper-financialisation” of university governance. While it was readily acknowledged that the market turn in higher education policy left universities in greater need of financial proficiency, the specific concern was for those areas now reportedly overlooked in governing body discussions. The educational and research purposes of the university – and the associated commitment to ethics, community, values and social justice – were sometimes considered secondary to budgetary matters.

The mechanism through which new lay (external) governors were identified and recruited was also felt by many interviewees to be suboptimal. Most governing bodies had a sub-committee to oversee nominations, but this was sometimes characterised as a “rubber-stamping” exercise. One interviewee suggested that many new appointments were “convenient for the executive”; another expressed surprise at the “mateyness” between institutional managers and some of those charged with holding them to account.

Frustration

A remarkable aspect of the project was the extent to which a similar critique was put forward by different types of members, whether lay governors, staff governors, or student governors. Most interviewees, aside from those chairing sub-committees or in other positions of designated power, mentioned feeling marginalised at times. The intersection of disempowerment and identity was captured by one interviewee who said: “I always felt like I had to make allies because I was young, because I was a woman, because I was the only student governor.”

Despite the sometimes problematic power relation sketched above, it is clear from this research that most individual governors remain an asset to their institution. They freely give their time and skills because they want to draw on their professional experiences to help oversee and improve how universities are run.

However, for many interviewees reflecting on their contribution, a sense of frustration was tangible. They felt that hierarchical cultures on governing bodies left protocols inscrutable and decision-making processes skewed. For those wanting to challenge dominant thinking, to advocate more directly on behalf of staff and students, or to reinvigorate ideas about higher education as a public good, the experience of university governance was often exasperating as much as it was stimulating.

Further work is needed to establish how the full potential of all university governors can be unleashed. Some interviewees suggested that induction events should more plainly acknowledge the sector’s difficulties, and actively seek to give new recruits the confidence to take on established traditions and pecking orders within their governing body where appropriate. Others felt that a more inclusive code of governance, focused on protecting the interests of campus communities, might act as a reminder that the scope of university governance extends beyond regulatory compliance and financial oversight. The evidence from today’s report suggests that some governing body cultures need urgent attention.

UNIVERSITY GOVERNANCE: Views From the Inside

I’m really pleased to have my report on university governance published by the Council for the Defence of the British University. Thank you to Dr Diane Harris for being the project Co-Investigator.

WonkHE have published three responses so far:

We could change the governors, we could change the governance, by Jim Dickinson.

A longer term view of university governance effectiveness, by Advance HE head of governance and consulting, Collette Fletcher

University governance is changing – but simplistic “representation” is not the answer, by executive secretary of the Committee of University Chairs, John Rushforth.

cdbu-prof-steven-jones-university-governance-report-jan-2024-1Download

UCAS reforms to the personal statement: One step forward, more to go?

Originally published as HEPI Weekend Reading; written by Tom Fryer, Steve Westlake and Steven Jones

On 12 January, UCAS released Future of Undergraduate Admissions, a report that contained details of five upcoming reforms. 

In the report, UCAS proposes to reform the free-text personal statement into a series of questions. This is welcome. As we noted in our recent HEPI Debate Paper on UCAS personal statements, an essay without a question is always going to breed uncertainty.

So the change does represent progress towards a fairer admissions system. However, the number of steps we take towards this fairer system will depend on how the questions are designed. 

The UCAS report makes an initial proposal of six questions across the following topics: 

1. Motivation for Course – Why do you want to study these courses? 
2. Preparedness for Course – How has your learning so far helped you to be ready to succeed on these courses? 
3. Preparation through other experiences – What else have you done to help you prepare, and why are these experiences useful? 
4. Extenuating circumstances – Is there anything that the universities and colleges need to know about, to help them put your achievements and experiences so far into context? 
5. Preparedness for study – What have you done to prepare yourself for student life?
6. Preferred Learning Styles – Which learning and assessment styles best suit you – how do your courses choices match that?

Our first point concerns inequality. To create admissions processes that address inequalities we should use questions that place explicit limits on the number of examples that can be used. If we leave questions open-ended, this risks creating a structure that allows some applicants to gain an advantage over their peers, a key problem with the original format. Also, where possible, questions should stress the acceptability of drawing upon activities, such as caring or part-time work, that may not be deemed ‘high-prestige’. This could minimise the impact of inequalities in access to these ‘high-prestige’ activities. The relatively small number of courses that require formal work experience could gain this information through an optional question.  

Secondly, admissions processes should prioritise applicants’ interests and avoid imposing an unnecessary burden. The current proposals contain several questions that appear similar, which does appear to impose an unnecessary workload on applicants and their advisers. We recommend combining the second (course preparedness), third (preparedness through other experiences) and fifth (study preparedness) questions into one, in order to protect applicants’ interests. 

Thirdly, other commentators have drawn attention to the association of ‘learning styles’ in question 6 with the widely debunked model that classifies people into four different learning modes: visual; aural; read/write; and kinesthetic. This does not seem to have been UCAS’s intention. Instead through informal conversations we understand the question intended to focus on applicants’ preferences for independent study versus contact time, or frequent short assessments versus substantive end-of-year approaches. Regardless, should applicants’ attitudes to learning and assessment influence admissions decisions? There could be a range of reasons why an applicant has chosen a certain provider, including geographical location for those with caring responsibilities, and many of these will trump concerns about learning styles. We recommend removing this question. 

Fourthly, while the report gives evidence that many applicants see the personal statement as an opportunity to advocate for themselves, this alone does not justify the creation of a large number of questions (or indeed, nor does it justify the status quo). Unfortunately, a lack of transparency prevents applicants from understanding how their statement will be read (if it is read at all), and many will be unaware of the research on inequalities in this area. These caveats are important when considering how applicants’ views should feed into discussions about creating an admissions system that protects all applicants. 

Our final point relates to validity. Admissions processes should use valid measures of applicants’ ability to complete their chosen courses. Although there is limited research in this area, we think there are opportunities to improve the proposed questions. 

To take one example, the first question asks ‘Why do you want to study these courses?’. We contend that an abstract question is unlikely to be the most valid way to assess applicants’ motivations. This question is likely to prompt similarly abstract or cliched answers, including in the form ‘Ever since a child…’. As an alternative, in our HEPI paper, we proposed the following: 

Please describe one topic that is related to your course. Please discuss what you have learnt about this topic, through exploring this outside of the classroom. This could include books, articles, blogs, seminars, lectures, documentaries, or any other format. 

This question measures both whether an applicant demonstrates a basic level of motivation and whether they understand what is covered on the course. By asking for a concrete example of a topic they have explored, we believe this question is likely to be a more valid way to assess whether applicants meet a basic level of motivation and preparedness, and it is less likely to result in overly abstract or clichéd responses that reveal little about applicants. 

UCAS’s proposed reforms to personal statements recognise that fair admissions require greater transparency, a more supportive structure, and the prevention of some applicants being placed at a disadvantage. Moving to a series of questions represents one step forward. However, to achieve these goals, the questions must be designed to address inequality and remove unnecessary burdens in a transparent and valid manner.  

There is currently no published research on how personal statements are used in admissions decisions. That’s why we are launching a survey to gather some initial data, which you can access here. 

We are particularly seeking input from people involved with the day-to-day work of undergraduate admissions. We would appreciate it if you could share this with any of your colleagues. We plan to use this data to feed into the public conversation about UCAS’s reforms. 

Reclaiming the university narrative: new stories for an old sector?

On December 7th 2022, I was delighted to give an invited talk about my new book as part of the Bristol Conversations in Education series. My title was Reclaiming the university narrative: new stories for an old sector?

You can watch the video recording (including a really interesting Q&A discussion) here.

UCAS personal statements create inequality and should be replaced by short-response questions

Last week saw the publication of HEPI Debate Paper 31 on Reforming the UCAS Personal Statement.

I’ve been banging on about the UCAS personal statement for over a decade, pointing out that it disadvantages under-represented groups in multiple ways. Initially, there was some pushback (mostly anecdotal), but now there isn’t really much counter-argument at all. Almost everyone in the sector acknowledges that the personal statement is problematic at the very least.

Following the report’s publication, I was asked by a Times Higher journalist why nothing had changed. Being more direct than usual, I said: “Fee-paying schools and colleges have long known that the UCAS personal statement, in its current form, is a chance for their pupils to advantage themselves further in the university application game.”

As well as a powerful independent school lobby persistently advocating for the retention of personal statements, I’d also lay some blame on the elite end of the HE sector. Senior admissions tutors at Russell Group universities often reassure me that nobody actually bothers reading the statements anyway, as though that makes it all okay. Meanwhile, stress levels among students and staff in under-resourced state schools get higher, and the statement continues to provide just enough rope for some applicants to hang themselves.

The HEPI report is an attempt to reach a compromise position. By suggesting that UCAS personal statements should be replaced by short-response questions (rather than scrapped completely), we are trying to meet the sector half way.

I say ‘we‘ but this idea belongs squarely to Tom Fryer, a PhD student of mine. Tom is the report’s main author, and I’m indebted to him for providing new data that supports the case for reform. This data emerges from Write on Point, an organisation that Tom founded to provide young people from under-represented backgrounds with support for writing their statement. Tom is just the kind of thoughtful, self-motivated postgraduate researcher that all supervisors dream of, and I’m very grateful to him for picking up this important issue – and bringing important new evidence to the debate – just as I was beginning to flag!

Will change now happen? Clare Marchant, the chief executive of UCAS, told the Times Higher that she has been working on options for reforming the personal statement since May 2021. Apparently, this has involved consulting with 1,200 students, 170 teachers and advisers, and 100+ universities, and a report outlining proposals for the next admissions cycle will be published in the coming months. But I’m still not holding my breath…

Podcasts as academic book promotion

Since the publication of my latest book, Universities Under Fire, I’ve been asked to give a couple interviews with well-known US podcasters. The genre is new to me, but the experiences were interesting, and it was fun attempting to reach different kinds of audience.

First, I found myself in conversation with Andrew Keen, a San Francisco based entrepreneur and author. Andrew’s questions suggested his familiarity with contemporary English higher education wasn’t in-depth, but his enthusiasm more than compensated for any gaps in knowledge.

Shortly afterwards, I spoke to The Curious Man. The curious man is Matt Crawford, a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. Matt’s insider understandings of how universities operate allowed for a more informed exchange, and I soon warmed to his values and politics.

Podcasts potentially offer a way for scholars to reach much larger audiences, and to influence folk outside the usual conference circle and seminar series. It’s a challenge, because usually the only people who want to talk to you for an hour about a book you’ve written are fellow academics (and among your peers you can safely assume lots of shared knowledge). But engaging with podcasters is a worthwhile endeavour, and I’m grateful for the opportunities that Andrew and Matt afforded me.

The Tory leadership race shows what a soft target universities have become

This piece was originally published in the Times Higher Education (05.08.22)

When the Conservative Party leadership hopefuls launched their campaigns at the start of July, the focus of one candidate, Kemi Badenoch, seemed different from that of the others. In addition to pledging tax cuts and economic growth, Badenoch used her platform to needle the UK higher education sector, taking potshots at universities’ brainwashing of students and their “pointless” degrees.

“Some universities spend more time indoctrinating social attitudes instead of teaching lifelong skills or how to solve problems,” she told The Sun newspaper on 11 July. The following day, writing for The Spectator, Badenoch expressed that anti-university sentiment in a way that was more coded but no less recognisable: “I’m not the sort of person who you can sideline, silence, or cancel,” she warned.

Badenoch has a reputation for HE baiting. When minister for equalities, in late 2020 she used Black History Month to pivot into an attack on critical race theory (CRT), accusing educators of presenting white privilege as fact to their students and describing CRT as “an ideology that sees my blackness as victimhood and their whiteness as oppression”.

The rhetoric was powerful, but it was also misleading. CRT is a set of cross-disciplinary tools and methods that emerged in the late 1980s for exploring racial injustices. It involves analysis of social structures, not individual identities.

The problem is that, as academics, we tend not to be very good at explaining our methodologies. Historically, we haven’t needed to because the separation of state and university was always enough to keep politicians’ noses out of our curricula. But those days have gone, and we must now find ways to articulate more clearly and more persuasively the value of our approaches.

In an age of culture wars, all kinds of petty non-stories can be blown up into a headline event if it is politically expedient to do so. Even a vaguely unpatriotic gesture by a small group of students can be seized upon by a government keen to divert voter gaze from its economic and social policy. Once outrage is manufactured, the truth matters little.

The temptation for universities is to look the other way until the news cycles roll on. But news cycles don’t roll on. For a public conditioned into distrusting universities, the idea that academics are secretly radicalising their students through CRT is depressingly plausible. So politicians and media commentators continue to fabricate or exaggerate tales of “wokeness” on campus: biased lecturers, student snowflakes, Mickey Mouse degrees and no-platforming.

A programme of marketisation has compromised universities, leaving them unsure how to rebut criticism like Badenoch’s. Discourses of the public good have been mostly displaced by a narrow, utilitarian focus on value for money. Right-wing governments realised that universities were a block to free-market thinking, so they sought to impose competition as disciplining strategy. Now the sector is losing confidence in its core social purposes.

Pushing back against increasingly populist forms of government isn’t easy. However, it is vital that the anti-university narrative isn’t allowed to take hold uncontested. Evidence of the limits of a quasi-market in higher education is ubiquitous: graduates repay loans for most of their working lives, but the cost to the state remains substantial; institutions spend millions on marketing, but price differentiation remains rare; and despite institutions being ranked in every way imaginable, traditional hierarchies of prestige are arguably stronger than ever.

Yet vice-chancellors remain reluctant to dissent. Many were quick to accept sizeable pay rises when the marketisation project began, seemingly unaware that they were being co-opted by the reformers. Meanwhile, the sector’s representative bodies stubbornly favour strategies of soft power and behind-the-scenes influence over more public confrontation. So market logic persists despite strong indications that it is neither sustainable nor equitable.

As academics, we are also sometimes complicit in our silence, swept along by tides of metrics and oblivious to the treacherous undercurrents. Those of us fortunate enough to hold permanent posts can turn blind eyes to creeping contractual and intellectual precarity elsewhere, preoccupied by – and sometimes enticed by – an embarrassment of individualistic metrics.

But a counter-narrative needs to emerge from somewhere. Someone needs to be pointing out that universities remain the lifeblood of many communities, particularly in straitened times, and that higher education is one of the few ways through which the status quo can be challenged. The culture wars and the snipes about academic methods are not inconsequential. They form part of an agenda to soften up the sector for further structural overhaul, and ultimately for cleansing society of critical or counter-hegemonic thinking.

Badenoch didn’t make it to the final two in the Conservative leadership contest. However, she progressed further than most commentators expected, and her anti-university sentiment played well with many in her party and beyond. Other politicians and strategists will have noticed the immense capital to be gained from a plain-speaking, anti-woke stance.

They may also have noticed that the UK higher education sector is a soft target because almost no one is fighting back.

Beyond TEF Cynicism: Towards a New Vocabulary of ‘Excellence’?

This piece was first published by the Society for Research into Higher Education (24.10.19)

One might expect that asking a room full of diverse stakeholders to discuss ‘teaching excellence’ would result in all kinds of quarrels and disagreement. In fact, the SRHE’s September 2019 event (The impact of the TEF on our understanding, recording and measurement of teaching excellence: implications for policy and practice) was a refreshingly convivial and creative affair.

Everyone present agreed that the TEF’s proxies for excellence were wholly inappropriate. In fact, there was surprisingly little discussion of existing metrics. We all felt that the consumerist language of ‘value for money’ and the instrumental lens of ‘employability’ were inadequate to capture the nuanced and complex ways in which curiosity can be sparked and orthodoxy challenged in the HE classroom.

Tanya Lubicz-Nawrocka spoke about the absence of the student voice in TEF policy, noting that conceptualisations of ‘excellence’ tend to overlook the very moral and critical components of transformative teaching that students value most highly. Michael Tomlinson drew attention to student-as-consumer framings within the ‘measured market’, noting the inevitability of institutional game-playing, status leveraging and brand promotion in such a relentlessly competitive environment. Both speakers suggested that students were misleadingly empowered, lacking the agency that policy discourses attribute to them.

I tried to push this idea further, beginning my talk by asking whether any lecturer had ever actually changed the way they teach because of government policy. There was broad agreement that while excellence frameworks influenced professional cultures and co-opted university managers, they barely touched academic practice. Lecturers know their own students – and know how to teach them – better than any White Paper.

But is the TEF actually about university teaching at all? Or do too many barriers sit between policy and practice for that to be a realistic aim? Policy enactment in HE is interrupted by institutional autonomy, by academic freedom and, increasingly, by lecturers’ professional identity. The TEF’s real purpose, I would argue, is more about manipulating the discourse. It manufactures a crisis, positioning intractable academics as the problem and students as the victim, thus allowing competition to come along and save the day.

Grade inflation is one area in which the contradictions of top-down policy discourse are laid bare. The market demands that lecturers mark students’ work generously (so that ‘value added’ columns in league tables don’t hold back institutional ranking). Then policymakers wade in, attacking institutions for artificial increases and threatening fines for those who persist. The logic is inconsistent and confused, but this matters little – the discourse persuades voters that their own hard-won education successes are being devalued by a sector overprotective of its ‘snowflake’ customer base.

TEF provider statements offer the opportunity for universities to fight back, but evidence suggests they’re bland and indistinct, tending towards formulaic language and offering little additional clarity to the applicant.

But despite such missed opportunities, 73 Collier Street was full of new ideas. Opposition to metrics wasn’t based on change-resistance and ideological stubbornness. Indeed, as respondent Sal Jarvis noted, we urgently need to measure, understand and close differential attainment gaps in many areas, such as ethnicity. But there was consensus that current proxies for ‘excellence’ were incomplete, and creative thoughts about how they could be complemented. What about capturing graduates’ long-term well-being instead of their short-term satisfaction? Or encouraging institutions to develop their own frameworks based on their specific mission and their students’ needs? How about structural incentives for collaboration rather than competition? And a focus on teaching processes, not teaching outcomes?

The argument that the TEF is less about changing pedagogies than manipulating wider discourses shouldn’t bring any comfort to the sector. I tried to show how the dominant logic of teaching excellence primes the sector for more fundamental policy shifts, such as for-profit providers receiving taxpayer subsidy on pedagogical grounds. One delegate spoke to me at the end of the event to offer another example, explaining how employability-minded managers within his institution were squeezing out critical engagement with cultural theory to allow for further skills-based, professional training. The TEF may not change practice directly, but it retains the power to nudge the sector away from its core public roles towards more privatised and instrumental practices.

The challenge for us is to articulate a confident and robust defence of all kinds of university teaching. We need to explain how our pedagogies bring lifelong gains both to our students and to wider society, even if initial encounters can be difficult and unsettling. Policy has taken us a long way down the market’s cul-de-sac, but what’s reassuring is that we’re now moving on from TEF-bashing towards a coherent counter-narrative. This event confirmed that universities have more meaningful things to crow about than their fleeting goldenness against a bunch of false proxies.

2019 National Teachers and Advisers Conference – slides

Good to meet so many committed and clued-up school staff at this event last week. Unconditional offers clearly remain a big concern for colleagues in the pre-18 sector, and questions were asked about why universities remains complicit in ‘pressure selling‘ something that it is to the detriment of young people, and may hit disadvantaged youngsters hardest.

The slides from my presentation are here:

2019-05 (final pdf) – Steven Jones – UoM – National Teachers and Advisers Conference.