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  • Collaborative IT Services in UK Universities: A Necessary Evolution

    Collaborative IT Services in UK Universities: A Necessary Evolution

    ***Registration is now open for the HEPI Annual Conference on Thursday 12 June, Before, During, After: The route through higher education in changing times, with speakers including Neil O’Brien MP, Jo Saxton, Susan Lapworth and a video address from The Rt Hon Baroness Jacqui Smith. Sign up for your place here.***

    • By Pete Moss, Business Development Director at Ellucian.

    As resourcing pressures grow, the need for efficiencies in the UK higher education sector is well-known. Not only is every university reviewing its costs, systems and processes, but Universities UK too has set up a new Transformation and Efficiency Taskforce under Sir Nigel Carrington to accelerate solutions through collaboration.

    The old adage, ‘don’t reinvent the wheel’ seems apt when thinking about shared services in UK higher education.  In the USA, there is already a range of shared systems in operation in the university sector. While they differ on detail, they share the objective of saving money through strategies like systematisation, which can mean joining forces in a limited way, or full systems’ integration under one oversight. Forbes’ education writer, Derek Newton, explains in a report for education technology giant Ellucian, that ‘the benefits of system coordination or more complete integration are abundant and accessible, which helps explain the national trend in the direction of larger, more cohesive systems in higher education.’

    Newton’s report, based on several weeks of interviews with US university experts and those going through change programmes, explores university systems’ consortia on the East and West coasts and everywhere in between, spanning private, non-profit and public institutions. Collaborations involve any or all of data sharing, regulation and compliance processes, course and resource management, procurement and cybersecurity. Even some competitor institutions have found ways to collaborate. The scale is eye-watering: California’s Community Colleges alone serve 2.1 million students, which is roughly the same size as the UK’s undergraduate population in its entirety.

    Back in the UK, one voice which is critical to any efficiency drive is that of the Academic Registrar (AR).  Most ARs lead teams at the coal face, delivering the best student experience that they can. Their insights are crucial to success both at an institutional and at a national level.

    Ben Rogers, an experienced UK Academic Registrar, reflects below on the concept of collaborative models.

    ‘Higher education in the UK has been undergoing significant transformation. New initiatives, such as Degree Apprenticeships and Micro-credentials, have begun to reshape how institutions deliver education, particularly in terms of the skills and flexibility that they offer to more diverse and dynamic student body students as well as to employers.

    Degree Apprenticeships combine academic study with workplace learning and require universities to collaborate closely with industry partners. Micro-credentials, on the other hand, offer short, targeted learning opportunities to individuals who want to upskill or reskill without committing to a full degree. Both models demand flexibility, responsiveness and innovation in educational delivery, all of which can be supported by a strong, unified IT infrastructure.

    However, the current state of IT services in many UK universities is often bespoke and highly esoteric. Many institutions have their own systems which can lead to inefficiencies and inconsistent user experiences. The lack of standardisation often creates additional administrative burdens and can hinder new initiatives like the deployment of AI within their infrastructure.

    This is where collaborative IT services can play a pivotal role. The concept of collaborative IT services refers to the practice of consolidating technology infrastructure, applications and support across multiple institutions.

    The potential benefits of collaborative IT services for universities are significant. Firstly, collaborative IT services can provide a streamlined, consistent experience for students and staff. A centralised IT platform could allow students enrolled in Degree Apprenticeships to access both their academic materials and workplace-related resources through a single portal. Similarly, Micro-credential learners could benefit from a unified system that offers easy access to course content, assessment tools, and progress tracking, regardless of which institution or provider is delivering the learning.

    Collaborative IT services can also enhance the flexibility and scalability of universities’ offerings. The rapidly changing nature of the job market, particularly in sectors such as technology, healthcare, and engineering, demands that universities are agile and can, for example, rapidly design and adopt new programmes. These systems can also help universities maximise their resources. By pooling their technology investments, universities can take advantage of economies of scale, leading to cost savings that can be reinvested. This is particularly important at a time of tightening budgets and has happened already in other parts of the world such as in the conglomerate universities in North America and Sweden.

    However, the transition to new ways of working is not without its challenges. For many universities, particularly those with long-established IT systems, the process of moving to a shared infrastructure can feel like a monumental undertaking. But the challenges, whether at a technical, policy or behavioural level, can be overcome by a sensible change programme.

    There are several steps that universities can take to ensure a successful transition. The first is to build strong relationships with the educational technology providers (especially providers with expertise in this area) to understand what is possible. The second is to build a strong case for change. Institutions must recognise that, to stay competitive and relevant in the face of new educational initiatives, they must embrace collaboration and innovation. Collaborative IT services offer the opportunity to enhance the student experience, streamline processes, save institutional money, and improve educational delivery. There is a strong rationale here to think about a future roadmap which brings all institutions up to speed over time.

    The adoption of collaborative IT services in UK universities is a critical step towards realising the full potential of new educational initiatives. In the long run, collaborative IT services will not only improve the delivery of education but also contribute to the development of a more agile, adaptable, and future-ready higher education sector in the UK.’

    While the US and UK higher education systems differ as outlined in HEPI’s report on the subject, they can still learn from one another when it comes to collaborative systematisation. Ultimately, they share the need to be efficient, agile, student and researcher-focused and ultimately the best that they can be.

    Lucy Haire, Director of Partnerships at HEPI, also contributed to this piece.

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  • Canceling AmeriCorps grants threatens the future of education and workforce pipelines that power our nation’s progress

    Canceling AmeriCorps grants threatens the future of education and workforce pipelines that power our nation’s progress

    The recent decision to cancel $400 million in AmeriCorps grants is nothing short of a crisis. With over 1,000 programs affected and 32,000 AmeriCorps and Senior Corps members pulled from their posts, this move will leave communities across the country without critical services.

    The cuts will dismantle disaster recovery efforts, disrupt educational support for vulnerable students and undermine a powerful workforce development strategy that provides AmeriCorps members with in-demand skills across sectors including education.

    AmeriCorps provides a service-to-workforce pipeline that gives young Americans and returning veterans hands-on training in high-demand industries, such as education, public safety, disaster response and health care. Its nominal front-end investment in human capital fosters economic mobility, enabling those who engage in a national service experience to successfully transition to gainful employment.

    As leaders of Teach For America and City Year, two organizations that are part of the AmeriCorps national service network and whose members receive education stipends that go toward certification costs, student loans or future education pursuits, we are alarmed by how this crisis threatens the future of the education and workforce pipelines that power our nation’s progress, and it is deeply personal. We both started our careers as corps members in the programs we now lead.

    Related: A lot goes on in classrooms from kindergarten to high school. Keep up with our free weekly newsletter on K-12 education.

    Aneesh began his journey as a Teach For America corps member teaching high school English in Minnesota. Jim’s path began with City Year, serving at a Head Start program in Boston. We know firsthand that AmeriCorps programs are transformative and empower young people to drive meaningful change — for themselves and their communities.

    At Teach For America, AmeriCorps grants are essential to recruiting thousands of new teachers every year to effectively lead high-need classrooms across the country. These teachers, who have a consistent and significant positive impact on students’ learning, rely on the AmeriCorps education awards they earn through their two years of service to pay for their own education and professional development, including new teacher certification fees, costs that in some communities exceed $20,000.

    Termination of these grants threatens the pipeline of an estimated 2,500 new teachers preparing to enter classrooms over the summer. At a time when rural and urban communities alike are facing critical teacher shortages, cutting AmeriCorps support risks leaving students without the educators they need and deserve.

    City Year, similarly, relies on AmeriCorps to recruit more than 2,200 young adults annually to serve as student success coaches in K-12 schools across 21 states, 29 cities and 60 school districts.

    These AmeriCorps members serving as City Year student success coaches provide tutoring and mentoring that support students’ academic progress and interpersonal skill development and growth; they partner closely with teachers to boost student achievement, improve attendance and help keep kids on track to graduate. Research shows that schools partnering with City Year are two times more likely to improve their scores on English assessments, and two to three times more likely to improve their scores on math assessments.

    Corps members gain critical workforce skills such as leadership, problem-solving and creative thinking, which align directly with the top skills employers seek; the value of their experience has been reaffirmed through third-party research conducted with our alumni. The City Year experience prepares corps members for success in varied careers, with many going into education.

    AmeriCorps-funded programs like Breakthrough Collaborative and Jumpstart further strengthen this national service-to-workforce pathway, expanding the number of trained tutors and teacher trainees while also preparing corps members for careers that make a difference in all of our lives.

    Those programs’ trained educators ensure all students gain access to excellent educational opportunities that put them on the path to learn, lead and thrive in communities across the country. And the leaders of both organizations, like us, are AmeriCorps alumni, proof of the lasting effect of national service.

    Collectively, our four organizations have hundreds of thousands of alumni whose work as AmeriCorps members has impacted millions of children while shaping their own lives’ work, just as it did ours. Our alumni continue to lead classrooms, schools, districts, communities and organizations in neighborhoods across the country.

    Related: Tracking Trump: His actions to dismantle the Education Department, and more

    The termination of AmeriCorps grants is a direct blow to educators, schools and students. And, at a time when Gen Z is seeking work that aligns with their values and desire for impact, AmeriCorps is an essential on-ramp to public service and civic leadership that benefits not just individuals but entire communities and our country at large.

    For every dollar invested in AmeriCorps, $17 in economic value is generated, proving that national service is not only efficient but also a powerhouse for economic growth. Rather than draining resources, AmeriCorps drives real, measurable results that benefit individual communities and the national economy.

    Moreover, two-thirds of AmeriCorps funding is distributed by governor-appointed state service commissions to community- and faith-based organizations that leverage that funding to meet local needs. By working directly with state and local partners, AmeriCorps provides a more effective solution than top-down government intervention.

    On behalf of the more than 6,500 current AmeriCorps members serving with Teach For America and City Year, and the tens of thousands of alumni who have gone on to become educators, civic leaders and changemakers, we call on Congress to protect AmeriCorps and vital national service opportunities.

    Investing in AmeriCorps is an investment in America’s future, empowering communities, strengthening families and revitalizing economies. Let’s preserve the fabric of our national service infrastructure and ensure that the next generation of leaders, educators and community advocates who want to serve our nation have the ability to do so.

    Aneesh Sohoni is Teach For America’s new CEO. Previously, he was CEO of One Million Degrees and executive director of Teach For America Greater Chicago-Northwest Indiana. He is a proud alum of Teach For America.

    Jim Balfanz, a recognized leader and innovator in the field of education and national service, is CEO and a proud alum of City Year.

    Contact the opinion editor at [email protected].

    This story about AmeriCorps, Teach For America and City Year was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

    Join us today.

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  • What Your Students Aren’t Telling You: Listening, Learning, and Leading with Empathy – Faculty Focus

    What Your Students Aren’t Telling You: Listening, Learning, and Leading with Empathy – Faculty Focus

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  • What Your Students Aren’t Telling You: Listening, Learning, and Leading with Empathy – Faculty Focus

    What Your Students Aren’t Telling You: Listening, Learning, and Leading with Empathy – Faculty Focus

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  • The era of hyper competition between universities needs to end

    The era of hyper competition between universities needs to end

    When the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) closed in 2018 and its duties were carved up and distributed between the Office for Students and Research England, we have inadvertently wound up the very function that the sector and the government now need most.

    As the sector struggles to find genuinely collaborative solutions to a perfect storm, we are weaker for not having the brokerage that HEFCE once provided between institutions themselves, and also between the sector and government.

    We miss working closely with an organisation that understood the sector and its individual institutions intimately, so that it could both provide useful evidence and insight to shape government policy and corral us to develop and deliver new innovative approaches to programme delivery, technological developments or systems-level challenges.

    The introduction of HERA 2017 exacerbated what competitive threads already existed in the sector, threads HEFCE often helped to overcome through its stewardship.

    We are now confronted by the genuine problem of trying to identify opportunities for collaboration from within a formal and competitive marketplace, forces within which have been intensifying more recently due to volatile immigration policy, rising operational costs and reduced student demand in some areas, to name a few challenges currently around.

    It’s a problem that the Department for Education’s HE Reform package should actively seek to resolve to usher in a new era that moves the sector towards greater collaboration in the national interest.

    Defining the problem

    In September 2015, then Minister for Universities and Science, Jo Johnson, delivered a speech proudly talking about a record number of students accepted into the UK’s universities, stating “we have no target” for “the right” size of the higher education system, but believe it should evolve in response to demand from students and employers, reflecting the needs of the economy’.

    He went on to talk up the level of demand and credited the 2012 reforms as being a key driver of change:

    This government values competition. We want a diverse, competitive system that can offer different types of higher education so that students can choose freely between a range of providers. Competition not for its own sake, but because it empowers students and creates a strong incentive for providers to innovate and improve the quality of the education they are offering.”

    In many ways, those reforms and that competitive market led to growth in tuition fee income and student numbers, which contributed to investment in our facilities, community and civic agendas, mental health and student support.

    There are of course some restrictions placed on that market by government to temper it (not least price caps), though there remain many ways in which it is expected to compete, perhaps particularly as institutions seek to attract students.

    So, when a competitive market starts to falter, perhaps because of restrictions to a key source of demand (like international students) or funding (like a frozen tuition fee), government should consider interventions to address market failure.

    Indeed, HERA2017 allows scope for even the regulator to address market failure, so it’s not a lack of imagination on the part of the founding legislation preventing this course of action.

    The role of the Office for Students

    Amongst its general duties, as set out in the HERA, OFS is intended to have regard to:

    The need to encourage competition between English higher education providers in connection with the provision of higher education where that competition is in the interests of students and employers, while also having regard to the benefits for students and employers resulting from collaboration between such providers.

    OFS was created to regulate the competitive market. The nod to “having regard to the benefits from collaboration” is difficult to administer in the current regulatory approach.

    There is certainly plenty of evidence of how the OfS has invested in regulatory strategies and compliance, but much less of how it has used its scope to intervene where competitive barriers are too great to achieve a necessary goal like securing the sector’s financial footing.

    It could be argued this approach reflects an unnecessarily narrow interpretation of the powers and duties put forward in HERA 2017.

    Collaboration

    OfS could do more to align its relationships and approaches with a collaboration agenda. The burden of regulation could be reduced. Its focus could shift to fostering creative and collective thinking about responses to the vulnerabilities mentioned previously, alongside monitoring regulatory compliance in a risk-based, outcomes-oriented way.

    Indeed, the UK’s own Regulator’s Code steers regulators to prioritise both ensuring compliance and providing support to grow. Given the current state of finances, highlighted just last week in OFS’s Financial Sustainability Report, it would be very welcome and appropriate for a rethink on how and what OFS could be doing to work purposefully with institutions to design responses to these critical risks.

    Where competition divides, we convene

    It is not down to OFS to solve this crisis, though we see a major role for them to play if we could reimagine a more effective regulatory approach for the sector. The reason we’ve author this as sector body leaders is because we recognise that our organisations may also have a role to play in this work.

    Sector organisations like GuildHE, AHUA and others are well-placed to convene a wide variety of colleagues to help carve solution-oriented paths forward on behalf of the sector while navigating political sensitivities and delivering broader public benefits.

    Rocks and hard places

    The government now finds itself wedged between the desire to drive economic growth and the prospect that parts of the HE sector are weakening under the strain of protracted under-funding, with many already closing courses and actively shrinking their institutions, which will themselves deliver increased levels of unemployment and lower numbers of the types of skills graduates the economy will increasingly demand in the years ahead.

    UUK’s Blueprint, and the follow-on Transformation and Efficiency Taskforce, has done a good deal of the mental heavy-lifting for us all, exploring what steps the sector can take together, beyond or without an increase in teaching funding or tuition fee levels.

    But there is so much more to do – more thinking, more activating, and more effort to ensure that those beyond UUK’s membership are included and considered in any reimagining or business case developments that may provide useful paths forward. To be effective and complementary to the work UUK have done so far, we must be inclusive and expansive in what we consider possible.

    Many of us have experience in securing benefits through collaborative solutions. Joint procurement initiatives have been successful, as shown by the Southern Universities Purchasing Consortium (SUPC).

    Their 2023/23 impact statement shows they spent £2.4b through their agreements last year, generating £116.1m in cashable savings while embedding sustainability, ethics and innovation in their collaborative procurements.

    GuildHE’s Research consortium demonstrates the tangible benefits of collective purchasing by providing services such as an open-access research repository and HIVVE impact tracker, which not only offers services at discounted rates, but also extends access to smaller institutions that would otherwise be unable to afford them.

    Eating the elephant one bite at a time

    We can build on these efforts to inform the art of the possible. Brokerage efforts, designed and delivered by our organisations working in partnership, could facilitate opportunities to reduce the risk of market failure or the need for acquisitions.

    If successful, those efforts could give rise to collaborative initiatives that deliver real national and regional impacts, thereby underpinning the value of HE to local communities and, increasingly important, local politicians, some of whom not only reflect a laissez-faire attitude towards university closure, but also make statements about immigration and international students that courts further damage to us all.

    The growing concern about the financial state of our sector has led the OFS to recommend recently that a special administration regime for HE institutions be established, building (unknowingly or otherwise) on arguments that have been swirling for years about the need to establish a restructuring fund or regime to support institutions at risk of failure. The time is now to help create solutions to avoid needing such a regime, but to support those going through it if we can.

    We put our heads together and share this thinking outward as a call to arms for all those working on behalf of our higher education institutions.

    We also make clear that the anticipated HE Reform package must acknowledge the tensions created and fostered by the current competitive market if it intends to plot a practical path forward towards prosperity.

    Like OFS, we are not the whole solution, but we can be an important part of a vision which reinvests in higher education as the most impactful force within our democratic society to foster economic growth, deliver improved outcomes for society, and secure a legacy as global leaders – one we can all be proud of.

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  • Podcast: Immigration white paper, Jacqui Smith

    Podcast: Immigration white paper, Jacqui Smith

    This week on the podcast we get across the government’s new immigration white paper. What does cutting the graduate route visa from two years to 18 months mean for international students and universities?

    Plus we examine the proposed 6 per cent levy on international student fees and tighter compliance requirements that could put some institutions at risk.

    We also discuss Skills Minister Jacqui Smith’s Telegraph op-ed criticizing universities for “losing sight of their responsibility to protect public money” – are her concerns reasonable?

    With Smita Jamdar, Partner and Head of Education at Shakespeare Martineau, Roscoe Hastings, Director of Teaching Excellence and Student Experience at the University of Exeter, James Coe, Associate Editor at Wonkhe and presented by Jim Dickinson.

    Read more

    Everything in the immigration white paper for higher education

    There are lots of ways to be more transparent about university finances

    Lessons from innovating in our student support model

    Euro visions: A playbook to fight the populists in the Netherlands

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  • Redistribution doesn’t work when there’s nothing left to redistribute

    Redistribution doesn’t work when there’s nothing left to redistribute

    Too many people across our country do not get the chance to succeed.

    So the government is committed to supporting the aspiration of every person who meets the requirements and wants to go to university or pursue an apprenticeship, regardless of their background, where they live and their personal circumstances.

    Those aren’t my words – they’re the words of the House of Commons’ HE supply teacher Janet Daby, who answers for actual (Lords) minister Jacqui Smith whenever a question comes up about universities or students.

    This answer is a typical one – in which she notes that in the summer, the department (for education) will set out its plan for HE reform and that it will expect providers to play an “even stronger” role in improving access and outcomes for all disadvantaged students.

    Specifically on financial support:

    Whilst many HE providers have demonstrated positive examples of widening access, including targeted outreach and bursaries, we want to see the sector go further.

    Back in 2014, partly to get “top-up fees” through Parliament, then secretary of state Charles Clarke announced that a new Office for Fair Access (OFFA) would be created – and that it would require universities to offer up some of their additional fee income in bursaries.

    Assuming that a proportion of student financial support should come partly via universities’ own budgets has always created a tension – between those who say that local decision making (aka institutional autonomy) is better at designing schemes that get the money to where it’s really needed, and those that argue that redistributing fee income within a provider rather than across the country means that financial support ends up being based not on need, but on the number of other students at your university that need it.

    We used to be able to see that clearly. OfFA used to track how many “OfFA countable” students each provider had and their spending on financial support, and it would generally show that providers doing the most for access tended to have the least to spend per student.

    Over time, direct student financial support declined in popularity. Research questioned bursaries’ impact on applications (unsurprising given how hard it was to find information on them), and it tended to struggle to find retention benefits from 2006-2011 – findings that then got extrapolated far beyond their timeframe.

    Pressure to demonstrate impact led providers to focus on entry and completion metrics rather than the experience students were having as a result. That seemed less critical in the mid-2010s when inflation was low and maintenance loans were cranked up to hide the fact that grants were eliminated. Students living at home (more likely from widening participation backgrounds) also got relatively generous maintenance support compared to their costs.

    Eventually, provider-level reporting on student financial support pretty much disappeared as the Office for Students started to emphasise outcomes over experience or spending transparency.

    But with maintenance support over the past few years some distance from inflation, and the income thresholds over which parents are expected to top up stuck at the level they were set at in the year that Madeleine McCann went missing (18 whole years ago), we really do need some sense of how the mix is panning out.

    So to help us to understand what’s been going on, for the fourth year running we’ve managed to extract some data out of OfS via an FOI request.

    The data

    Ever since the days of the Office for Fair Access (OFFA), HESA has collected data on the amounts of student financial support, and the number of students that helps, for each university in England – and here we have that data over the past few years.

    It covers four different types of spend on student financial support:

    • Cash: This covers any bursary/scholarship/award that is paid to students, where there is no restriction on the use of the award
    • Near cash: This includes any voucher schemes or prepaid cards awarded to students where there are defined outlets or services for which the voucher/card can be used
    • Accommodation discounts: This includes discounted accommodation in university halls / residences
    • Other: This includes all in-kind or cash support that is not included in the above categories and includes, but is not limited to, travel costs, laboratory costs, printer credits, equipment paid for, subsidised field trips and subsidised meal costs

    Some caveats: We remain less than 100 per cent convinced about the data quality, this doesn’t tell us how much money is going to disadvantaged students specifically, it doesn’t tell us about need (and the extent to which need is being met), I’ve yanked out most of what we used to call alternative providers for comparison purposes, and it only covers home domiciled undergraduates (and below, in terms of level of study).

    But it is, nevertheless, fascinating. Here’s the numbers for each provider in England:

    [Full Screen]

    If we nationally just look at cash help, in 2023/24 just over £496m went to just under 311k students – a spend per head of £1,598 – very slightly above last year’s £1,464 per head.

    But dive a little deeper and you find astonishing disparities. In the Russell Group the £ per head was £2,362 – about £40 up on the previous year. Across Million+ providers that figure was £726 – just £4 more than 2 years ago.

    Interestingly, per student helped, the Russell Group spent the same in cash help per student as it did in 2019. Maybe inflation doesn’t apply in elite universities, or maybe they’re getting worse at recruiting those on low incomes. Meanwhile the cash spend per student helped across Million+ universities has almost halved from £1,309 in 2019/20.

    Clearly all universities are under financial pressure – but what we see is almost certainly an artefact of redistributing fee income around a provider rather than around a country, and it appears to result in manifest unfairness.

    Even if we don’t adjust for inflation, spend per student helped has fallen for 45 universities between 2022/23 and 2023/24, and since 2019, it’s fallen for 56 universities. If we do apply inflation (CPI), only five are beating their 2019 SPH. No wonder students are struggling to come to campus.

    Some may say that it might be better just to look at what’s been going on under the auspices of formal, declarable access and participation work. HESA finance data now includes a look at expenditure – but not the number of students that expenditure covers, nor the total amounts invested pre-pandemic, and nor the amounts allocated in premium funding, all of which would aid meaningful comparison.

    Moving money around

    I tend, in general, to be a fan of redistribution and cross-subsidy. It can help reduce economic inequality, promote social stability, and ensure that everyone has access to basic necessities. It reflects a commitment to fairness and the idea that a society should care for all its members.

    As such, the logical bit of my brian never had much of a problem with the Charles Clarke/OFFA expectation – it was at least aimed at ensuring that everyone got to have a decent experience at university.

    But the redistributive effects of moving money around a provider when some providers (which already tend to be the richest) have fewer poor kids to spend it on never really added up.

    If you really wanted the system to be fairer, and for the most money to reach those who need it most, you might start by acting regionally. I doubt that John Blake’s regional partnership structures – which will involve cohort-level renewal for Access and Participation Plans will actually go as far as expecting providers in a region to pool their bursary or hardship spend – but there’s a very good logical case for that kind of approach.

    When students at Salford are getting £358 each in cash help while their neighbours at the University of Manchester are getting £1,829, there’s a very strong case for pooling the money.

    But even if that was to happen, beware the regional agglomeration effects. The region with the lowest higher education participation rate in the UK is the North East of England, at 33.4 per cent. London, with its 63 per cent rate, ought to be giving some of its spend on student financial support away to support participation up North.

    And once you’re there, you (re)realise what many said at the time of the Clarke announcement – that moving money around a university when participation in universities is so unequal to start with is no way to run a fair system.

    And even more importantly, it’s not fair on fee-paying students. When the assumption was that fees were a small part of the overall funding mix, we could say to students that the state’s contribution would be focussed more on those in need.

    Even with fees at £9,000, the redistributive effects of some paying much more than that through interest of RPI+3% and some much less via the repayment threshold and the cut-off – all while funding a moderately comfortable financial support system for all – was some sort of egalitarianism in action.

    But once the subsidy slips away, and students are expected to pay back almost all of the debt they incur, we end up expecting their personal debt to do what the state ought to do. And while it’s one thing for your fees to be spent subsidising other students at your own university, it would be quite another for them to be spent subsidising those at others in your region, or even around the UK.

    Then add in the fact that in UUK’s cuts survey, just under half of universities (49 per cent) say they may still need to cut hardship funding and 59 per cent say they may need to cut bursaries. Even if some sort of tougher APP regime was to find a way to stop that, that just means that wider cuts will fall on everyone – and so for some students, less and less of their actual contribution will end up being spent on their actual education.

    It turns out that the progressive taxation – ensuring that those with higher incomes contribute a larger share of their earnings to public services – is the much better way to promote economic fairness and reduce income inequality. Who knew?

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  • The trouble with the latest accreditation round for initial teacher education

    The trouble with the latest accreditation round for initial teacher education

    English teacher education has been the subject of ongoing and turbulent policy change for many years. But the radical shift in agenda instigated by the Department for Education (DfE) market review between 2022 and 2024 brought this change to another level. The policy instigated a reaccreditation process for all initial teacher education (ITE) providers awarding qualified teacher status.

    The Conservative government’s attempt at “delivering world-class teacher development” ended up decimating the landscape of ITE, leaving those of us left to pick up the pieces. Now DfE has opened a second round of the accreditation process – has it learned any lessons?

    What went wrong

    Stage 1 of the process the first time around included a written proposal of over 7,000 words outlining compliance with the new standards, including curriculum alignment to the ITE core curriculum framework. Additional details and evidence of partnership and mentoring systems and processes also had to be included. Successful applicants progressed to stage 2. Here, rigorous scrutiny of further preparation and plans began, with each institution being allocated a DfE associate to work with for a further twelve months.

    The additional workload this required stretched the capacity and resources of all education departments within higher education institutions. Academics were simultaneously delivering ongoing provision, continuing recruitment, and writing additional postgraduate (and for many undergraduate) revised provision – and many were under the threat of redundancy. All of the above, under constant threat of looming Ofsted visits.

    A previous Wonkhe article likened to the process to the Netflix series Squid Game, using the metaphor to describe the experience for existing ITT providers – meet the confusing demands and conflicting eligibility requirements, or you’re out.

    A significant number of providers failed to secure accreditation, either losing or giving up their status, with provider numbers reducing from 240 to 179.

    At the time the sector offered collegiate support, forming working groups to foster joint responses when collating the sheer volume of output required. Pressures surfaced including stress and anxiety caused by the increase in workload. Insecurity of jobs and the conflicting and at times confusing advice brought many individuals to the point of exhaustion and burnout.

    Squid: off the menu?

    You would therefore expect an announcement of the opportunity for providers to re-enter the market to be met with a sense of joy. Wouldn’t you?

    However, the new round is only for any lead provider currently working in partnership with an accredited provider. These partnerships are only in their first year and were encouraged by the DfE because of the “cold spots” created when thirteen higher education institutions failed to pass the previous process – despite having proven a history of quality provision.

    The creation of such partnerships added yet more stress and workload to all concerned. No legal advice on governance was provided. They proved incredibly complex to navigate, requiring long standing buy-in to make them workable and financially viable. As of yet no advice has been published of how to exit these partnership arrangements.

    Providers wishing to begin delivering ITT from September 2026 must meet the eligibility criteria. The window for the applications will be open for a much shorter period than the previous round, with the process and outcome to be completed 30 June 2025. This contrasts to the 18 months previously required for providers to demonstrate their “market readiness” in the previous round.

    Stage 1 of the new process will include a written submission of no more than 1500 words – remember, it was 7,000 last time – with applicants submitting a brief summary of their ITT and mentor curricula. In this short piece they will need to “demonstrate how their curriculum meets the quality requirements in the ITT criteria.” A window across March and April 2025 was open to complete and upload this portfolio.

    Stage 2, this time round, is an interview, where applicants “deliver a presentation to a panel, and answer questions further demonstrating how they meet the quality requirement.” Following both the written and verbal submissions, an assessment will be made and moderated by panels of ITT experts.

    For those still haunted by the lived experience of the first round of ITT accreditation, the greatly reduced stringency of the process would appear to make a mockery of the previous, highly controversial, demands and expectations.

    Like last time, success in the accreditation will require a demonstration of compliance with the expectations of the core curriculum framework (or from September, the ITTECF) along with further DfE quality requirements through submission.

    However, unlike last time, prospective providers will not be required to create extensive written responses, detailed curriculum resources or an extensive mentor curriculum (for which many of the requirements were axed overnight in the government’s announcement in November).

    Unbalanced

    How can the two contrasting timelines and expectations possibly be seen as equitable or comparable?

    In addition, how can we guarantee a smooth transition between lead partners and current accredited providers? Some of these partnerships involve undergraduate provision, established as a result of “rationalising” ITT provision. For those students only in year one of a three-year degree, how will this transition work?

    As a sector we recognise that the policy is aimed at meeting the government target of recruiting an extra 6,500 teachers this sitting parliament. And we welcome our peers back into the fold. Many of us are still reeling from the injustice of those colleagues being locked out in the last round (at the time all rated good or better by Ofsted).

    However, as NFER’s recent teacher labour market report pointed out, teachers’ pay and workload remain the highest cited reasons for ongoing difficulties in recruitment and retention. Neither of these things have been addressed by the new accreditation process.

    For those of us still clinging on for dear life, our confidence in the system is fading. One day, just like our stamina and resilience, it will evaporate all together.

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  • Higher education postcard: Hughes Hall, Cambridge

    Higher education postcard: Hughes Hall, Cambridge

    Greetings from Cambridge – and unlike last week, this time we’re definitely in England.

    It is 1878, and the Cambridge Independent Press of 7 December reports that the university has taken steps to enable the training of teachers. The Teachers’ Training Syndicate (its Cambridge-ese for a committee or working group, I think) is to be established, to oversee programmes of training for students intending to become school teachers, and the colleges at which they train.

    Image: Shutterstock

    All of this took place in the context of increased state engagement with school education: the provision of schools for all children was becoming increasingly necessary, and local authorities of various kinds (it’s complicated!) were empowered to fund such schools.

    And it stands to reason that where you have schools, you need teachers. And by then the practice of teaching was becoming increasingly professionalised. Plus, it was one of the few professions open to women.

    And so in 1885 the Cambridge Training College for Women was opened. Initially based at Newnham College, there were fourteen students, under the guidance of the college’s first principal, Elizabeth Phillips Hughes. Hughes was the first woman to gain first class honours in moral sciences at Cambridge, having studied at Newnham. (She also helped to found the Barry Teachers Training College, which ultimately became part of the University of South Wales, and helped to draft the statutes of the University of Wales). She remained principal of the new college until 1899, steering it from its modest start to a new building – that shown on the card – in 1895.

    The driving forces behind the establishment of the college included Miss Frances Buss, champion of girls’ education, and one of the subjects of an anonymous verse of some fame:

    Miss Buss and Miss Beale

    Cupid’s darts do not feel.

    How different from us

    Miss Beale and Miss Buss.

    Miss Beale was Dorothea Beale, suffragist, headmistress of Cheltenham Ladies’ College and one of the founders of St Hilda’s College, Oxford. And it seems that the pioneers of women’s education had a lot to put up with.

    At this point Hughes Hall was not a college. (It wasn’t even Hughes Hall yet!) It was only after the university recognised women as full members (in 1947, less than a lifetime ago) that the college gained recognition as part of the university (albeit not yet a college) and was renamed Hughes Hall. This was in honour of Elizabeth Phillips Hughes, the first principal; its full name at that time was Elizabeth Phillips Hughes Hall.

    It began to admit male students in 1973: the first of Cambridge’s all-women institutions to do so. In 1985 Hughes Hall became an “approved foundation” of the university (it’s the step below being a full college) and in 2006 Hughes Hall became a college of the university, with a charter and everything. And a full name – for Sunday best or when it has been naughty – of The President and Fellows of Hughes Hall in the University of Cambridge.

    Hughes Hall admits only mature students (judged by age not attitude), to both undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. It still teaches education, both as an academic subject and as a PGCE, as well as programmes across other disciplines.

    This post owes its origins to the eagle-eyed Professor Chris Brooke of Homerton, Cambridge, who corrected me about wat was shown on the card. I’d shared the card as one of my daily posts on Bluesky thinking it was Homerton. But it definitely isn’t!

    Here’s a jigsaw of the card – hope you enjoy it.

    Backstory

    A couple of you have asked about the #HigherEducationPostcard backstory.

    It started about ten years ago when I was in a Cardiff antiques mall, sheltering from the rain. One of the stalls had books and old postcards, and when browsing the latter I found half a dozen showing universities. Which I thought was quite cute. So I bought them.

    Fast forward to 2020 and the pandemic. The first few months were scary for lots of reasons, and if you were self-employed in the HE sector the question of how to do consulting without being on site was very much front and centre. And whilst sitting at my desk trying to solve this puzzle I noticed the small stack of postcards, and thought I’d share them on Twitter. They were really popular, so I thought I could carry on doing this. But where to get postcards? eBay, mostly. And so I started bidding. And then the collection sort of growed. Its at about 1200 cards now, in fifteen albums with a stack of a couple of hundred still to be scanned and filed.

    In the summer of 2020 I ran a #HigherEducationPostcard world cup on Twitter – 32 cards, paired off, the one with most votes went through to the next round. In the final, Swansea University beat van Mildert College, Durham; thousands of votes were cast, each institution getting its students, staff and alumni to join in. It was great fun!

    I’d been posting daily on Twitter, and when in summer 2021 Paul Greatrix retired from weekly Registrarism blogposts on Wonkhe, I suggested that I write a weekly higher education postcard blog. The good folk at Wonkhe towers said yes, and here we are, 170 posts later. My only rule is that I have to own the actual postcard; and I try to make them interesting and informative. And mostly true. I really enjoy writing and sharing them, and have no plans to stop just yet. I hope you like them too. Thanks for reading!

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  • The era of hyper competition between universities needs to end

    The era of hyper competition between universities needs to end

    When the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) closed in 2018 and its duties were carved up and distributed between the Office for Students and Research England, we have inadvertently wound up the very function that the sector and the government now need most.

    As the sector struggles to find genuinely collaborative solutions to a perfect storm, we are weaker for not having the brokerage that HEFCE once provided between institutions themselves, and also between the sector and government.

    We miss working closely with an organisation that understood the sector and its individual institutions intimately, so that it could both provide useful evidence and insight to shape government policy and corral us to develop and deliver new innovative approaches to programme delivery, technological developments or systems-level challenges.

    The introduction of HERA 2017 exacerbated what competitive threads already existed in the sector, threads HEFCE often helped to overcome through its stewardship.

    We are now confronted by the genuine problem of trying to identify opportunities for collaboration from within a formal and competitive marketplace, forces within which have been intensifying more recently due to volatile immigration policy, rising operational costs and reduced student demand in some areas, to name a few challenges currently around.

    It’s a problem that the Department for Education’s HE Reform package should actively seek to resolve to usher in a new era that moves the sector towards greater collaboration in the national interest.

    Defining the problem

    In September 2015, then Minister for Universities and Science, Jo Johnson, delivered a speech proudly talking about a record number of students accepted into the UK’s universities, stating “we have no target” for “the right” size of the higher education system, but believe it should evolve in response to demand from students and employers, reflecting the needs of the economy’.

    He went on to talk up the level of demand and credited the 2012 reforms as being a key driver of change:

    This government values competition. We want a diverse, competitive system that can offer different types of higher education so that students can choose freely between a range of providers. Competition not for its own sake, but because it empowers students and creates a strong incentive for providers to innovate and improve the quality of the education they are offering.”

    In many ways, those reforms and that competitive market led to growth in tuition fee income and student numbers, which contributed to investment in our facilities, community and civic agendas, mental health and student support.

    There are of course some restrictions placed on that market by government to temper it (not least price caps), though there remain many ways in which it is expected to compete, perhaps particularly as institutions seek to attract students.

    So, when a competitive market starts to falter, perhaps because of restrictions to a key source of demand (like international students) or funding (like a frozen tuition fee), government should consider interventions to address market failure.

    Indeed, HERA2017 allows scope for even the regulator to address market failure, so it’s not a lack of imagination on the part of the founding legislation preventing this course of action.

    The role of the Office for Students

    Amongst its general duties, as set out in the HERA, OFS is intended to have regard to:

    The need to encourage competition between English higher education providers in connection with the provision of higher education where that competition is in the interests of students and employers, while also having regard to the benefits for students and employers resulting from collaboration between such providers.

    OFS was created to regulate the competitive market. The nod to “having regard to the benefits from collaboration” is difficult to administer in the current regulatory approach.

    There is certainly plenty of evidence of how the OfS has invested in regulatory strategies and compliance, but much less of how it has used its scope to intervene where competitive barriers are too great to achieve a necessary goal like securing the sector’s financial footing.

    It could be argued this approach reflects an unnecessarily narrow interpretation of the powers and duties put forward in HERA 2017.

    Collaboration

    OfS could do more to align its relationships and approaches with a collaboration agenda. The burden of regulation could be reduced. Its focus could shift to fostering creative and collective thinking about responses to the vulnerabilities mentioned previously, alongside monitoring regulatory compliance in a risk-based, outcomes-oriented way.

    Indeed, the UK’s own Regulator’s Code steers regulators to prioritise both ensuring compliance and providing support to grow. Given the current state of finances, highlighted just last week in OFS’s Financial Sustainability Report, it would be very welcome and appropriate for a rethink on how and what OFS could be doing to work purposefully with institutions to design responses to these critical risks.

    Where competition divides, we convene

    It is not down to OFS to solve this crisis, though we see a major role for them to play if we could reimagine a more effective regulatory approach for the sector. The reason we’ve author this as sector body leaders is because we recognise that our organisations may also have a role to play in this work.

    Sector organisations like GuildHE, AHUA and others are well-placed to convene a wide variety of colleagues to help carve solution-oriented paths forward on behalf of the sector while navigating political sensitivities and delivering broader public benefits.

    Rocks and hard places

    The government now finds itself wedged between the desire to drive economic growth and the prospect that parts of the HE sector are weakening under the strain of protracted under-funding, with many already closing courses and actively shrinking their institutions, which will themselves deliver increased levels of unemployment and lower numbers of the types of skills graduates the economy will increasingly demand in the years ahead.

    UUK’s Blueprint, and the follow-on Transformation and Efficiency Taskforce, has done a good deal of the mental heavy-lifting for us all, exploring what steps the sector can take together, beyond or without an increase in teaching funding or tuition fee levels.

    But there is so much more to do – more thinking, more activating, and more effort to ensure that those beyond UUK’s membership are included and considered in any reimagining or business case developments that may provide useful paths forward. To be effective and complementary to the work UUK have done so far, we must be inclusive and expansive in what we consider possible.

    Many of us have experience in securing benefits through collaborative solutions. Joint procurement initiatives have been successful, as shown by the Southern Universities Purchasing Consortium (SUPC).

    Their 2023/23 impact statement shows they spent £2.4b through their agreements last year, generating £116.1m in cashable savings while embedding sustainability, ethics and innovation in their collaborative procurements.

    GuildHE’s Research consortium demonstrates the tangible benefits of collective purchasing by providing services such as an open-access research repository and HIVVE impact tracker, which not only offers services at discounted rates, but also extends access to smaller institutions that would otherwise be unable to afford them.

    Eating the elephant one bite at a time

    We can build on these efforts to inform the art of the possible. Brokerage efforts, designed and delivered by our organisations working in partnership, could facilitate opportunities to reduce the risk of market failure or the need for acquisitions.

    If successful, those efforts could give rise to collaborative initiatives that deliver real national and regional impacts, thereby underpinning the value of HE to local communities and, increasingly important, local politicians, some of whom not only reflect a laissez-faire attitude towards university closure, but also make statements about immigration and international students that courts further damage to us all.

    The growing concern about the financial state of our sector has led the OFS to recommend recently that a special administration regime for HE institutions be established, building (unknowingly or otherwise) on arguments that have been swirling for years about the need to establish a restructuring fund or regime to support institutions at risk of failure. The time is now to help create solutions to avoid needing such a regime, but to support those going through it if we can.

    We put our heads together and share this thinking outward as a call to arms for all those working on behalf of our higher education institutions.

    We also make clear that the anticipated HE Reform package must acknowledge the tensions created and fostered by the current competitive market if it intends to plot a practical path forward towards prosperity.

    Like OFS, we are not the whole solution, but we can be an important part of a vision which reinvests in higher education as the most impactful force within our democratic society to foster economic growth, deliver improved outcomes for society, and secure a legacy as global leaders – one we can all be proud of.

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