Oh, the humanities

The humanities have long faced crisis, but 2018 has been a particularly bad year. In launching the post-18 education funding review, Theresa May and Damian Hinds suggested that all subjects are not born equal, and hinted that the review might separate subjects by differential fees. With a growing focus on graduate earnings, and data now available to cut up earnings by subject and institution, it’s widely accepted that the looming changes to the system will not favour those subjects often characterised as self-indulgent, less valuable, and cheaper to deliver than others.

And indeed, taken as a whole, humanities graduates do earn less than those who studied sciences. We’re told that we need coders and technicians, not Norse scholars, video artists, or art historians.

However, that narrative about the humanities doesn’t stand up to scrutiny; politics combines history and social science, dance is often vocational, engineers and designers work hand-in-hand, and medicine requires creativity. Simple labels don’t really work. Even with a narrow focus on earnings, some humanities graduates go on to the highest-paid careers.

Crucially, the uniquely human concerns of these subjects are essential to understand and respond to the challenges society faces. They always have been. People need help adapting to modern technology, international trade requires cultural competence, and scientific breakthroughs rest on global interdisciplinarity. Critical thinking and creativity will become increasingly important if we are to distinguish workers from algorithms.

For the humanities, there have been problems at every level of the pipeline: changes to school curricula, tight budgets, and staff recruitment shortages combine to mean fewer students are taking art at school, universities are closing modern languages departments and offering fewer courses, and 14% fewer students now study history and philosophy than five years ago. Already the preserve of the privileged, the arts risk becoming even less representative of modern Britain’s diversity.

Today on Wonkhe, we begin a series looking at the state of the humanities and the current policy environment around them:

• Loic Menzies and Anita Kerwin-Nye argue that threats to the arts in UK schools mean universities need to take action now if they’re to secure a pipeline of future students.
• Sally Shuttleworth of the University of Oxford warns that student choice is being limited.
• The narrative that the humanities are "irrelevant luxuries" is pernicious and harmful. Jon Wilson of King's College London makes the case for the vocational and cultural value of such study.
• Emma Hunt of Arts University Bournemouth calls on the government to focus on creativity.
• David Kernohan makes sense of humanities by the numbers.

With the review of post-18 education funding now underway, on 3 July in London, Wonkhe is bringing together the higher education community to discuss the future of fees and funding across the UK.

Speakers include:

• Phillip Augar, Chair, post-18 funding review panel

• Helen Carasso, co-author of “Everything for Sale? The Marketisation of UK Higher Education”, University of Oxford

• Gavan Conlon and Maike Halterbeck, London Economics

• Alison Jones, Director of Planning, Legal and Governance, University of Bradford and Chair, HESPA

• Andrew McGettigan, HE funding expert and author of “The Great University Gamble: money, markets and the future of higher education”

• Sally McGill, CFO, Durham University and Chair, BUFDG

• Anna Vignoles, Professor of Education, University of Cambridge

Book your place now

After the goldrush: what’s happened to teaching excellence?

The Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework, the new subject-level TEF, Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO), the National Student Survey (NSS)... we’ve no shortage of data sources that purport to tell us something about the quality of teaching in the sector. And we’ve been round and round and back over the limitations of each, even as proxy measures, many times on Wonkhe.

But say, for whatever reason, someone who teaches in higher education feels like their teaching is not up to scratch. What do they do, and what exists to support them? Institutionally they would probably talk to an educational developer who would probably be a SEDA (Staff and Educational Development Association) member. Nationally, Advance HE still offers subscribing institutions many of the services that the old Higher Education Academy used to offer: support for training new teachers, fellowships, and conferences.

But what if our hypothetical staff member actually wants to do something themselves about the issue – experiment, research, develop new approaches? As of 2018, no national sources of funding for such work exist in England, Wales, or Northern Ireland, and very little in Scotland. Likewise, no funding exists nationally – aside from a few very small SEDA and SRHE (Society for Research into Higher Education) grants – to support the work of educational developers.

Presenting at last week’s SEDA Spring Conference in Leeds, Wonkhe’s David Kernohan traced the last thirty years (and nearly £1bn) of direct and indirect teaching quality enhancement funding – and makes a call for the return of small project funding to support the work of staff who simply want to give students the educational experience they deserve.

On Wonkhe:

Long read: After the goldrush: Thirty years of teaching quality enhancement.

You might have missed on Wonkhe

There is an absence of reliable quantitative data on how Scottish students in higher education manage their money and what they think about it. Lucy Hunter Blackburn delves into an unexpected source of data from the Department for Education.

Mary Stuart argues for the role of leadership in supporting the university as a community of scholars.

Aaron Porter presents the findings from the Whatuni student satisfaction survey and asks what providers can do to reverse the downward trend in student satisfaction.

What do the Welsh government’s regulatory reforms mean for universities? Kieron Rees from Universities Wales takes us through the implications of the recent technical consultation on reforms to the oversight of post-16 education in Wales.

GuildHE Chief Executive Gordon McKenzie shares five ways the post-18 review can “Augar” well, and calls for a more open debate about the balance of costs of the HE system between taxpayers, learners, and employers.

How successful are BTEC students at university? Pallavi Amitava Banerjee from the University of Exeter looks at the data, which suggests that students with BTEC qualifications are more likely to fail to progress within undergraduate study.

Are we missing the point on leadership diversity? Rachel Handforth of Sheffield Hallam University considers the “leaky pipeline” issue, which sees a continuous loss of women as you look higher up the career ladder, and calls for institutions to take action to address the under-representation of women in the doctoral student community.

Is the progression lottery a fair game? Wayne Turnbull and Harvey Woolf look at how best to support students who struggle to complete their first year in higher education.

The Office of the Independent Adjudicator’s Barry McHale explains why complaints can be seen as student engagement in its richest form: student complaints can hugely benefit an institution and other students in that, even if one complainant’s situation cannot be resolved, the lessons learned from the case could prevent the same situation occurring again.

Titus Alexander of Democracy Matters suggests three ways to increase the impact of research using practical politics.

On Registrarism:

A look at the stars of stage and screen who have received honorary degrees from universities.

A review of a new crime thriller set in an English university.

Introducing the I Spy Universities series. How many points for a "Sam on Campus" tour stop?

And breaking with tradition, Registrarism writes about actual bands on campus.

What else is going on

BrHExit: a student remain movement

Sixty students’ unions are combining forces to campaigns for a “people’s vote” on the terms of Britain’s EU exit deal. The SUs represent nearly one million students across the country, with the National Union of Student’s vice president for higher education, Amatey Doku, a spokesman for the group. Working under the banner FFS, for our future’s sake, the organisation aims to mobilise students through on-campus groups and contacting MPs. The Labour Party is also a target for the campaign, with the chair of Labour Students, Melantha Chittenden, telling The Guardian, “It’s wrong to think students only care about student-specific issues like Erasmus – they care passionately about staying in the customs union and retaining freedom of movement, they understand the rights and protections that the EU affords us all and will do anything to defend that.”

Final pay offer

The Universities and Colleges Employers Association (UCEA) negotiations with the HE unions concluded last week after the last of three meetings. The final offer from employers is for a minimum 2% increase in pay, with increases up to 2.8% for staff on the lowest pay band. UCEA stressed that the average increase in pay would be 3.5% given automatic pay progression for many. They also agreed joint work on casualisation and gender pay.

A manifesto for social mobility

Social mobility charity Brightside and the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) published an HE access "manifesto" for the Office for Students (OfS). It features 35 action points, each by authors from different stakeholder groups, including academics, widening participation practitioners, think tanks, and students. Recommendations include the appointment of a new commissioner for student mental health, fee waivers for asylum-seekers, and post-qualification admissions as well as fully linked data to assess the impact of policies contained in providers' access agreements. In response, Chris Millward of OfS agreed that a more transparent admissions system is needed, and that more work is required for applicants to have a "genuine choice" of routes into higher education at different life stages.

On Wonkhe:

Diana Beech introduces HEPI’s “manifesto” for widening participation, which features 35 action points for OfS, each by 35 different authors from across the sector.

OfS data strategy not found

Documents continue to emerge from OfS – with recent weeks including a strategy, business plan, and guide to funding. It is difficult to imagine anyone other than us reading these things or noting the subtle changes in direction implied by wording and emphasis. We learned from the business plan that active interventions in the market (including commissioning and the much-discussed validation powers) are still very much on the table – and that we can expect OfS reports on degree classifications by the end of the summer, and both unconditional offers and senior staff remuneration by the end of the year.

But one document we will not see in the near future is the expected OfS data strategy, as we understand that this planned consultation has been shelved. The high-level principles underpinning the OfS use of data will come to define the majority of the work of the regulator – and the most common interface with institutions. We confidently expect that OfS will be consulting informally with the likes of the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS), and UCISA (the institutional IT managers’ representative organisation), but hope other sector voices will be able to feed in to this critically important work.

On Wonkhe:

The range of systems needed to run a modern university is vast, but is the sector ready for real-time data? Peter Tinson of UCISA shares his thoughts.

David Kernohan reports on the essential information in the OfS business plan.

SLC: Steve Lacked Control

Having successfully moved on from the shadow cast by the “Steve Lamey era”, the Student Loans Company (SLC) now has the chance to see the lack of oversight regarding the appointment offered by the Department for Education (DfE) brought into focus. The National Audit Office last week fingered ex-HE Minister Jo Johnson for forcing through Lamey’s appointment even after concerns had been raised during the recruitment process, and noted deficiencies in the ongoing DfE/SLC relationship.

Lamey’s subsequent commitment to working his way through more Nolan issues than the touring production of Blood Brothers could and should have been addressed earlier – and the report leaves the DfE facing awkward questions about its oversight of a body that distributes a significant amount of public funding.

Scottish learner journeys

Of particular interest to Scottish universities in the seventeen recommendations of the Learner Journey Review (covering 15- to 24-year-olds) is the potential for rationalisation at SCQF level 7, the final year of school (advanced highers), which overlaps with college provision and the first year of undergraduate programmes in Scotland but with differential volumes of credit. The report concluded that “We will minimise unnecessary duplication at SCQF level 7”, but doesn’t specify exactly how or give a timeline for alignment (“a number of years”). There are multiple references to better coordination between universities, colleges, and schools, and the conclusion that “We will support colleges and universities to ensure more learners progress from college to all our universities without unnecessary duplication of SCQF credit.” While not surprising conclusions, the review progresses a number of policy themes shaping the Scottish HE sector, and further signals the willingness for the Scottish government to exercise more than a little influence in how universities operate.

School sponsorship suggestion scrapped

The government finally unveiled its response to the consultation in 2016, which included the expectation that universities would need to become formal sponsors of academies or free schools. There was much resistance to the plans from HE providers, and the conclusion is that working with schools to raise attainment can have a broader definition than sponsorship. Rather than a new initiative, working with schools is already embedded within OfS’s guidance on access and participation plans. Ultimately, the press coverage focused on the expansion of grammar schools, with the inevitable polarised views on their capacity to improve outcomes.

RIP RPI?

The House of Commons Treasury Select Committee said last week that using the "flawed" RPI (Retail Price Index) interest rate for student loans (up to 6.3% from autumn) is "absurd" and "grossly unfair", and that it should be abandoned in favour of the more reliable CPI (Consumer Price Index) rate (currently 2.3%). It also said charging students interest while still studying was “punitive”.

The DfE said that RPI provided “consistency over time” and that the outcomes of the post-18 review cannot be pre-judged.

Further free speech confusion

Sam Gyimah’s ability to weave a press release that gets him front pages out of the thinnest of materials continues to astound. A long-planned small meeting of sector luminaries on the vexed topic of free speech is hardly a huge development, and by all accounts the meeting itself was nothing to write home about, but the widely-touted (and more media-friendly) “summit” managed to spread across many newspapers’ column inches last week.

Meanwhile, a picture of Theresa May in an Oxford geography building itself prompted the free speech alarm as students (and staff) added their comments and annotations to the installation. Yet the temporary removal of the picture (as it is shifted to a place higher up on the wall that eager post-it clenching hands cannot reach) was described by Gyimah as an affront to May herself - even though those in need of a static, unconvincing, image of the prime minister could simply watch PMQs [seems fair - Ed].

Also on this week's HE agenda...

Monday 14th May

• GuildHE is running a workshop on understanding the Higher Education – Business and Community Interaction (HE-BCI) Survey.
• It’s education questions in the House of Commons at around 2.30 pm.

Tuesday 15th May

• The House of Commons Education Select Committee will take evidence on the quality of apprenticeships and skills training at 9.45 am.
• The Association of University Administrators will hold a workshop in Manchester on managing change.
• The Universities and Colleges Employers Association (UCEA) will hold an event on mediation skills for leaders, managers and HR professionals in London.
• The Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services (AGCAS) will hold a three-day residential course at the University of Warwick on understanding the issues impacting the delivery of work experience in HE.

Wednesday 16th May

• The House of Commons Education Select Committee will take evidence on the government’s careers strategy at 10 am. The committee will meet representatives from the Careers and Enterprise Company.
• Advance HE will hold its summit on BME leadership in higher education in London.
• GuildHE will host a REF impact roundtable.
• The Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) will hold a UK Quality Code advice and guidance workshop in Glasgow.
• The Universities Human Resources (UHR) North West is holding its Business Partner Conference 2018 at the University of Salford.
• It is PraxisAuril’s Spring Conference in Telford (until Friday)

Thursday 17th May

• The Higher Education Funding Council for Wales (HEFCW) will hold its council meeting.
• QAA will hold an event on Contract Cheating and Academic Integrity in Gloucester.

Friday 18th May

• The Academic Registrars Council will hold its timetabling practitioners group meeting in London.
• UCEA will hold a workshop on considerations when recruiting staff from overseas in Manchester.