SRHE Newsletter
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SRHE NEWS NO 2 May 2010 The world to come This issue of SRHE NEWS will be circulated just before the UK general election on 6th May. The financial prospects for UK higher education seem bleak, whatever the election result, and this reflects the situation in much of the developed world, as ‘Cutswatch’ in this issue shows. Echoing 1997’s election-straddling Dearing Inquiry, Labour and Conservative parties have postponed the difficult question of whether to raise undergraduate fees by commissioning a review which will not report until after the election. Liberal Democrats plan to phase out fees and the National Union of Students has persuaded 1000 Parliamentary candidates of all parties to oppose fee increases. But all parties talk of public expenditure as if it were synonymous with ‘waste’, higher education has already taken a financial hit, and the Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates that HE must take a further 24% cut to make the parties’ budget arithmetic work. Gloom abounds, but let us take a longer and broader view. On 22/23 April SRHE and the Council for Industry and HE staged a seminar at St George’s House Windsor on the theme of Trust, Accountability and the World to Come. Educationists and industrialists explored not only our difficulties but also our responsibilities and our opportunities in the post-credit-crunch post-election world to come. The discussions emphasised that as we enter difficult years of restricted funding, growing workload pressure and (perhaps) higher student fees, it will help to stay focused on why we do what we do, and what matters most. The broad investment in UK HE in the last ten years has been welcome, but motivated by reductionist priorities - to educate individuals for a high-skills economy, and to do good research in relatively few institutions. Fine words about the broader contributions of HE to a healthy society and enlightened citizenship have buttered few parsnips. ‘Wealth creation’ remains an economic rather than human concept and profit is still primary. Government policies and funding cuts intensify competition and overemphasise the student and the institution as the basic concerns of policy. Funding Councils are statutorily responsible for funding institutions, not (as was once the case) for the more community-oriented ‘ensuring adequate provision’ in every area. Widening participation targets are set for institutions; upmarket universities are berated for missing them, and their ‘failure’ is misinterpreted as a failure of the system as a whole. Every funding announcement is read first for its effect on the institution, and institutions gang up in mission groups. But as SRHE President David Watson has argued, the strength of the UK HE system is its ‘narrow reputational range’ and the integrity of the whole, greater than the sum of the institutional parts. Higher education not only transforms individual lives, it addresses socioeconomic disadvantage, powers economic regeneration, enriches arts and cultural life, and much more. In developed societies higher education has become the passport to full citizenship. If we focus too much on the individual student experience, we lose sight of which potential students are excluded, and how institutions could reach them by working together. If we focus too much on the institution, we lose sight of the power of higher education as a whole to promote social improvement. So in difficult times let us think not only of what the community can do for our institution, and what our institution can do for our students. Those things are important, but let us think too of what our higher education sector, working together, can do for the community in the difficult world to come. Rob Cuthbert Editor Contact us SRHE News Editor: Rob Cuthbert [email protected] (0044) 117 328 2624 Executive administrator: Lynn Goh [email protected] (0044) 117 328 4121 Professor Rob Cuthbert Director, Centre for Authentic Management and Policymaking in University Systems (CAMPUS) School of Education University of the West of England Bristol BS41 9ND UK Editorial policy SRHE NEWS aims to comment on recent events, publications, and activities in a journalistic but scholarly way, allowing more human interest and unsupported speculation than any self-respecting journal, but never forgetting its academic audience and their concern for the professional niceties. If you would like to suggest topics for inclusion in future issues, to contribute an item, or to volunteer a regular contribution, please contact [email protected]. We aim to be legal, decent, honest, truthful, opinionated and informed by scholarship. We identify named individuals with their employing institutions. Suggested additions to editorial policy are welcome. Keep them short. Future editions of SRHE NEWS Copy deadline dates and publication dates for 2010 are: SRHE News 3 Copy deadline 9th August Publication Date 1st September SRHE News 4 Copy deadline 9th November Publication Date 1st December 2 Contents Editorial Policy News Access and widening participation Academic staffing including Working lives Lynne Gornall Cutswatch People Beneath the auditable surface The art of academic development Dilly Fung Perspectives from a newer researcher in higher education Sian Lindsay Burton Clark: his contribution to the study of higher education Academic News Management and policy Teaching and learning including I prefer research to feed my teaching, not lead it Ian McNay The student experience Subjects and disciplines Research Technology and learning resources Global Perspectives International Network takes off Linda Evans Diversity or divergence? Marcia Devlin Society News SRHE Office News Networks News Higher Education Policy Network Carole Leathwood Join SRHE Letters Small ads Any answers? Mind your language SRHE Diary of events 3 Policy News Policy News aims to be a scholarship-informed commentary on recent developments in HE in the UK and worldwide. Access and Widening Participation The Equality Act 2010 was fast-tracked to the statute book in the UK’s pre-election legislative ‘wash- up’. The Act unifies public sector duties to promote equality, bringing together gender, race, disability and other requirements and identifying nine ‘protected characteristics’ relevant for equalities. But this largely welcome tidying up and extension of social legislation unfortunately coincides with HE spending cuts likely to force the closure of outreach programmes such as Aimhigher, and to reduce the numbers available for HE in FE colleges, which have made such a significant contribution to widening HE participation by the socioeconomically disadvantaged and other under-represented groups. Aimhigher works: research by David Chilosi (LSE) and others, published in the Journal of Further and Higher Education in February 2010, suggests that Aimhigher interventions increase GCSE attainment by almost 4%, and increase application rates and admissions to HE by more than 4%: More broadly, widening participation (WP) works, according to a report on English HE by Mark Corver, one of HEFCE’s team of independent-minded statisticians. The participation rate of people from under-represented groups has increased consistently since the mid-2000s. That’s worth remembering when you read another story about the supposed “waste” of all that money spent on widening participation and access. It’s also worth remembering that the now considerable funds earmarked for WP came originally from unhypothecated teaching funds, which were taken back by HEFCE and then reallocated with strings attached; there was no new money at the start. There’s evidence of a different kind for WP in Miriam David’s edited book from the WP strand of ESRC’s Teaching and Learning Research Programme for Improving learning by widening participation (London: Routledge 2009). Women have higher participation rates than men in every kind of HE institution, apart from Oxbridge (where male and female participation rates are the same), according to a careful study for 1997-2008 by John Thompson, former data analyst at HEFCE, for the Higher Education Policy Institute (Male and Female Participation and Progression in Higher Education HEPI Report 41). Disaggregate by class and it’s still true: “the poorer performance of men is common to all social groups, but it is getting worse among the poorest.” Women have higher participation rates for both full-time and part-time HE, and once within HE women are more likely to succeed and obtain a degree. Women get 56% of all first class degrees, although they make up less than 50% of the population for the relevant ages. 13.9% of males graduating got a first, compared with 13% of women, but 63.9% of women got a first or a 2:1, compared with 59.9% of men. The differences in achievement at school – at least, for state schools - are (more than) sufficient to account for the differences in HE participation. And the GCSE is to blame, says Thompson: these differences started to appear when the GCSE was introduced, and the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment provides supporting evidence. The poorer performance of males is a global phenomenon, perhaps partly explained by greater personal returns on investment in higher education for women than men, although this is a complex issue and a speculative conclusion. Individual and social returns on investment in HE, and the case for widening participation, are bound up with ideas of social and cultural capital. Blairite former Cabinet Minister Alan Milburn’s Panel on Fair Access to the Professions produced a report which highlighted the role of social capital in preserving social inequalities and led to a Government initiative on internships for students. 4 Psychologists Esperanza Villar and Pilar Albertin (Girona, Spain) report research on student attitudes to investment in social capital through higher education, in Studies in Higher Education (35:2). They argue that students are not unduly instrumental in their networking (what they call a ‘pragmatic’ orientation), but rather that their focus is on making personal friends (a ‘socio-affective’ orientation), with some ‘context-contingent’ responsiveness to their situation.