Category: Students’ Unions

  • OfS rebalances the free speech/harassment see-saw on antisemitism

    OfS rebalances the free speech/harassment see-saw on antisemitism

    The Union of Jewish Students (UJS) has published a fascinating new episode of “Yalla”, its podcast for Jewish students.

    Hosted by Louis Danka, who is the new President of UJS, the September 2025 episode features an extensive interview with Arif Ahmed, OfS’ Director for Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom.

    The conversation comes weeks after the regulator’s new higher education free speech guidance came into force on August 1, 2025, alongside enhanced harassment protections.

    What makes the interview especially interesting is what it doesn’t mention – Ahmed’s reversal on the IHRA definition of antisemitism.

    In February 2021, Ahmed wrote in a HEPI blog that he was strongly against Gavin Williamson’s requirement that universities adopt the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, arguing it obstructs perfectly legitimate defence of Palestinian rights and chills free speech:

    I hope the Secretary of State reconsiders the need for it; but these new free speech duties ought to rule it out in any case.

    We’re all allowed to change our minds on things. The issue is the extent to which the law, or the regulation he’s now in charge of, offers clarity on the volte-face.

    And while there’s plenty of helpful material in there on how OfS might approach casework and complaints, it does raise all sorts of questions about expectations – and OfS’ strategy for communicating what in some cases amounts to significant additions and clarifications to its guidance.

    What the podcast says

    The interview centres on what I’ve previously described as the twin sandbags on the regulatory see-saw – the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 and the E6 condition on harassment and sexual misconduct.

    A central theme throughout is UJS’ contention of a deteriorating campus environment for Jewish students. Ahmed acknowledges there has been “a big rise in antisemitic incidents in recent years, on campus, in the country more generally” and describes this as a source of “grave concern” for OfS.

    The discussion then considers how this manifests practically on campuses. Ahmed describes, for example, scenarios where Jewish students may feel unable to attend lectures due to protest activity, or where “protests outside Jewish accommodation” create hostile environments.

    He first emphasises that while “political ideas expressed in the protests may be perfectly awful and expressible,” universities can still regulate their “time, place and manner” – such that core functions can keep going.

    Hence on protest regulation, Ahmed says:

    …if you have protests that take place in such a way that Jewish students don’t feel able to attend lectures … it may also be right for the university say, well, you can’t do it here, and you can’t do it in this place, and you can’t have it every day outside a lecture theatre.

    He also points to protests outside Jewish accommodation as another context where restrictions could be justified.

    Ahmed’s contemporary position on IHRA is explained as follows:

    …we ourselves have adopted the IHRA definition, and we do think it can be a very useful tool for understanding modern antisemitism.

    He adds that there is “no obstacle, in principle” for universities adopting a particular definition, and “certainly not” the IHRA working definition.

    He clarifies that it is “absolutely compatible” with the guidance, provided it’s being used properly as a way to understand antisemitism rather than to suppress lawful and legitimate debate. That latter caveat may represent the only vestige of his previous concerns about IHRA chilling Palestinian rights advocacy.

    The published guidance takes an uncompromising stance on Holocaust denial, where Ahmed explains this was made explicit after consultation feedback seeking clarity:

    …we will not under any circumstances protect Holocaust denial, so nothing that we do in our complaint scheme or otherwise will protect that speech.

    With the more obvious stuff out of the way, the subsequent nuanced discussion involves distinguishing between legitimate political discourse and antisemitic harassment, particularly around coded language.

    Ahmed addresses scenarios like “Zionists off our campus” signs, explaining that context is crucial. On coded antisemitism, Ahmed explains:

    …very often when people use the expression “Zionist”, for instance, it can actually be used as a kind of euphemistic expression meaning Jewish people, and in the circumstances where that’s so it seems very much more likely to be something that’s targeted at individuals because of their race, because of their religion.

    He then distinguishes between attacking ideas versus targeting individuals, noting that speech “directed at ideas” differs from speech that makes individuals feel excluded because of their protected characteristic.

    Ahmed is at pains to point out that freedom of speech encompasses religious expression, making Jewish students’ ability to practice their faith a free speech issue. He also describes scenarios where Jewish students might hide religious symbols like Stars of David due to campus hostility. He then explains the religious expression dimension:

    …if you have an atmosphere on campus which is allowed to grow, which grew, Jewish students are intimidated out of expressing their own religion, that’s that’s an affront to their freedom of speech.

    The interview also explores “chilling effects” – where students self-censor rather than face consequences. Ahmed describes situations where students with pro-Israel views or Jewish religious expression might “decide not to say it in the first place” due to fears about academic consequences or social ostracism.

    Nevertheless, he repeatedly stresses that harassment determinations require objective analysis, not just subjective feelings. He explains that the legal test involves whether:

    …a reasonable person would think that was… creating an intimidating atmosphere for people because of their race, because of their religion.

    And on that point:

    …it’s not enough, for speech to count as harassment, that the person at the receiving end feels offended; what’s important is that a reasonable person would think that was so.

    He concludes by stressing that freedom of speech “historically… most protects minorities and those… for whom their voice and their words are the only things that they have.”

    What the papers say

    The Jewish News coverage of Ahmed’s podcast exemplifies how the reassuring rhetoric translates into heightened community expectations.

    The headline itself – “Free speech tsar tells universities: stop intimidation of Jewish students” – frames Ahmed’s nuanced legal discussion as a clear directive for immediate action.

    The article’s language amplifies Ahmed’s confidence, presenting his tentative statements (“it may also be right for the university to say”) as firm commitments (“universities must take firm steps”) and his regulatory expectations (“we would expect universities to take action”) as binding obligations.

    The coverage also amps up specific protections – Jewish students’ ability to attend lectures, enter accommodation, and express their religion – without conveying the complex legal determinations universities might need to navigate to provide that protection.

    Ahmed’s discussion of “coded language” becomes a promise that universities can identify and restrict antisemitic euphemisms, while his IHRA compatibility statements are presented as resolving rather than acknowledging ongoing tensions between free speech and antisemitism prevention.

    Most tellingly, UJS President Louis Danker’s response reveals both the raised expectations and their fragility. While expressing satisfaction that “the Office for Students shares our concerns,” he acknowledges that “the ambiguity of the guidance will be challenged by crucial test cases in the coming months.”

    This tension, between reassurance about shared concerns and worry about guidance ambiguity, captures the potential problem that OfS has created – confident promises built on uncertain legal foundations that will inevitably face testing in precisely the complex scenarios that the framework struggles to address.

    What the podcast doesn’t say

    The central question is whether the reassuring statements to Jewish students align with what universities can actually deliver under existing legal frameworks.

    If we take holocaust denial, for example, Ahmed demonstrates clear understanding:

    Article 17 says that none of these rights can be used, essentially to destroy other people’s rights. So speech that aims to destroy others rights… the courts have found, for instance, that many instances of Holocaust denial they’ve looked at, fall under it.

    That explanation appears to be legally accurate. Article 17 is sometimes called the “abuse clause” of the European Convention – it strips protection from speech that aims to destroy the rights of others, such as Holocaust denial.

    But the guidance leaves the explanation out, simply declaring Holocaust denial unprotected without explaining why – or when. That omission matters, because Article 17 normally operates alongside Article 10(2) – another part of the Convention that allows restrictions on speech if they are necessary and proportionate to protect others.

    As a reminder, the OfS guidance’s three-step framework treats human rights considerations as sequential rather than integrated:

    Step 1 asks simply whether speech is “within the law” – defined as speech not prohibited by primary legislation, legal precedent, or secondary legislation. Crucially, university regulations and contracts don’t count as “law” here. If not, don’t allow it. If it is, move to Step 2.

    Step 2 considers whether there are “reasonably practicable steps” to enable the speech. Universities should consider factors like legal requirements (including any formal duties), maintaining essential functions, and physical safety – but explicitly cannot consider the viewpoint expressed, whether it’s controversial, or reputational impact. If steps can be taken, take them. If not, move to Step 3.

    Step 3 – which is only reached if no reasonably practicable steps exist – then asks whether any restrictions are “prescribed by law” and proportionate under the European Convention. This involves checking if there’s a specific legal rule authorising the restriction, and runs through a four-part proportionality test weighing the importance of the objective against the severity of limiting the right.

    That proportionality test looks something like this:

    • Is the objective important enough? – The reason for restricting speech must be sufficiently weighty to justify limiting a fundamental right.
    • Is the restriction rationally connected? – The measure must actually help achieve the objective, not just be vaguely related to it.
    • Is this the least restrictive option? – Could you achieve the same goal with less impact on free speech? If yes, you must use the less intrusive approach.
    • Does the benefit outweigh the harm? – Even if the first three tests are met, you must still balance the severity of restricting speech against how much the restriction actually helps achieve your objective. The restriction fails if the damage to free expression outweighs the benefit gained.

    As I’ve noted before on here, the published approach seems to conflict with Minasyan v Armenia (2019), where the European Court of Human Rights struck down Armenia’s handling of a protest case. The Armenian courts had first checked whether protesters broke domestic criminal law, and only afterwards asked whether their free speech rights were engaged.

    Strasbourg was clear – you can’t separate those steps. The balancing of rights under Article 10(2) has to be done at the outset. So when the guidance asks universities to check domestic criminal law first and only consider broader human rights implications as an afterthought, the sequential framework seems to repeat the flaw that Strasbourg condemned.

    Meanwhile, Ahmed seems to correctly state the objective harassment test:

    …it’s not enough. Speech to count as harassment, that the person at the receiving end feels offended… what’s important is that a reasonable person would think that was so.

    But his practical applications consistently reference subjective experiences without clear frameworks for objective assessment. He discusses Jewish students feeling “unable to attend lectures” or “intimidated out of expressing their own religion” – but then offers up little on how universities should distinguish between justified concerns and unfounded complaints.

    The “reasonable person” test sounds simple, but in practice it is one of the hardest questions courts face. Would an average observer see this as harassment, taking into account context, repetition, and effect?

    Judges often split over the answer, even with days of evidence. Expecting university or SU staff to make that call in real time, during a protest or at a room-booking stage, is asking staff to perform complex human rights analyses on the fly. Clarity on what he might expect is reasonable in those scenarios would help.

    Ahmed’s discussion of antisemitic language also illustrates the analytical burden placed on those enforcing or explaining rules day to day:

    …very often when people use the expression Zionist, for instance, they can actually, can actually be used as a kind of euphemistic expression meaning Jewish people.

    Determining when “Zionist” functions as coded antisemitism requires careful analysis of speaker intent, contextual factors, and impact on targeted individuals. These are determinations that typically require evidence about speaker’s background and previous statements, analysis of the specific context and setting, an assessment of audience understanding and reaction, and an evaluation of the targeting effects on specific individuals.

    Day to day, staff may well lack both the investigative capacity and legal expertise to perform those sorts of analyses reliably. Ahmed acknowledges the complexity – “it might depend on context” – but doesn’t offer anything like a practical methodology for making the determinations.

    The UK Supreme Court in Elan-Cane (2021) stressed that domestic bodies should not push human rights analysis beyond what the European Court of Human Rights has already recognised. Lord Reed warned against overstepping into areas Strasbourg had not yet endorsed.

    Ahmed’s framework arguably asks universities to do exactly that – making human rights calls (on protests, coded language, or harassment) that even the courts approach with extreme caution.

    If legally trained judges with full procedural protections must be cautious about extending human rights analysis, how can staff be expected to perform similar determinations through internal processes? Is OfS fit to do so when it gets a complaint in? And what are the penalties for getting it wrong?

    Rights collision

    Another silence in the interview is how to handle the collision of rights. He clearly anchors harassment to protected characteristics like race and religion, and he treats Zionism as an idea that can be lawfully discussed – while warning it is sometimes used as a euphemism for “Jew” in context. He doesn’t quite say “Zionism is a protected belief” in terms, though that would be the likely legal position under Equality Act case law. The same goes for anti-Zionism.

    Under UK equality law, political and philosophical beliefs qualify for protection if they meet what’s known as the Grainger criteria – that is, the belief must be genuinely held, relate to a weighty aspect of human life, attain a certain level of seriousness and cogency, and be worthy of respect in a democratic society.

    Courts have already recognised beliefs such as environmentalism, gender-critical feminism, and ethical veganism under this test. Anti-Zionism looks like it would qualify on the same basis, provided it is expressed as a coherent political or philosophical position rather than as a proxy for antisemitism.

    What he does not explain is what universities should do when the protections appear to come into direct conflict or quite how a university is supposed to differentiate between the political or philosophical position and the proxy.

    Let’s imagine a student holding a placard reading “Zionism is racism” and another responding that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism.” Both statements can amount to the expression of protected beliefs under the Equality Act. Both students might also claim they are being harassed by the other.

    Courts take weeks to sift through context, intent, and impact in such cases – weighing not just Article 10 free speech but also Article 9 (religion), Article 8 (private life) and Article 11 (assembly).

    On balance, “Zionists off campus” feels like it targets a group of people. Those banned from painting it on a banner may feel their speech is being chilled. “Zionism off campus” feels more like a protected piece of political expression. Some reading that may feel harassed. Complaints in either event are likely.

    Recent cases show how fraught these clashes can be. In Forstater v CGD Europe, the tribunal upheld that gender-critical beliefs were protected, even though many found them offensive – but also emphasised that protection for a belief does not mean protection for every manifestation of it.

    In Mackereth v DWP, the tribunal held that a doctor’s refusal to use trans patients’ pronouns could lawfully be limited, despite his Christian beliefs being protected. The principle is clear – both Zionism and anti-Zionism can be protected, but the way they are expressed may still lawfully be restricted if it harasses others.

    What’s missing from Ahmed’s account is the extent to which universities are expected to perform that fine distinction in real time, and at which stage of a process they’re expected to do so.

    What now?

    The danger in all of this is a form of regulatory false advertising – promising protection through frameworks that universities cannot properly execute without risking legal challenge or practical failure.

    The focus on context is welcome, but it doesn’t solve the core problem – the absence of a practical framework for when and how to balance competing rights. Without it, institutions risk inconsistency, overreach, or paralysis – either censoring lawful political expression or failing to protect students from harassment.

    The reassuring tone also suggests clearer legal boundaries than actually exist. When he says that universities “would expect to take action” about intimidatory speech, he presents complex, fact-specific determinations as straightforward administrative decisions.

    It’s a false certainty that may mislead universities into thinking they have clear authority to restrict speech, and could simultaneously raise student expectations about protection that may prove impossible to deliver.

    Then the style compounds the problem. In the podcast and coverage of it, Jewish students hear confident reassurances; in the consultation response annex, Article 17 is quietly acknowledged; in public guidance, proportionality is all but absent from the “within the law” test.

    The impression is of a regulator telling each audience what it wants to hear by pointing at one end of the see-saw, rather than grappling with the hard edges of the case law in ways that may temper expectations rather than raise them.

    And given both the free speech guidance and the E6 guidance drives home the need to get these messages into the heads of students themselves, there’s certainly nothing in there on how universities are supposed to explain all of this to students.

    It leaves universities (and by proxy their SUs) stuck in the impossible position that they have been for months.

    They remain caught between those heavy sandbags without mechanisms to resolve them, having expectations raised on both ends in ways that may not be as simple in practice, and offering little confidence that a good stab at making the calls, carried out in good faith, will result in anything other than Kafka’s regulator appearing with a fine either way.

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  • OfS’ understanding of the student interest requires improvement

    OfS’ understanding of the student interest requires improvement

    When the Office for Students’ (OfS) proposals for a new quality assessment system for England appeared in the inbox, I happened to be on a lunchbreak from delivering training at a students’ union.

    My own jaw had hit the floor several times during my initial skim of its 101 pages – and so to test the validity of my initial reactions, I attempted to explain, in good faith, the emerging system to the student leaders who had reappeared for the afternoon.

    Having explained that the regulator was hoping to provide students with a “clear view of the quality of teaching and learning” at the university, their first confusion was tied up in the idea that this was even possible in a university with 25,000 students and hundreds of degree courses.

    They’d assumed that some sort of dashboard might be produced that would help students differentiate between at least departments if not courses. When I explained that the “view” would largely be in the form of a single “medal” of Gold, Silver, Bronze or Requires improvement for the whole university, I was met with confusion.

    We’d spent some time before the break discussing the postgraduate student experience – including poor induction for international students, the lack of a policy on supervision for PGTs, and the isolation that PGRs had fed into the SU’s strategy exercise.

    When I explained that OfS was planning to introduce a PGT NSS in 2028 and then use that data in the TEF from 2030-31 – such that their university might not have the data taken into account until 2032-33 – I was met with derision. When I explained that PGRs may be incorporated from 2030–31 onwards, I was met with scorn.

    Keen to know how students might feed in, one officer asked how their views would be taken into account. I explained that as well as the NSS, the SU would have the option to create a written submission to provide contextual insight into the numbers. When one of them observed that “being honest in that will be a challenge given student numbers are falling and so is the SU’s funding”, the union’s voice coordinator (who’d been involved in the 2023 exercise) in the corner offered a wry smile.

    One of the officers – who’d had a rewarding time at the university pretty much despite their actual course – wanted to know if the system was going to tackle students like them not really feeling like they’d learned anything during their degree. Given the proposals’ intention to drop educational gain altogether, I moved on at this point. Young people have had enough of being let down.

    I’m not at home in my own home

    Back in February, you might recall that OfS published a summary of a programme of polling and focus groups that it had undertaken to understand what students wanted and needed from their higher education – and the extent to which they were getting it.

    At roughly the same time, it published proposals for a new initial Condition C5: Treating students fairly, to apply initially to newly registered providers, which drew on that research.

    As well as issues it had identified with things like contractual provisions, hidden costs and withdrawn offers, it was particularly concerned with the risk that students may take a decision about what and where to study based on false, misleading or exaggerated information.

    OfS’ own research into the Teaching Excellence Framework 2023 signals one of the culprits for that misleading. Polling by Savanta in April and May 2024, and follow-up focus groups with prospective undergraduates over the summer both showed that applicants consistently described TEF outcomes as too broad to be of real use for their specific course decisions.

    They wanted clarity about employability rates, continuation statistics, and job placements – but what they got instead was a single provider-wide badge. Many struggled to see meaningful differences between Gold and Silver, or to reconcile how radically different providers could both hold Gold.

    The evidence also showed that while a Gold award could reassure applicants, more than one in five students aware of their provider’s TEF rating disagreed that it was a fair reflection of their own experience. That credibility gap matters.

    If the TEF continues to offer a single label for an entire university, with data that are both dated and aggregated, there is a clear danger that students will once again be misled – this time not by hidden costs or unfair contracts, but by the regulatory tool that is supposed to help them make informed choices.

    You don’t know what I’m feeling

    Absolutely central to the TEF will remain results of the National Student Survey (NSS).

    OfS says that’s because “the NSS remains the only consistently collected, UK-wide dataset that directly captures students’ views on their teaching, learning, and academic support,” and because “its long-running use provides reliable benchmarked data which allows for meaningful comparison across providers and trends over time.”

    It stresses that the survey provides an important “direct line to student perceptions,” which balances outcomes data and adds depth to panel judgements. In other words, the NSS is positioned as an indispensable barometer of student experience in a system that otherwise leans heavily on outcomes.

    But set aside the fact that it surveys only those who make it to the final year of a full undergraduate degree. The NSS doesn’t ask whether students felt their course content was up to date with current scholarship and professional practice, or whether learning outcomes were coherent and built systematically across modules and years — both central expectations under B1 (Academic experience).

    It doesn’t check whether students received targeted support to close knowledge or skills gaps, or whether they were given clear help to avoid academic misconduct through essay planning, referencing, and understanding rules – requirements spelled out in the guidance to B2 (Resources, support and engagement). It also misses whether students were confident that staff were able to teach effectively online, and whether the learning environment – including hardware, software, internet reliability, and access to study spaces – actually enabled them to learn. Again, explicit in B2, but invisible in the survey.

    On assessment, the NSS asks about clarity, fairness, and usefulness of feedback, but it doesn’t cover whether assessment methods really tested what students had been taught, whether tasks felt valid for measuring the intended outcomes, or whether students believed their assessments prepared them for professional standards. Yet B4 (Assessment and awards) requires assessments to be valid and reliable, moderated, and robust against misconduct – areas NSS perceptions can’t evidence.

    I could go on. The survey provides snapshots of the learning experience but leaves out important perception checks on the coherence, currency, integrity, and fitness-for-purpose of teaching and learning, which the B conditions (and students) expect providers to secure.

    And crucially, OfS has chosen not to use the NSS questions on organisation and management in the future TEF at all. That’s despite its own 2025 press release highlighting it as one of the weakest-performing themes in the sector – just 78.5 per cent of students responded positively – and pointing out that disabled students in particular reported significantly worse experiences than their peers.

    OfS said then that “institutions across the sector could be doing more to ensure disabled students are getting the high quality higher education experience they are entitled to,” and noted that the gap between disabled and non-disabled students was growing in organisation and management. In other words, not only is the NSS not fit for purpose, OfS’ intended use of it isn’t either.

    I followed the voice, you gave to me

    In the 2023 iteration of the TEF, the independent student submission was supposed to be one of the most exciting innovations. It was billed as a crucial opportunity for providers’ students to tell their own story – not mediated through NSS data or provider spin, but directly and independently. In OfS’ words, the student submission provided “additional insights” that would strengthen the panel’s ability to judge whether teaching and learning really were excellent.

    In this consultation, OfS says it wants to “retain the option of student input,” but with tweaks. The headline change is that the student submission would no longer need to cover “student outcomes” – an area that SUs often struggled with given the technicalities of data and the lack of obvious levers for student involvement.

    On the surface, that looks like a kindness – but scratch beneath the surface, and it’s a red flag. Part of the point of Condition B2.2b is that providers must take all reasonable steps to ensure effective engagement with each cohort of students so that “those students succeed in and beyond higher education.”

    If students’ unions feel unable to comment on how the wider student experience enables (or obstructs) student success and progression, that’s not a reason to delete it from the student submission. It’s a sign that something is wrong with the way providers involve students in what’s done to understand and shape outcomes.

    The trouble is that the light touch response ignores the depth of feedback it has already commissioned and received. Both the IFF evaluation of TEF 2023 and OfS’ own survey of student contacts documented the serious problems that student reps and students’ unions faced.

    They said the submission window was far too short – dropping guidance in October, demanding a January deadline, colliding with elections, holidays, and strikes. They said the guidance was late, vague, inaccessible, and offered no examples. They said the template was too broad to be useful. They said the burden on small and under-resourced SUs was overwhelming, and even large ones had to divert staff time away from core activity.

    They described barriers to data access – patchy dashboards, GDPR excuses, lack of analytical support. They noted that almost a third didn’t feel fully free to say what they wanted, with some monitored by staff while writing. And they told OfS that the short, high-stakes process created self-censorship, strained relationships, and duplication without impact.

    The consultation documents brush most of that aside. Little in the proposals tackles the resourcing, timing, independence, or data access problems that students actually raised.

    I’m not at home in my own home

    OfS also proposes to commission “alternative forms of evidence” – like focus groups or online meetings – where students aren’t able to produce a written submission. The regulator’s claim is that this will reduce burden, increase consistency, and make it easier to secure independent student views.

    The focus group idea is especially odd. Student representatives’ main complaint wasn’t that they couldn’t find the words – it was that they lacked the time, resource, support, and independence to tell the truth. Running a one-off OfS focus group with a handful of students doesn’t solve that. It actively sidesteps the standard in B2 and the DAPs rules on embedding students in governance and representation structures.

    If a student body struggles to marshal the evidence and write the submission, the answer should be to ask whether the provider is genuinely complying with the regulatory conditions on student engagement. Farming the job out to OfS-run focus groups allows providers with weak student partnership arrangements to escape scrutiny – precisely the opposite of what the student submission was designed to do.

    The point is that the quality of a student submission is not just a “nice to have” extra insight for the TEF panel. It is, in itself, evidence of whether a provider is complying with Condition B2. It requires providers to take all reasonable steps to ensure effective engagement with each cohort of students, and says students should make an effective contribution to academic governance.

    If students can’t access data, don’t have the collective capacity to contribute, or are cowed into self-censorship, that is not just a TEF design flaw – it is B2 evidence of non-compliance. The fact that OfS has never linked student submission struggles to B2 is bizarre. Instead of drawing on the submissions as intelligence about engagement, the regulator has treated them as optional extras.

    The refusal to make that link is even stranger when compared to what came before. Under the old QAA Institutional Review process, the student written submission was long-established, resourced, and formative. SUs had months to prepare, could share drafts, and had the time and support to work with managers on solutions before a review team arrived. It meant students could be honest without the immediate risk of reputational harm, and providers had a chance to act before being judged.

    TEF 2023 was summative from the start, rushed and high-stakes, with no requirement on providers to demonstrate they had acted on feedback. The QAA model was designed with SUs and built around partnership – the TEF model was imposed by OfS and designed around panel efficiency. OfS has learned little from the feedback from those who submitted.

    But now I’ve gotta find my own

    While I’m on the subject of learning, we should finally consider how far the proposals have drifted from the lessons of Dame Shirley Pearce’s review. Back in 2019, her panel made a point of recording what students had said loud and clear – the lack of learning gain in TEF was a fundamental flaw.

    In fact, educational gain was the single most commonly requested addition to the framework, championed by students and their representatives who argued that without it, TEF risked reducing success to continuation and jobs.

    Students told the review they wanted a system that showed whether higher education was really developing their knowledge, skills, and personal growth. They wanted recognition of the confidence, resilience, and intellectual development that are as much the point of university as a payslip.

    Pearce’s panel agreed, recommending that Educational Gains should become a fourth formal aspect of TEF, encompassing both academic achievement and personal development. Crucially, the absence of a perfect national measure was not seen as a reason to ignore the issue. Providers, the panel said, should articulate their own ambitions and evidence of gain, in line with their mission, because failing to even try left a gaping hole at the heart of quality assessment.

    Fast forward to now, and OfS is proposing to abandon the concept entirely. To students and SUs who have been told for years that their views shape regulation, the move is a slap in the face. A regulator that once promised to capture the full richness of the student experience is now narrowing the lens to what can be benchmarked in spreadsheets. The result is a framework that tells students almost nothing about what they most want to know – whether their education will help them grow.

    You see the same lack of learning in the handling of extracurricular and co-curricular activity. For students, societies, volunteering, placements, and cocurricular opportunities are not optional extras but integral to how they build belonging, develop skills, and prepare for life beyond university. Access to these opportunities feature heavily in the Access and Participation Risk Register precisely because they matter to student success and because they’re a part of the educational offer in and of themselves.

    But in TEF 2023 OfS tied itself in knots over whether they “count” — at times allowing them in if narrowly framed as “educational”, at other times excluding them altogether. To students who know how much they learn outside of the lecture theatre, the distinction looked absurd. Now the killing off of educational gain excludes them all together.

    You should have listened

    Taken together, OfS has delivered a masterclass in demonstrating how little it has learned from students. As a result, the body that once promised to put student voice at the centre of regulation is in danger of constructing a TEF that is both incomplete and actively misleading.

    It’s a running theme – more evidence that OfS is not interested enough in genuinely empowering students. If students don’t know what they can, should, or could expect from their education – because the standards are vague, the metrics are aggregated, and the judgements are opaque – then their representatives won’t know either. And if their reps don’t know, their students’ union can’t effectively advocate for change.

    When the only judgements against standards that OfS is interested in come from OfS itself, delivered through a very narrow funnel of risk-based regulation, that funnel inevitably gets choked off through appeals to “reduced burden” and aggregated medals that tell students nothing meaningful about their actual course or experience. The result is a system that talks about student voice while systematically disempowering the very students it claims to serve.

    In the consultation, OfS says that it wants its new quality system to be recognised as compliant with the European Standards and Guidelines (ESG), which would in time allow it to seek membership of the European Quality Assurance Register (EQAR). That’s important for providers with international partnerships and recruitment ambitions, and for students given that ESG recognition underpins trust, mobility, and recognition across the European Higher Education Area.

    But OfS’ conditions don’t require co-design of the quality assurance framework itself, nor proof that student views shape outcomes. Its proposals expand student assessor roles in the TEF, but don’t guarantee systematic involvement in all external reviews or transparency of outcomes – both central to ESG. And as the ongoing QA-FIT project and ESU have argued, the next revision of the ESG is likely to push student engagement further, emphasising co-creation, culture, and demonstrable impact.

    If it does apply for EQAR recognition, our European peers will surely notice what English students already know – the gap between OfS’ rhetoric on student partnership and the reality of its actual understanding and actions is becoming impossible to ignore.

    When I told those student officers back on campus that their university would be spending £25,000 of their student fee income every time it has to take part in the exercise, their anger was palpable. When I added that according to the new OfS chair, Silver and Gold might enable higher fees, while Bronze or “Requires Improvement” might cap or further reduce their student numbers, they didn’t actually believe me.

    The student interest? Hardly.

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  • Wales can lead the way on student engagement – if it chooses to

    Wales can lead the way on student engagement – if it chooses to

    Imagine studying in a Wales where every student understands their rights and responsibilities.

    Where module feedback drives real change, where student representatives have time, resources and power to make a difference, and where complaints drive learning, not defensiveness.

    Where every student contributes to their community in some way – and where decisions can’t be made about students without students.

    When the Tertiary Education and Research (Wales) Act 2022 was being drafted, the inclusion of a mandatory Learner Engagement Code was important – Wales resolved to put into primary legislation what England had buried in the B Conditions and Scotland had largely left to institutional discretion.

    Section 125 now requires the Commission to prepare and publish a code about learner involvement in decision-making that’s not optional, or best practice – it’s law.

    This year the newly formed commission (MEDR) has been informally consulting on it – but it’s now been so long since the original debates that there’s a danger everyone helping to develop the thing will forget what it was supposed to do.

    Nobody will benefit from something that emerges as something weak or vague. The opportunity is for Wales to lead the way with some crunchy “comply or explain” provisions for universities in Wales that reflect the fact that this has been put in primary legislation.

    The cost of getting it wrong

    We know what happens when learner engagement is treated as an afterthought. In England, providers often silence critique on reputational grounds – the Office for Students’ (OfS) free speech guidance had to explicitly state that students have the right to publicly criticise their institutions. Imagine needing regulatory clarification that criticism is allowed in a democracy.

    Meanwhile, Scottish institutions celebrate their “partnership” approach while student representatives struggle to influence decisions that matter. Sparqs frameworks look good on paper, but without regulatory teeth, they rely on institutional goodwill. And goodwill, as any student rep will tell you, tends to evaporate when difficult decisions need making.

    When module evaluation becomes a tick-box exercise rather than genuine dialogue, problems fester. When student reps are excluded from decisions about their own education, drop-out rates climb. When complaints are buried rather than learned from, the same issues affect cohort after cohort.

    I’ve seen a lot of it over the years. The disabled student who gave up trying to get adjustments implemented because every lecturer claimed the central service’s plans were “merely advisory”. The international PGT student who couldn’t complain about teaching quality because they feared visa implications. The part-time student who couldn’t access support services because everything was designed around full-time, on-campus students.

    The student facing disciplinary proceedings who wasn’t allowed an advocate and faced a panel with no student members – in contrast to the support available to staff in similar situations.

    These aren’t edge cases – they’re systematic failures that a robust Code could prevent. Wales has a genuine opportunity to do something different – to create a Code with teeth that makes learner engagement mandatory, measurable and meaningful.

    Learning from what works

    The most effective student engagement systems require common features. They’re comprehensive, covering everything from module evaluation to strategic planning, and are backed by resources, ensuring student representatives aren’t expected to volunteer countless hours without support. And crucially, they have consequences when institutions fail to comply.

    The key is moving from “should” to “must”, with a comply or explain mechanism that has genuine bite.

    Here’s how it could work. The Code would set out clear standards – not aspirations but requirements. Providers would either have to comply with the standards or publicly explain why they’ve chosen an alternative approach that delivers equivalent or better outcomes.

    But – and this is crucial – explanations wouldn’t be allowed to be boilerplate excuses. They would need to be evidence-based, time-limited, and subject to scrutiny.

    The Commission would assess compliance annually, not through tick-box returns but through triangulated evidence – student surveys, complaint patterns, representation effectiveness metrics, and crucially, the views of student representatives themselves.

    Where providers persistently fail to meet standards without adequate justification, consequences would follow – from improvement notices to conditions on funding.

    There would be an expectation of an annually agreed student partnership agreement – setting out both processes and priority actions – and an expectation that students’ unions would produce an annual report on the experiences of students at that provider.

    This isn’t about micromanaging institutions – it’s about establishing minimum standards while allowing flexibility in how they’re met. A small FE provider might implement representation differently than a large university, but both must demonstrate their approach delivers genuine student voice in decision-making.

    Student rights and democratic education

    The Code should first establish that students are both consumers with enforceable rights and partners in their education. This dual recognition ends the sterile debate about whether students are one or the other. It means providers must respect consumer rights (quality, promises kept, redress) while creating genuine partnership structures.

    Knowing your rights matters. Following Poland’s model, all students should receive comprehensive training on their rights and responsibilities within 14 days of starting. That shouldn’t be an optional freshers’ week session – it should be mandatory education covering consumer rights, representation opportunities, complaints procedures, support services, and collective responsibilities.

    Crucially, the training should be developed and delivered by the SU. There should be written materials in (both) plain language(s), recorded sessions for those who can’t attend, annual refreshers, and staff trained to respect and uphold these rights. When every graduate understands both their rights and responsibilities, Wales will transform not just higher education but society.

    Protected status and academic adjustments

    Following Portugal’s model, student representatives should get protected status. That means academic adjustments for representative duties, just as providers must accommodate pregnancy or disability. No student should face the choice between failing their degree or fulfilling their democratic mandate.

    Representatives should get justified absences for all activities – not just formal meetings but preparation, consultation, and training. Assessments should be rescheduled without penalty, deadlines adjusted based on representative workload, and attendance requirements modified. Reps should get protection from any form of academic discrimination.

    The Finnish model adds another layer – ideally, student representatives in governance should receive academic credit or remuneration (or both). Learning through representation is learning – about negotiation, governance, and strategic thinking. They are skills that matter in any career.

    Module evaluation as universal engagement

    The Estonian approach shows what’s possible when feedback becomes embedded in academic culture. Making evaluation mandatory for module completion ensures universal participation. But it must be meaningful – published results, documented actions, closed feedback loops. Every student becomes a partner in quality enhancement, not just the engaged few.

    Wales should adopt Estonia’s three-part structure – teaching quality, student engagement, and learning outcomes. This recognises that educational success requires both good teaching and student effort. No more blaming students for poor outcomes while ignoring teaching failures, and no more student satisfaction surveys that ignore whether students are actually engaging with their learning.

    Results should be published within modules – not buried in committee papers but visible where students choose modules. Previous evaluation results, actions taken, ongoing improvements – all should be required to be transparent. Future students should be able to see what they’re signing up for, and current students should see their feedback matters.

    Comprehensive scope of engagement

    Sweden’s clarity is instructive – students must be represented “when decisions or preparations are made that have bearing on their courses or programmes or the situation of students.” There’s no weasel words about “where appropriate” or “when practicable” – if it affects students, students must be involved.

    In the Netherlands, where decisions are made by individuals, not committees, information must be provided and consultation must occur at least 14 days in advance. And written explanations should be required when student recommendations aren’t followed – because accountability matters in managerial decisions.

    Beyond academic structures, students should be represented on professional service boards, IT committees, estates planning groups, marketing focus groups. Decisions about campus facilities or digital systems affect students as much as curriculum design – yet these areas often lack any student voice.

    The digital environment deserves special attention. Student representatives should be involved in decisions about learning platforms, assessment systems and communication tools – not after implementation but during planning. Because digital accessibility and usability directly impact educational success.

    Consent not consultation

    Wales could be bold. Following the Dutch model, some decisions should require student consent, not just consultation. The Code could distinguish clearly between:

    Matters requiring consent (cannot proceed without student agreement):

    • Teaching and Assessment Regulations
    • Significant programme structure changes
    • Student charter content
    • Institutional policy frameworks affecting learners
    • Quality assurance procedures
    • Representation structure and changes
    • Elective module options for the following year

    Matters requiring consultation (mandatory input but not binding):

    • Budget allocations affecting student services
    • Campus development plans
    • Strategic planning
    • Staff appointments affecting students
    • Marketing and recruitment strategies

    Matters governed by a council of staff and students:

    • Student accommodation
    • Student employment
    • Student services and mental health
    • Harassment and sexual misconduct policy

    Matters delegated to the students’ union

    • Student engagement and representation
    • Student activities and volunteering

    This isn’t radical – it’s a recognition that students are genuine partners. No other stakeholder group would accept purely advisory input on regulations governing their activities. Why should students?

    From course reps to citizens

    Another area where Wales could be genuinely radical would take Wales’ vision of students as citizens by going beyond traditional representation structures – broadening “engagement” beyond academic quality.

    The European model of subject-level associations – common from Helsinki to Heidelberg – shows what’s possible. These aren’t just academic societies but genuine communities combining social activities, career development, representation, and civic engagement. They create belonging at the discipline level where students actually identify.

    In Tallinn, departmental student bodies aren’t sideshows but partners in departmental culture. They organise orientation, run mentoring, coordinate with employers, feed into curriculum development – and crucially, they’re funded and recognised as essential, not optional extras.

    In some countries there’s even a “duty of contribution” where students volunteer to help run the institution. Green officers, peer mentors, student ambassadors – multiple routes to engagement beyond traditional representation. Not everyone wants to be a course rep. But everyone can contribute something.

    Even if we’re just talking about student clubs and societies, Wales should mandate that providers support and fund these diverse engagement routes.

    Every student should serve somehow during their studies – it’s citizenship education in practice. Some will be traditional representatives, others will mentor new students, run sustainability initiatives, organise cultural events, support community engagement. All develop democratic skills. All should share responsibility for their community.

    Taking part

    Some countries maintain a tripartite principle for major bodies – equal representation of students, academic staff, and professional staff – to recognise that universities are communities, not hierarchies. Maybe that’s asking too much – but even with a minimum of two students in the room, representation means nothing without support.

    Some countries require that student reps receive all documentation at least five days in advance, training on context and background, briefings on complex issues, and support to participate fully – you can’t contribute if you don’t understand what’s being discussed.

    When new committees or working groups are established, there should be active consideration of student membership with default presumption of inclusion. Decisions and justifications should be communicated to student representatives, and there should be annual reviews of representation effectiveness with evidence-based changes.

    Some countries transform meetings from tokenistic to meaningful. Materials distributed five working days in advance means no ambushing student representatives with complex papers. Everything in accessible language, translated where needed, should be a standard too.

    The Swedish innovation of publishing all decisions and rationales builds accountability. Rather than being buried in minutes, decisions get actively communicated. Students can see what’s decided in their name and why – democracy requires transparency. And committees should pick up minimum student membership levels with voting rights, and there should never (ever) be just one student in a room.

    Funded independence

    Latvia mandates that SUs receive at least 0.5 per cent of institutional income, and minimums were agreed as part of the Australian Universities Accord. This isn’t generous – it’s the minimum needed for effective representation. The Welsh Code should set a minimum as a % of income, or fees – ensuring student bodies have resources to train representatives, gather evidence, and hold institutions accountable.

    Funding should come with independence safeguards. There should be no conditions that compromise advocacy, no reductions for challenging decisions, and protected status even when (especially when) relationships become difficult. Written agreements should protect core funding even during institutional financial difficulties.

    Beyond core funding, providers should be required to supply facilities, administrative support, IT access, and time for representatives. The split between guaranteed core funding for democratic functions and negotiated funding for service delivery would protect both representation and student services.

    Complaints as learning and conduct

    Complaints are a really important part of student engagement – and so the OIA’s Good Practice Framework, which learns from them, should be mandatory, not optional. A proper system treats complaints as valuable intelligence, not irritations to be managed.

    Wales should then go further, automatically converting failed appeals containing service complaints into formal complaints. When patterns emerge, compensation should go to all affected students, not just those who complained. And every provider should be required to publish on what it’s learned from complaints over the past year, and what it’s doing about it – with sign off from the SU.

    The Swedish model’s restrictions on disciplinary proceedings protect students from institutional overreach. Proceedings are only allowed for academic misconduct, disruption of teaching, disruption of operations and harassment. And students are given full procedural rights – including representation, disclosure and presence during evidence.

    Wales should go further. Every student facing disciplinary proceedings should have the right to independent support, and any panel should include student members who are properly trained and supported. Peer judgement matters in community standards.

    And neither disciplinary nor funding processes should ever be used to silence criticism, punish protest, retaliate for complaints or discourage collective action. The free speech protections in OfS’ guidance should be baseline – students’ right to criticise their institution is absolute, whether individually or collectively.

    Disability rights are student rights

    Every year, countless disabled students arrive with hope and ambition, only to find themselves trapped in a Kafkaesque system of “support” that demands disclosure, documentation, negotiation, repetition, and often – silence. If Wales is to lead, then it should be unflinching in acknowledging the daily indignities that disabled students face – and bold in tackling the systemic failures that allow them to persist.

    Adjustments, when granted, are inconsistently implemented, and advocacy, if it exists at all, is fractured and under-resourced. In many departments, reasonable adjustments are still treated as optional extras. Central services write the plans, but academic departments dispute their legitimacy, claiming subject expertise trumps legal obligation. Students are asked to justify, to prove, to persuade – again and again. And often in public – as if their access needs were a debate.

    Disabled students can’t be expected to fight these battles alone. Wales should require institutions to facilitate advocacy, embedded close to academic departments, co-located with SUs where possible, and independent enough to challenge unlawful behaviour when necessary. Not every rep can be an expert in disability law. But every student should have access to someone who is.

    The law is clear – providers have an anticipatory duty. That means planning ahead for the barriers Disabled students face, not waiting until they fall. But few providers conduct serious, evidence-based assessments of their disabled student population by type of impairment, by subject area, by mode of study. Without that, how can anyone claim to be meeting the duty? Wales could also set the tone nationally with a mandatory bank of questions in the NSS that probes access, implementation, and inclusion.

    Wales’ code should mandate that providers move beyond warm words to hard strategy – analysing disability data with student input, mapping gaps, and resourcing change. Every provider should be required to publish a Disability Access Strategy – co-designed with students, informed by evidence, and backed with budget. And implementation should be monitored – not through passive complaints, but active auditing. Where there are failures, there should be automatic remedies – and if patterns persist, the Commission must intervene.

    And briefing all students on disabled students’ rights would help too. If every student understood what disabled students are legally entitled to, fewer adjustments would be denied, more peers would offer solidarity, and institutions would face pressure from all sides to comply with the law. Education here is empowerment – for disabled and non-disabled students alike.

    Wales could lead

    If all of that feels like a lot, that’s because it is.

    But that’s why it was put in primary legislation – to show what’s possible when you take student engagement seriously, to create structures that outlast changes in institutional leadership or political climate, and to graduate citizens who understand democracy because they’ve practiced it.

    But most importantly, to lead:

    The Commission will ensure that Welsh PCET providers lead the UK in learner and student engagement and representation.

    Universities Wales isn’t so sure. In its response to the Regulatory System Consultation it said:

    We do have a number of concerns about regulatory over-reach that can be found in several of the pillars. For example, in the Learner Engagement pillar, the demand for investment of resources and support for learner engagement could be deemed to be a breach of institutional autonomy, particularly in light of this being married to ‘continuous improvement’ – if this ends up being a metric on which the sector is judged, it could be particularly contentious in tight financial circumstances.

    Good grief. It really isn’t a breach of institutional autonomy for students to expect that a little slice of their fees (whether paid by them or not) will be allocated to their active engagement and will be under their control. As Welsh Government put it during the passage of the Bill:

    There is already some excellent learner engagement within the sector, but the prize now is to ensure this is the norm across all types of provisions and for all learners.

    Welsh Government talks about civic mission, distinctive Welsh values, and education for citizenship – in universities, the Code is where rhetoric can meet reality.

    Fine words should become firm requirements, and partnership can stop being what institutions do to students and become what students and institutions do together.

    I know which Wales I’d rather study in. The question now is whether MEDR has the courage to mandate it.

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  • DfE sets out the detail on the free speech act

    DfE sets out the detail on the free speech act

    In some ways, there’s little that’s new in the Department for Education’s Command Paper on the future of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023.

    Over 30 pages or so, it basically puts some meat on the bones of the two announcements made by Secretary of State Bridget Phillipson – the one from last Summer where the act’s implementation was paused, and the one from January which discussed the plan in outline to partially repeal.

    This isn’t the first Command Paper from DfE on the issue – back in 2021, then Secretary of State Gavin Williamson’s effort was a fairly heavily ideological compendium of Telegraph stories and Policy Exchange talking points – picking up everything from cancel culture to students being encouraged “to report others for legal speech”.

    This run at things tends to deftly avoid all of that. It’s about as technical as you can get, with pretty much all of the critique justifying the approach based on workability and burden. Even that “sources close to the Secretary State” quote from last Summer on the Act representing some sort of “hate speech charter” is missing in action here – with the only discussion on harassment surrounding the ban on non-disclosure agreements.

    That’s either savvy politics from a government keen to douse down culture war flames, or a hostage to fortune when OfS’ particular approach to the balancing act between free speech and EDI at some stage comes back to bite – with ministers caught in the middle.

    And we’re off

    We already knew that the government had decided to commence the duties on providers regarding freedom of speech and academic freedom, as set out in Section 1 of the Act. The regulations were made on 28 April 2025, the duties come into force on 1 August 2025, and we got some actual (if controversial) guidance from OfS on 19 June.

    These include requirements for providers to take reasonably practicable steps to secure freedom of speech within the law for staff, members, students, and visiting speakers, as well as protecting academic freedom for academic staff. The Command Paper is keen to point out that the expanded definition of academic freedom will be retained, protecting academic staff from suffering adverse employment consequences solely based on their opinions or ideas.

    Ditto Section 2 of the Act, which covers constituent institutions of providers. DfE says that its decision ensures that constituent institutions such as colleges, schools, or halls within universities (for example, the individual colleges at Oxford and Cambridge) are subject to the same obligations as their parent HE providers.

    It says that the clarification was particularly important to put beyond doubt that these constituent institutions cannot avoid the freedom of speech duties that apply to the main institution – although to the extent to which you see these things as a see-saw, that does mean that Oxbridge Colleges will each be able to maintain their own free speech code of practice, while it’s the central university that will hold a central responsibility for the harassment and sexual misconduct duty as of 1 August.

    Given that Oxbridge colleges tend to be fiercely guarded about their autonomy and independence, that harassment duty and features like its “single source of information” were going to be interesting enough – but given that OfS’ free speech guidance repeatedly mentions harassment considerations when making decisions on free speech, you can see how some astonishing complexity and internal conflict could be coming further down the track.

    It’s also worth noting in passing that while DfE seems keen to put Oxbridge colleges’ direct duties beyond doubt, there’s nothing in here on transnational education – which as we noted in the commentary on OfS’ guidance, is asserted to be outside of the scope of the Act without anything in the way of meaningful justification.

    The other thing in this section is DfE’s pride at extending the non-disclosure agreement ban OfS was already putting in place for harassment and sexual misconduct cases to bullying. It quotes campaigns like “Can’t buy my silence”, but of course doesn’t explain to students why silence can be bought over other types of complaint.

    Yes yous

    The original version of the Bill proposed regulating students’ unions directly – although notably, the SUs of those constituent colleges were to have been exempted on the basis that the college exercises sufficient control.

    Pretty much by accident, that did mean that an FE union whose College was on the register and in receipt of OfS funding was going to be expected to bear all of the complex legal duties and issue a Code of Practice – even if it was unincorporated and run entirely by FE (rather than HE) volunteers.

    So entirely sensibly, there’s confirmation that the government has decided to repeal sections 3 and 7 of the act in their entirety, which would have imposed the direct freedom of speech duties and given OfS regulatory powers over them.

    The workaround is the one that’s been in place since 1994 – regulating SUs through their provider. The rationale for repeal centres on concerns that SUs can lack the financial resources, regulatory capacity, and legal expertise to handle complex duties, that monetary penalties or damage awards could severely impact their ability to provide services and support to students, and the government recognised that SUs are already regulated as charities by the Charity Commission, which oversees their compliance with legal duties including furthering educational purposes through enabling discussion and debate.

    So instead of direct regulation, the government has decided to adopt our proposal from 2021 – the government will expect providers to take reasonably practicable steps to ensure their students’ unions follow codes of practice, which is what already happens over a whole range of issues. Some will see that as an attack on autonomy, others a charter for avoidance – sensible people will see this as the approach that will work.

    Or at least it should work, were it not for the fact that OfS seems to be requiring universities (and therefore by proxy their SUs) to adopt an approach to the balance between free speech and harm that is not legally compliant. More on that in our commentary on OfS’ guidance, suffice to say that SUs at the sharp end of some of the tensions may end up resolving that what OfS might have told them to do is not what they actually should do on a given issue.

    Complainants will be able to complain about the reasonably practicable steps thing – DfE civil servants may have forgotten that the Education Act 1994 also sets up some statutory complaints requirements on SUs themselves, which involve provider review. The other odd bit is that DfE’s amendments to the Act will require providers to set out in their Code of Practice how their students’ union will ensure that affiliation is not denied to any student society on the grounds of its lawful policy or objectives, or the lawful ideas or opinions of its members.

    That goes slightly further than the compliance already expected of SUs as charities over protected beliefs, and extends (very slightly) an existing provision in the Education Act 1994 that the procedure for allocating resources to groups or clubs should be fair and should be set down in writing and freely accessible to all students. It’ll cause conflict at the edges – students do expect to be able to vote on things, and votes can be problematic – but overall this all makes sense.

    Tort a lesson

    You might remember the controversy over the statutory tort – the thing that would have allowed staff, students, and external speakers to bring civil claims against HE providers, constituent institutions, or students’ unions for breaches of their freedom of speech duties.

    The government’s rationale for repealing that bit centres on concerns about its potentially harmful effects on the higher education sector – a chilling effect on freedom of speech that might make institutions more risk-averse about inviting challenging or controversial speakers due to fear of litigation. And so given judicial review, employment tribunals, the OIA complaints scheme for students, and the forthcoming enhanced OfS complaints scheme are all alternatives, plus the financial burden of potential legal costs, it’s gone.

    That all pretty much matches Lords speeches opposed to the Tort at the end of 2022 – this we might expect this to re-emerge as a flashpoint when all of this finds its “appropriate legislative vehicle”.

    This section also says that the government is also concerned that the threat of legal proceedings might lead institutions to prioritise protecting hateful or degrading speech over the interests of those who feel harassed or intimidated – an interesting idea given that both hateful and degrading speech can still be within the law, or at least OfS’ interpretation of it.

    Complaints chaos

    As expected, the Office for Students is going to be stripped of the ability to hear complaints from… students over academic freedom and freedom of speech.

    To be fair, the sensible rationale there is that the Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIA) is a well-established route that is recognised and understood by students and providers – and that approach will prevent students being baffled about who to approach, or worse, arbitrary categories that had the potential to take a wide-ranging complaint and insist on it being sliced up.

    That won’t remove the potential problem of students on one end of the see-saw and staff on the other each making complaints about the same issue – or OfS and OIA potentially making different judgements. There’s also the prospect that OfS and OIA will handle things at a different pace, and while OfS was proposing to allow a complaint to roll in without exhausting internal procedures, OIA usually needs a Completion of Procedures letter.

    It’s all very well asking the OIA to look at OfS’ guidance, but presumably there’s some risk that the OIA will look at the way OfS is defining free speech within the law and have representations made to it that disagree. Wales would feel pretty aggrieved if OfS’ particular interpretation was imposed on it via OIA’s dual country coverage, and presumably it would be wild for the OIA to say one thing about an incident in Wales and another in England.

    It all feels like the two bodies are being asked to get in a room and talk – on that, DfE just points at Section 63 of HERA (OfS may co-operate with others where appropriate) and says you two should talk. It might strengthen it if needs be.

    DfE also says that it will ask OfS to consider and then set out in requirements or guidance what fit for purpose internal complaints processes for academic freedom look like, although you could just as easily ask the OIA to build something into its Good Practice Framework.

    The other aspect here is that the legislation will switch from OfS having a power rather than a duty to consider complaints under its scheme. DfE says that will enable it to prioritise, for example, the most serious complaints or complaints on issues affecting the whole sector.

    The expectation is that “OfS and Dr Ahmed” will be transparent, independent and neutral in how they prioritise consideration of those complaints – notwithstanding the position-taking evident in the guidance already, that presumably points to some sort of criteria for folk to fight about.

    Lurking in the background of all that is academic freedom – in its consultation on the complaints scheme, OfS pointed at the Higher Education and Research Act and said “the Act will require us to consider every complaint that is capable of being referred under the scheme. It does not preclude us from considering matters of academic judgement.”.

    The OIA of course can’t look at such matters – and with “duty” switched to “power”, we’re going to need OfS to take a view on whether it will do things for staff and speakers that the OIA won’t be able to do for students.

    Foreign funding

    The one policy area where an announcement was pending was section 9 of the legislation, related to OfS’ monitoring of overseas funding to providers with an eye to assessing the extent to which such funding presents risks to freedom of speech and academic freedom. This measure is not currently in force.

    When Bridget Phillipson updated Parliament on Labour’s plans in January, it was the one area where a decision was not announced:

    I will take more time to consider implementation of the overseas funding measures. I remain fully committed to tackling cases of interference by overseas Governments, and the wider measures in the Act will further strengthen our protections. However, I want to ensure that any new reporting requirements for providers add value without being overly burdensome. We continue to work at pace with the sector on the wider implementation of the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme. My officials are working across Government and with the sector to review our response, and I will confirm my final decision in due course.

    Now we get a decision of sorts – and that decision is to continue to keep this under review, and introduce “alternative mitigations to support HE providers to improve international due diligence.”

    For a long time under the last government, the response to any and all bugbears that commentators and politicians had with universities’ and students’ relationships with other countries – ranging from overreliance on international students from certain countries, to research collaborations in weapons technology, to transnational repression, to the activities of Confucius Institutes and Chinese student associations – was that this would all be sorted out through the twin approach of the free speech act and the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme (FIRS). Labour has instead taken the approach that the latter needs to be implemented first.

    FIRS will come into effect on 1 July – we reviewed its implications for the sector back in April – and the policy paper promises to assess what comes out of it. FIRS, we are told, will provide “greater visibility of foreign state influence in the UK,” and information disclosed will be shared with DfE and OfS where relevant, allowing for pattern recognition as well as the prevention of specific threats.

    The alternative – that is, additional – mitigations mentioned above include asking the Office for Students to “consider the value of an explicit regulatory expectation” around due diligence on international partnerships. There’s also work on possible codes of practice and best practice sharing.

    The caveat here is that as FIRS is implemented:

    …it may demonstrate that further reporting on financial or other international arrangements would be beneficial to improve the identification and mitigation of these risks. As a result, we will keep the overseas funding provisions in the act under review in the event that, during FIRS implementation, evidence indicates further transparency reporting is necessary.

    But it feels that the government has come down on the side of listening to the sector about avoiding burden and duplication and, as the paper says, “minimising diversion of resources away from teaching and research.”

    There’s an interesting table on pages 24 and 25 of the command paper, perhaps anticipating criticism over the wait-and-see approach. The table lists all the different measures (ATAS, export controls, harassment duties, financial monitoring, national security act powers) that are already in place to mitigate against “foreign interference”, even without implementing OfS’ new powers.

    (In this context it’s worth briefly noting that Monday’s industrial strategy announced that the government will consult on updating the definitions of the 17 areas of the economy subject to mandatory notification under the National Security and Investment Act, to ensure that they remain “targeted and proportionate”. This could – potentially – see a slight loosening of the areas of research collaboration where higher education institutions need to notify and get approval from the government.)

    Equality impacts

    Finally, there’s a very odd section at the end of the command paper that describes and comments on an Equality Impact Assessment that DfE has, for some mysterious reason, not actually published.

    One of the sections might give us a clue as to why:

    Expanding these duties may lead to more open expression of views which could have a negative impact on those who currently face elevated levels of lawful but offensive comments related to their protected characteristics. They could also potentially lead to increased unlawful harassment against groups with specific protected characteristics.

    It’s almost as if DfE doesn’t want to publish a document that makes the legislation Phillipson is progressing sound like a “Tory hate charter” after all.

    It all partly depends on how OfS plays its duty – again, see the article on the meaning of free speech within the law – but you’d also have to assume that the detail is pretty bleak, and/or offers up all of the remaining fine lines and rhetorical contradictions being dumped on universities to navigate. The tort might be gone, but all of that complexity very much remains.

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  • Trusting students and reducing barriers by abolishing penalties for late work

    Trusting students and reducing barriers by abolishing penalties for late work

    Universities, wonderful as they are, can be very complicated.

    The way that we operate can often be confusing for students, not least because some of our expectations and traditions are hidden and unspoken – even more so for students who enter higher education from historically underrepresented backgrounds.

    Indeed, revealing the so-called hidden curriculum in higher education is a common means by which we try to eliminate gaps in access and outcome.

    But there are also times when, as a sector, we should be more critical of the way we do things, whether those practices are hidden or unhidden.

    Here we want to share an example of what happens when you challenge orthodoxy, and why we think we should do this more often.

    Assessment penalties

    If you spend some time reviewing UK university policies on assessment and examination, you will find that it is almost universally the case that there are penalties associated with late or non-submission.

    Typically, this involves a deduction of marks. Sometimes late submissions will be capped at a pass, other times the deduction is linked to the degree of lateness. Similarly, students who fail to submit an assessment or sit an exam will often find that their next attempt at resit will be capped.

    Of course, institutions do recognise that there may be lots of good reasons why students cannot meet deadlines, and so alongside these penalties, we also have Extenuating or Mitigating Circumstances processes. In short, if a student tells us the reason they were late or could not submit, then they may be exempted from those penalties if the reasons meet our established criteria.

    What is far harder to find is any robust explanation, in written form, of why these penalties exist in the first place. There is much received wisdom (as you would expect, for a sector so steeped in tradition) for why we have these penalties, which – in our experience – typically falls into two categories.

    The first justification is about using penalties to disincentivise lateness or non-submission. If students know they will lose marks, that will ensure that most submit on time. The second justification is about fairness. If you submit late, you are getting more time than other students, so you should not receive a higher mark as a result of this presumed advantage. Each of these justifications could be debated endlessly, but we don’t intend to do that here.

    Questioning the received wisdom

    The reason we began to question the wisdom of capping students who submitted their work late, or who needed to use their resit attempt, was prompted by insights which emerged from work led by our SU. Over the past few years, our SU has been supporting students who needed to complete resits by calling them to ensure that they understood what they needed to get done, and had access to the support they needed. In itself, this initiative has been very impactful, and we are seeing year-on-year improvements in student pass rates.

    However, this initiative also gave our students a chance to share their own insights into why they found themselves having to resit assessments. In plain terms, our students were telling us – we are overwhelmed.

    Students who did not submit assignments were not being tactical or lazy, or trying to gain an advantage over others. They were simply not able to get all of the work done that we required in the time given – despite substantial efforts we have already made over the last few years to ensure we are not over-assessing.

    At the same time, we had been aware for some time that our students were using our Extenuating Circumstances (ECs) process extensively. Thousands of valid claims were made by students each year, which we processed and – for the substantial majority – supported.

    This meant that our students who were submitting late or completing resits were not, for the most part, actually being subjected to marking caps. Perhaps we could have stopped there, reflecting that this reflects a system working as it was designed to work: students with valid reasons for late submission should not be capped; we had a system which allowed students to make such claims to avoid penalties; and it seemed the system was well-used.

    What we could not shake, however, was a sense that this all seemed quite unnecessary – layers of bureaucracy needing to exist to ensure that students who did not deserve to have an academic penalty applied to their mark, while the very existence of the possibility of this penalty was entirely our own decision. We asked ourselves what would happen if we simply removed marking penalties for late and non-submissions? If students were awarded a mark based solely on the content of their submission? If we created a late submission window for every deadline, and allowed students to manage their own time?

    We took this idea to a panel of our students, and were intrigued to hear their views. Overwhelmingly, they felt this would be a good idea. The stress of having to apply for extra time, often close to a deadline if some unexpected problem had arisen which threatened their ability to submit on time, was something students felt would be alleviated by this change. They also reflected that, for the most part, students are inherently motivated to try and meet their deadlines, and aren’t simply trying to game the system and find loopholes.

    Yes but

    Concerns about this change came from internal and external consultation with colleagues. While in principle wanting to support the idea, it was difficult to shake the concerns that 1) without a penalty for late submission, students would simply treat the last day of the late submission window as their new deadline, and 2) if resits were not penalised with a cap, many students would choose to not submit at the first attempt and defer their submission to a later date.

    We also had to consider, if these outcomes came to pass, the impact on staff workloads and marking turnaround times. With these concerns in mind, taking a careful approach to how we communicated changes to students and putting in place contingencies for managing impacts on workloads, we ultimately decided to take the plunge, and at the start of the 24/25 academic year we removed marking caps for late and non-submission. Then we kept a close eye on what happened next.

    What happened next is that our students did what we believed and hoped they would.

    Across the first semester this year, we have actually seen a small decline in the percentage of late submissions – with only 12.22% of work submitted being submitted within the 5 working day late submission window.

    All other work was submitted on or before the main deadline. By comparison, in 23/24 12.32% was submitted late, and 12.41% in 22/23, so it is perhaps more accurate to say that there has been no change in late submissions.

    But this was, of course, accompanied by a dramatic reduction in the number of times that students have had to request the option to submit late through our ECs process (and then worry about whether this request would be supported).

    These claims have reduced by 154 per cent, thereby also alleviating a huge administrative burden on our colleagues who have to process these claims. In short, students who in previous years needed extra time have been able to access it without having to ask, and removing the threat of a marking penalty has not increased the proportion of students submitting their work late.

    The concern that if students were not capped for non-submission then they might defer sitting exams has also proven unfounded. In fact, we have seen a 5 per cent increase in the number of students attempting their exam first time. In numerical terms, we had 370 fewer students failing to attend an exam during our January exam period.

    Student success

    While it is reassuring to have found that this change in policy has not led to any significant change in students’ engagement with deadlines and assessments, more importantly we also wanted to know whether our students were more likely to succeed.

    The data quoted above could have masked another issue, whereby students who did submit work were no more likely to submit past the deadline, but perhaps more students were not submitting at the first attempt and instead were deferring to their resit period.

    To explore this issue, we compared first time pass rates for first semester assessments to the previous academic year. This has revealed a 4.3 per cent improvement in pass rates at first attempt, with the biggest improvement of 6 per cent for our first-year undergraduates.

    When looked at by student characteristic, we have also seen the greatest degree of improvement for our ABMO students and our male students, who have historically been more likely to not pass assessments at their first attempt.

    Statistics aside, in human terms, this change in policy (which sits within a wider context of strategic initiatives we have in place to improve student outcomes for all of our students) is associated with us having 604 more students who have passed at their first attempt this year, than we would have had if pass rates had stayed the same as last year.

    With regard to concerns about the impact of this change on staff workloads, having more students passing first time also means a reduction in resit marking later in the academic year.

    Complex challenges

    For those interested in the practicalities of our new approach, we still have an Extenuating Circumstances procedure, but this is now intended as a mechanism for students to let us know about more complex challenges where a few days extra time would be inadequate to help them successfully engage with their assessments.

    We have also made clear to students that late submitted work is still recorded as being late (but with no marking penalty applied), and if students continually submit work late we will – in a supportive manner – reach out to find out if they need more or different support from us.

    We will continue to monitor the impact of these changes, in particular to understand whether there is any overall impact on student outcomes over the full year and beyond – particularly outcome gaps for different groups of students. But so far, our experience has been that making a change which initially seemed quite radical has simply served to make life easier for our students when they are already working so hard to access and participate in education.

    It is also important to recognise that extra time in itself is not a panacea for improving student outcomes, despite it being the most common form of adjustment offered to disabled students.

    By making this change in our approach, we were simply trying to make this very simple accommodation immediately available to any student who needs it, for whatever reason.

    This massively reduces a large administrative burden on the university, and frees us up to focus on more personalised forms of support, for students who need more than a few extra days to complete an assignment.

    The reason we are keen to share this with the sector is that we think it is a good example of how we can better support our students by challenging our own self-imposed orthodoxy. It is great to think that we have been able to reduce the anxiety associated with missing deadlines, without having to worry that our students will cynically use this change to game the system.

    We strongly believe that our students are inherently motivated to engage with their studies and do the best they can, and we think it is our job to make sure we are not getting in the way of them doing that.

    If, in the process, we can cut out unnecessary administration and bureaucracy for ourselves, then so much the better.

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  • The best and most rewarding study time possible

    The best and most rewarding study time possible

    About a decade ago now, there was a problem at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

    Across a collection of STEM courses, there was a significant “achievement” (attainment/awarding) gap between marginalised groups (all religious minorities and non-White students) and privileged students (caucasian, non-Hispanic participants who were either Christian or had no religion).

    Psychology prof Markus Brauer had an idea. He’d previously undertaken research on social norms messaging – communicating to people that most of their peers hold certain pro-social attitudes or tend to engage in certain pro-social behaviours.

    He knew that communications shape people’s perceptions of what is common and socially acceptable, which in turn influences their own attitudes and behaviours.

    So he thought he’d try some on new students.

    He started by trying out posters in waiting rooms and teaching spaces, and then tried showing two groups of students a video – one saw an off-the-shelf explanation of bias and micro-aggressions, and another where lots of voxpopped students described the day to day benefits of diversity.

    Long story short? The latter “social norms” video had a strong, significant, positive effect on inclusive climate scores for students from marginalised backgrounds.

    They reported that their peers behaved more inclusively and treated them with more respect, and the effect was stronger for marginalised students than for privileged students.

    Then he tried it again. One group got to see the social norms video in their first scheduled class, and those students also got an email from the university’s Deputy Vice Chancellor for Diversity and Inclusion in week 7 of the semester, which reported positive findings from the university’s most recent climate survey and encouraged students to continue working toward an inclusive social climate.

    The other group had a short “pro-diversity” statement added to the syllabus that was distributed in paper format during the first class. That pro-diversity statement briefly mentioned the university’s commitment to diversity and inclusive excellence. Students in this group did not receive an email.

    As well as a whole bunch of perception effects, by the end of the semester the marginalised students in the latter group had significantly lower grades than privileged students. But in the norms video group, the achievement gap was completely eliminated – through better social cohesion.

    What goes on tour

    I was thinking about that little tale on both days of our brief study tour to Stockholm last month, where 20 or so UK student leaders (and the staff that support them) criss-crossed the city to meet with multiple student groups and associations to discuss their work.

    Just below the surface, on the trips there’s an endless search for the secret sauce. What makes this work? Why is this successful?

    Across our encounters in Stockholm, one of the big themes was “culture”. Gerry Johnson and Kevan Scholes’ Cultural Web isn’t a bad place to start.

    • Stories and symbols were everywhere in Stockholm – Uppsala and Lund’s student nations tell a story of deep-rooted student self-governance, while patches on student boilersuits mark both affiliation and achievement.
    • Rituals and routines were on offer too. Valborg (Walpurgis Eve) celebrations in Sweden bring students together in citywide festivities, and the routine of structured student influence meetings – where student representatives actively participate in decision-making – ensures that engagement isn’t just performative but institutionalised.
    • Organisational structures help too. A student ombuds system that provides legal advice and advocacy, sends the signal that rights – mine and yours – are as important as responsibilities. Students’ role in housing cooperatives demonstrate how deeply embedded student influence is too – giving students a tangible stake in their own living conditions. And plenty of structures that include circa 2k students feels “just right” in terms of self-governing student communities.
    • Control systems and power structures define the boundaries of student influence and how authority is distributed. Visibly giving student groups the job of welcome and induction – not “res life” professionals, “student engagement” teams or “events managers” – seems to matter. Causing student groups to lead on careers work – with professional staff behind the scenes, rather than front and centre – matters too.

    In conversation, culture came up in multiple ways. One of the things that lots of the groups and their offshoots mentioned was that they played a role in introducing students to Swedish student culture – for international students, home students who were first in family, or just new students in general who needed to know how things worked.

    It came up in both an academic context and a social context. In the former, the focus was on independent study and the relative lack of contact hours in the Swedish system – in the latter, through traditions like “spex” (comedic part-improv theatrical performances created and performed by students), students wearing boiler suits with patches, or “Gasques”, where where students dress up, sing traditional songs, and enjoy multiple courses of food alongside speeches and entertainment.

    But it also came up as a kind of excuse. As well as cracking out the XE app to work out how much better off students in Sweden tend to be, when we got vague answers to our questions interrogating the high, almost jaw-dropping levels of engagement in extracurricular responsibilities, both them and us were often putting it down to “the culture”.

    “It’s fun”, “it’s what we do here”, “we want to help people” were much more likely to be the answers on offer than the things our end expected – CV boosting, academic credit or remuneration.

    “Excuse” is a bit unfair – partly because one of the things that’s happened off the back of previous study tours is that delegates have brought home project ideas or new structures and plonked them into their university, the resultant failures often put down to a difference in culture.

    Maybe that’s reasonable, maybe not. But we can change culture, surely?

    Depth and breadth

    Whatever’s going on, the depth and breadth of student engagement in activity outside of the formal scope of their course in Sweden is breathtaking.

    At Stockholm’s School of Economics, the student association’s VP for Education told us that of the circa 1800 students enrolled, about 96 per cent are SU members – and 700 of them are “active”. I think I thought he meant “pitching up to stuff semi-regularly”, but on the next slide he meant ”have a position of responsibility”.

    At the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, the volunteers we met from Datasektion – the “chapter” for students studying data science courses – had similar stats, nestled in a much bigger university. We met them in their “chapter room” – something that felt like it was theirs rather than a page from a furniture catalogue. As they presented their slides, I started surfing around their website to count the roles. I soon gave up. There’s even a whole committee for keeping the chapter room clean – it’s their home, after all.

    Chatting to the tiny crew of staff at Stockholm University’s SU was a humbling experience. Every time we thought we’d got a grip on their structures, another set unfurled – councils, forums, sports groups, societies, project groups and hundreds of university-level reps shouldn’t be sustainable in a university of 30,000 students – but it is.

    Even at Södertörn University just south of the city – a former Högskola (university college) that’s as close as Sweden gets to a post-92, the numbers are wild. There’s reps for departments, reps for subjects, reps for university boards and working groups, reps that run the careers fair, and reps for the SU’s work environment, archives, finance and administration, graphic design, sustainability, communication, project management and student influence and impact.

    There’s even 30 odd students that run the pub – without a “grown up” in sight.

    It was probably the Doctoral chapter back at KTH that really did it for me. I don’t think it’s unfair to suggest that extracurricular activity and student representation for PhD students in the UK is fairly thin on the ground – in Sweden, not only is there a vision for PGR student life beyond the research and the survival, there are formal time compensation arrangements that support it.

    Maybe that’s why there’s branches, projects, EDI initiatives, careers support, international student events, ombudspeople, awards nights, trips, handbooks, student support and highly sophisticated research and lobbying. Actually, maybe that’s why Swedish PhD students are salaried at a level approaching those that supervise them – while our “New Deal” says nothing on student life or representation, and frames stipends equivalent to the minimum wage as an achievement.

    There’s many a student leader that’s returned to the UK and decided that they need an elected officer for every faculty, or to create a PGR “officer” or whatever, only to find that the culture in said university or faculty gives that student nothing to work with and little to organise.

    One of our new Swedish friends described that as “painting a branch a different colour – the tree will still be brown when the tree grows and the branch falls off”, as she impressively explained the way that students were recruited first to help, then later to take charge, building their confidence and skills along the way.

    Causes and effects

    Back in the UK, the sector often talks of how students have changed – as if their desires, preferences, activities or attitudes are outside of the gift of educational institutions – something to be marketed to rather than inculcated with.

    But every student I’ve ever met wants to fit in – to know the rules of the games, to know how things work around here, to know how to fit in. Maybe how they’re inducted and supported – and who does that induction and support – matters.

    Maybe it’s about age – students enrol into higher education later in Sweden. Maybe it’s about pace – in the standard three years, only about 40 per cent of bachelor’s students complete – add on three years, and “drop out” is as low as in the UK.

    Maybe it’s about a wider culture of associative activity – the UK always has been useless at sustaining mutuals, and our participation rates in them are near the bottom of the European tables.

    Maybe it’s the legislation – law that has given students the formal right to influence their own education and a panoply of associated rights without the tiresome discourse of consumerism or “what do they know” since the 1970s.

    Maybe it’s about trust. You soon spot when you visit a country how much its people are trusted when you jump on a train – “it must be because it’s so cheap” is what we tend to think, but maybe that lack of barriers and inspectors is about something else.

    Less than 4 in 10 staff in Swedish Universities are non-academic, far less than in the UK. Maybe we do so much for students in the UK because they need the help. Maybe we’ve convinced ourselves – both in universities and SUs – that they can’t or won’t do it on their own – or that if they did, they’d mess it up, or at least mess the metrics or the marketing up.

    In that endless search for the secret sauce, the research doesn’t help. In theses like this, the most common reasons for student volunteering in Sweden are improving things/helping people, meeting new people/making friends, developing skills, and gaining work experience/developing their CV. Like they are everywhere.

    International students, particularly those studying away from their home country, are more likely to volunteer as a way to make new social connections. Younger students tend to volunteer more frequently than older ones. And universities could encourage volunteering by increasing awareness, linking it to academic subjects, and offering rewards or networking opportunities​. We knew that already.

    But actually, maybe there’s something we didn’t know:

    Swedish students tend to volunteer because it is seen as normal rather than something extraordinary.

    And that takes us back to Wisconsin.

    Normal for Norfolk

    In this terrific podcast, Markus Brauer urges anyone in a university trying to “change the culture” to focus on the evidence. He says that traditional student culture change initiatives lack rigorous evaluation, rely on flawed assumptions, provoke resistance, and raise awareness without changing behaviour.

    He critiques approaches that focus on individual attitudes rather than systemic barriers, stressing that context and social norms – not just personal beliefs – shape behaviour. Negative, deficit-based framing alienates. And it’s positive, evidence-based, and systematic strategies – structural reforms, visible institutional commitments and peer modelling that really drive the change.

    Maybe that’s why each and every student leader we met had an engagement origin story that was about belonging.

    When I asked the International Officer at the Stockholm Student Law Association what would happen if a new student didn’t know how to approach an assignment, he was unequivocal – one of the “Fadder” students running the group social mentoring scheme would do the hard yards on the hidden curriculum.

    When I asked the Doctoral President at KTH how she first got involved, it was because someone had asked her to help out. The Education VP at the School of Economics? He went to an event, and figured it would be fun to help run it next time because he’d get to hang out with those that had run it for him. Now he runs a student-led study skills programme and gets alumni involved in helping students to succeed. Maybe it’s that. School plays sell out.

    Belonging has become quite important in HE in recent years. The human need to feel connected, valued, and part of something greater than ourselves has correlations with all sorts of things that are good. Belonging shapes students’ identities, impacts their well-being, enables them to take risks and overcome challenges with resilience.

    But since we’ve been putting out our research, something bad has been happening. Back in the UK, I keep coming across posters and social media graphics that say to students “you belong here”

    And that’s a problem, because something else we know is that when a student doesn’t feel like that and when there’s no scaffolding or investment to stimulate it, it can make students feel worse. Because the other thing we’ve noticed about how others in Europe do it is that it’s about doing things.

    Doing belonging

    The first aspect of that is that when students work together on something it allows us to value and hope for the success of others beyond their individual concerns. They want the project to succeed. We want the event to go well. They smile for the photos in a group.

    The second is that when they work in a group and they connect and contribute they’re suddenly not in competition, and so less likely to lose. When they’re proofing someone’s essay or planning a route for a treasure hunt, they’re not performing for their success – they’re performing for others.

    But the third is that they start to see themselves differently. Suddenly they’re not characterised by their characteristics, judged by their accent or ranked by their background. They start to transcend the labels and become the artist, the coach, the consultant or the cook.

    The folklore benefits of HE participation are well understood and hugely valuable to society. They’re about health, wellbeing, confidence, community mindedness and a respect for equality and diversity.

    In every country in the process of massifying, the debate about whether they’re imbued via the signalling of those that go (rather than those that don’t), or whether they’re imbued via the graduate attributes framework variously crowbarred into modules, or imbued simply via friendship or via the social mixing that seems so scarce in modern HE rages on.

    My guess is that it’s partly about having the time to do things – we make student life more and more efficient at our peril. It’s partly about giving things back to students that we’ve pretty much professionalised the belonging out of. It’s partly about scaffolding – finding structures that counterintuitively run against the centralisation rampant in the management of institutions and causing students to organise their communities in groups of the right size.

    Maybe it’s all of that, or some of it. Maybe some good social norming videos would help.

    But my best guess is not that higher education should show new students a manipulative video tricking them into the social proof that helping others is fun. It’s that seeing other students do things for them – and then asking them to get involved themselves – is both the only way to build belonging and community, and the only way to ensure that the benefits of participation extend beyond the transactional.

    When students witness peers actively shaping their environment, supporting each other, and making tangible contributions to their communities, they don’t just internalise the value of participation – they embody it. Creating the conditions where reciprocity feels natural, expected and rewarding is about making it natural, expected, and rewarding.

    The more HE massifies, the more the questions will come over the individual benefits to salary, the more the pressure will come on outcomes, and the more that some will see skills as something that’s cheaper to do outside of the sector than in it.

    If mass HE is to survive, its signature contribution in an ever-more divided world ought to be belonging, community and social cohesion. However hard it looks, that will mean weaning off engineering individual engagement from the top down – and starting to enable community engagement from the ground up.

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  • A sea change in student partnership

    A sea change in student partnership

    A few years back now, someone who worked for one of Scotland’s sector agencies liked to draw a comparison when talking about student-centredness.

    They said that conservation charities passionately place wildlife at the heart of everything they do, but crucially would never put representatives of flora and fauna on committees (imagine the mess).

    Therefore, my erstwhile and esteemed colleague would argue, when institutional leaders proudly claim to be “student-centred” it reveals nothing about how they involve students in shaping their experiences.

    Of course, you can diligently monitor wildlife and use your data to make good decisions, in a manner not dissimilar to learning analytics in education, but the difference is that students can then go on to be a part of conversations in a way that wildlife never can.

    Waterproof papers

    My mind was cast back to this parallel when I saw the recent news that the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS), one of our partners here at the University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI), has put The Ocean on its governing body.

    It’s a move that SAMS’ Director Nick Owens admits “could be seen as trivial or ‘greenwashing’”, and we might imagine other specialist institutions making similar gestures in the disciplines they so richly embody and advance.

    For instance a conservatoire could put “Music” on their board, or an agricultural college “The Land”.

    Nick explains further, however:

    The Ocean is clearly a metaphor in this context and cannot represent itself in human terms.”

    That point is vital because, if we go back to our parallel, SAMS has already gone much further with its other main cause – students.

    Like all constituent parts of UHI and indeed our university overall, SAMS has student membership on its governing body, not to just sit there and wave like the ocean might, or to flap about disruptively like a bird among a wildlife charity’s trustees.

    Instead, we expect of student governors an informed, constructive and active contribution.

    As my colleague Aimee Cuthbert wrote on Wonkhe a year ago, we have a major project that is making that student membership truly effective and impactful across UHI’s complex governance arrangements.

    On a basic level we want to build on national guidelines such as Scotland’s codes of good governance for colleges and universities and support packages such as those from the College Development Network.

    The wet room

    In our own unique context we want to make sure UHI’s governing bodies do not merely talk about students as an abstract concept or worthy concern, and instead have them in the room to provide meaningful input about students’ diverse and complex experiences and the implications for students of the difficult decisions that must be made.

    That means a lot of work with those involved in our governing bodies, exploration of the key issues on our boards’ desks at a time of change, and helping our local officers impact on their individual partner governing bodies while also working together as a team to impact on decisions that are UHI-wide.

    A core part of our project is therefore that very human process of communication – supporting the networking, sharing practice and informal relationship building that makes student governors truly a part of the process in a way that an ocean can’t be.

    So, when someone tells you their institution is student-centred, that’s arguably the very least we might expect, and in isolation such a declaration risks viewing students in the same way that others might view wildlife.

    The Ocean as governor, therefore, is not only a striking metaphor for SAMS’ important mission, but has added power in benchmarking our perceptions of those we claim to be here for – reminding us that there’s a big difference between caring about students and actively involving them as partners.

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  • Bridget Phillipson reaffirms commitment to free speech

    Bridget Phillipson reaffirms commitment to free speech

    Secretary of State Bridget Phillipson has delivered a statement to Parliament on her regulatory approach to higher education – specifically, the future of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act.

    Ahead of her day in court with the Free Speech Union – which is taking her to court over her implementation pause – she announced that key provisions will be brought into force, whilst “burdensome provisions” will be scrapped.

    And the good news is that pretty much for the first time from a minister on this issue, there’s an explicit recognition of the fine lines, complexities and contradictions often in play on the issue. A press notice covers largely the same material.

    You’ll recall that on taking office back in July, Phillipson paused further commencement of the Act in response to “concerns raised by a cross section of voices” – and controversially, at least for some, a “source” branded the Act as passed a “Tory hate charter”.

    In the intro, Phillipson said she was still committed to ensuring the protection of academic freedom and free speech – “vital pillars” of the university system:

    Universities are spaces for debate, exploration, and the exchange of ideas, not for shutting down dissenting views… extensive engagement with academics, universities, students, and minority groups revealed concerns about unworkable duties, legal system burdens, and potential impacts on safety, particularly amid rising antisemitism on campuses.

    Insights from her work to consult with interested stakeholders (both for and against the act), says Phillipson, have shaped a “balanced, effective, and proportionate approach” to safeguard free speech while addressing minority welfare.

    What stays

    First up, the government will commence the following requirements currently in the act (in sections 1,2 and 6):

    • The duties on higher education providers to take reasonably practicable steps to secure and promote freedom of speech within the law
    • The duty on higher education providers to put in place a code of conduct [practice] on freedom of speech

    Those are relatively uncontroversial – most providers were preparing in that spirit already, although the (very) detailed suggestions on compliance previously proposed by OfS may yet change.

    Underpinning that, Phillipson also intends to commence the duties on the Office for Students (OfS) (section 5) to promote freedom of speech and the power to give advice and share best practice. And unsurprisingly, the ban on non-disclosure agreements for staff and students making complaints about bullying, harassment and sexual misconduct will also remain.

    There was a curious passage on the Director for Free Speech and Academic Freedom role – the Secretary of State said that she had “complete confidence” in Arif Ahmed who will be staying on – but then criticised how he’d been appointed, drawing on interim Chair David Behan’s review of the regulator that had recommended a look at how all OfS executive and board appointments should be made.

    She said will decide on the process of appointing directors to the independent regulator “shortly”.

    What’s going

    A couple of other measures were “not proportionate or necessary”, so she’ll be seeking repeal.

    The duties on students’ unions are to go – because they’re neither “equipped nor funded” to navigate such a complex regulatory environment, and are already regulated by the Charity Commission:

    But I fully expect students unions to protect lawful free speech, whether they agree with the views expressed or not, and expect providers to work closely with them to make sure that happens, to act decisively to make sure their students union complies with their free speech code of conduct.

    That effectively returns us to the Education Act 1986 position – of providers taking reasonably practicable steps to get their SU to comply – and sensibly removes the prospect of a new student being told about two codes of practice to follow depending on who they’d booked a room with.

    Most controversially for some, she will also repeal the legal tort, on the basis that it would have resulted in:

    Costly litigation that risks diverting resources away from students at a time when University finances are already strained – remaining routes of redress have plenty of teeth.

    Those pro the tort worry that that only leaves OfS’ powers to find as the compliance lever – although others worried that the threat of it would have resulted in more threatening letters than sensible, nuanced decisions.

    What’s changing

    On the OfS free speech complaints scheme, it will remain in place for university staff and visiting speakers – but there will be two changes. OfS will first be freed up to prioritise the more serious complaints – and be officially empowered to ignore others.

    And the government will remove the “confusing duplication” of complaint schemes for students. Students will be diverted to using the Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIA, and OfS will take complaints from staff, external speakers and university members.

    That doesn’t quite remove the potential duplication of the two bodies considering the same incident or issue from different angles/complaints – but it’s a sensible start.

    And the government will also amend the mandatory condition of registration on providers to give OfS flexibility in how they apply those conditions to different types of providers – we’d expect that to cover issues like the obvious oversight of 14-year olds in FE colleges caught by the Act suddenly gaining free speech rights.

    The government says it will also take more time to consider implementation of the overseas funding measures in the act as it “works at pace” on the wider implementation of the foreign influence registration scheme that was part of the National Security Act 2023. Those two bits of legislation never felt properly aligned – so that also feels pretty sensible.

    In the debate that ensued, there was some lingering suspicion from the opposition that that all amounted to the government going soft on China – and regardless of the foreign funding clauses, there were some concerns from providers about the workability of the draft OfS guidance on the main duties re oppressive regimes and TNE. That will be one to watch.

    Finally, we will also get a policy paper to set out the proposals in more detail, potentially alongside a decision on information provision for overseas funding.

    What’s next

    As we signalled back in March, the interaction with allegations and incidents of antisemitism appears to have been a big influence on the decisions – the press notice reminds readers that there were fears that the legislation would encourage providers to “overlook” the safety and wellbeing of minority groups, including Jewish students, and instead protect those who use hateful or degrading speech on campus:

    Groups representing Jewish students also expressed concerns that sanctions could lead to providers overlooking the safety and well-being of minority groups.

    Phillipson even referenced the faux pas from Michelle Donelan way back in May 2021 when, on the day the Bill was launched, she was unable to explain how the government’s proposals would prevent Holocaust deniers coming to campus.

    Phillipson said that she could see “no good reason” why any university would invite a Holocaust denier onto campus to deny the overwhelming evidence that the Holocaust is an “appalling form of antisemitism”. Even when the last government had clarified the position on holocaust denial, it never confirmed that holocaust deniers could be banned – and the point about many external speaker edge cases is that they rarely fill the form in with “I’m going to say something unlawful”.

    There’s still a way to go yet on these (and other) fine lines – in the ensuing debate, Phillipson said that she was worried that the regime that was due to launch would have “unduly prioritized” free speech which is hateful or degrading over the interests of those who feel harassed and intimidated – these issues, she said, can be “very finely balanced”. That may well see a push from the SOS that the two sets of guidance – on OfS’ new Harassment and Sexual Misconduct duties, and the drafts on this regime, are integrated more sensibly.

    The ongoing questions surrounding the IHRA definition of antisemitism may also yet pop up again too – not least because of Arif Ahmed’s own apparent u-turn on it and the ensuing cases challenging its usage in disciplinary procedures. Questions of pro-Palestinian activism on camps and where that might stray into antisemitism were notably absent from OfS’ guidance drafts.

    Overall, some in the debate will be furious at the government’s apparent watering down of the Act, others will be pleased that some of the arguably more unworkable aspects are being amended.

    But probably the most important signal from Phillipson was a recognition that the area is complex and decisions often finely balanced – putting a degree of trust in universities (and their SUs) that they will also take it seriously.

    Whatever else has happened over the past few years, there’s plenty of evidence that understanding has improved in the sector – it looks it has in Whitehall too. The question now is whether, next time an incident or issue comes along, it is handled by a university (or its SU) in a way that commands confidence.

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