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  • Toward a Trauma-Informed Writing Process (opinion)

    Toward a Trauma-Informed Writing Process (opinion)

    “Your writing isn’t academic enough.”

    A single sentence from a faculty mentor cut deeper than I expected—because it wasn’t the first time my voice had been questioned. I spent decades believing I was not good enough to become a writer. Not because I lacked skill or insight, but because I was writing through a deep wound I didn’t yet understand.

    That statement was a flashpoint, but the wound began long before:

    • When I, as a shy Guatemalan immigrant child, felt I was lacking academically and learned to shrink my voice.
    • When I was told that my ways of knowing—grounded in culture, emotion, embodiment—didn’t belong in academic writing.
    • When I absorbed the perfectionism and shame that academia breeds.

    For years, I edited myself into invisibility—performing an academic voice that was praised for its polish and precision but stripped of everything that made it mine.

    And I am not alone.

    The Invisible Wounds We Carry

    In my work as a writing consultant and developmental editor, I hear the same story over and over: Brilliant scholars—often from historically excluded communities—are convinced they are bad writers when, in reality, they are carrying unprocessed writing trauma.

    We rarely name it as such. But that is what it is:

    • The trauma of repeatedly being told your voice is wrong or not “rigorous.”
    • The trauma of navigating academic culture that rewards conformity over authenticity.
    • The trauma of absorbing deficit narratives about your language, identity or intellectual worth.

    Academic spaces can be punishing, performative and isolating. Add in past wounds—whether from classrooms, reviewers, supervisors or broader systems—and writing becomes more than putting words on a page. It becomes a battleground.

    I once had a client who burst into tears during a one-on-one session with me. She opened the document she had avoided for weeks. The moment her fingers hovered over the keyboard, she said, her chest tightened. She felt dizzy, like the room was closing in.

    “I can’t do this,” she whispered.

    What was she working on? A simple literature review. But there was nothing simple about it.

    Her body remembered: her first-year doctoral seminar, where she was told her writing wasn’t academic enough. Being cut off in class. Watching her white male peer echo her words and be praised for his “insight.”

    Writing didn’t feel liberating. It felt like re-enactment.

    Her tears weren’t a breakdown. They were a breakthrough. Her nervous system was doing exactly what it was designed to do: keep her safe.

    I’ve experienced that spiral, too. Sitting in front of a blank screen, begging my brain to write something!—only to be met with my inner chorus:

    • I teach people how to write—what’s my problem?
    • I’m not going to say anything that hasn’t already been said.
    • This is going to take forever—and I’d rather not disappoint myself.
    • I’m not really a good writer. I’m just faking it.

    Even after years of writing—journals, academic papers, dissertation, books—it still doesn’t feel easy. I have to work at it each day. Writing, for me, is like a relationship. At first, it’s exciting. Words flow; ideas spark. But eventually, the doubts creep in. You start to ghost your own document.

    But real relationships, and real writing, require showing up. Even when you’re tired. Even when it’s hard. Even when it feels like your worst critic lives inside your own head.

    This Isn’t All in Your Head—It’s All in Your Body

    These blocks that haunt you as you imagine writing aren’t signs that you shouldn’t write the thing. These are survival strategies your nervous system uses to protect you. And yes—they show up at your desk.

    This is all to say that, in my experience, writing blocks tend to be trauma responses—not character flaws or technical writing issues. Now, are there times when folks are challenged by things like time management? Of course. But to me, that is just a symptom of something deep-seated.

    We’re told to “just sit down and write,” as if our struggle is solely or partly a matter of discipline, time management or motivation. But often, it’s not that we don’t want to write. We actually really want to write. It’s that our body—our entire nervous system—is sounding an alarm.

    Not safe. Not ready. Not now.

    The response varies. It’s not one-size-fits-all. But it’s always trying to protect us.

    Let’s break these responses down.

    1. Fight: You argue with your work. Nothing sounds good enough. Every sentence feels off. You rewrite the same paragraph 10 times and still hate it. You pick fights with your draft like it owes you money. You hover over the “delete” key like a weapon. You get lost in perfectionist loops, convinced that your argument is weak, your evidence lacking, your phrasing too soft, too bold, too elementary, too you.

    This is the part of you that learned, somewhere along the way, that the best defense is a good offense. If you criticize your writing first, no one else can beat you to it.

    It’s a form of protection dressed as hypervigilance.

    It’s exhausting. And it’s not your fault.

    1. Flight: You avoid it completely. The minute you open the document, your chest tightens. So instead, you check your email, clean the kitchen, research grants for a project you haven’t even started, reformat your CV for the fifth time or suddenly become very concerned about the state of your inbox folders. Every task feels urgent—except the one you actually need to do.

    It doesn’t mean you don’t care. It means your system is trying to escape danger. And in academia, writing often is danger, because of what it represents—exposure, judgment, potential rejection—and what it can lead to: excommunication, cancellation, even deportation.

    Flight says, “If I don’t go near the source of pain, I won’t have to feel it.” But avoidance doesn’t erase fear. It buries it. And that buried fear just grows heavier.

    1. Freeze: You stare at the screen, paralyzed. You’ve carved out time, made the tea, lit the candle—and still, nothing happens. The cursor blinks like it’s mocking you. You reread the same sentence 30 times. You open a new tab, then another. You scroll, refresh, skim, click—but you’re not absorbing anything.

    Your body might go still, but inside, it’s chaos: looping thoughts, spiraling doubts, blankness that feels like suffocation.

    This is shutdown. Your brain says, “Too much.” So it hits pause.

    It might look like laziness, but it’s actually self-preservation.

    1. Fawn: You overfocus on pleasing others.

    This one’s sneaky. You’re writing. You’re producing. But you’re doing it in someone else’s voice. You try to imagine what your adviser would say. You filter every word through Reviewer 2’s past critiques. You write with a white, cis-hetero-masculine ghost looking over your shoulder.

    You say what you think you should say. You cite whom you think you have to cite. You mute your own voice to keep the peace.

    You’re not writing to be heard. You’re writing to be accepted.

    Fawning isn’t about submission. It’s about safety. It’s about staying small so you don’t become a target. But in doing so, you slowly disappear from your own work.

    What if your block isn’t failure?

    What if it’s your body’s way of saying:

    “This way of writing doesn’t feel safe.”

    “These expectations aren’t sustainable.”

    “You are not a machine. You are a whole human.”

    Writing as a Site of Healing, Not Harm

    If we understand writing blocks as trauma responses, then the answer isn’t more pressure or productivity hacks.

    The answer is care.

    A trauma-informed writing practice prompts us to shift our questions:

    • Instead of “Why am I procrastinating?” ask, “What am I protecting myself from?”
    • Instead of “How can I write more?” ask, “What would make this feel safer?”
    • Instead of “Why can’t I just get it done?” ask, “What do I need to feel supported right now?”

    This practice is about making room for your whole self at the writing table.

    It includes:

    • Slowing down to listen to your resistance. What is it trying to tell you? What stories or fears are surfacing?
    • Creating emotional safety before expecting output. That might mean grounding rituals, community check-ins or simply naming your fear out loud.
    • Reframing writing as healing, not harm. What if writing wasn’t about proving your worth but about reclaiming your voice? What if it became a place to process, reflect, resist—and even rest?

    Because here’s the truth: You can’t punish yourself into productivity.

    You can’t shame your voice into clarity.

    But you can write your way into wholeness—slowly, gently, in your own time.

    Resistance Is Wisdom

    Let’s stop treating our writing resistance as evidence of failure. What if it’s an invitation to listen? A clue to your next move? A doorway into a new way of knowing? Let’s not avoid resistance but lean into it, face it and treat it with compassion.

    Ask yourself,

    • What if my block isn’t a wall, but a mirror?
    • What if my voice needs tenderness, not toughness?
    • What if my writing can be a place where I feel more like myself, not less?

    Maybe the goal isn’t to “push through” your writing block.

    Maybe it’s to create the conditions where it feels safe enough to speak your voice.

    You don’t need to force yourself to write like someone you’re not.

    You don’t need to perform brilliance to be taken seriously.

    You don’t need to sacrifice your health on the altar of productivity.

    You need practices that restore your voice, not erase it.

    You need writing that nourishes, not punishes.

    A trauma-informed writing practice invites your whole self to the page. It makes room for and challenges you to lean into the imperfection, reflection and vulnerability. It reframes writing not as punishment but as possibility.

    Toward a More Human Academy

    In this political moment—where academic freedom is under attack, DEI initiatives are being dismantled and scholars are being silenced for telling the truth—we can’t afford to ignore how trauma shapes whose voices get heard, cited or erased.

    Trauma-informed writing is a form of resistance.

    It’s how we push back against systems that demand performance over presence, conformity over courage.

    It’s how we cultivate an academy where all voices—especially those long excluded—can write with power, truth and unapologetic authenticity.

    I’m still healing my own writing wounds. Maybe you are, too.

    But here’s what I know now: Writing wounds don’t heal overnight.

    They heal when we meet them with compassion—every time we dare to put words on a page.

    Aurora Chang is the founder of Aurora Chang Consulting LLC, where she provides developmental editing, holistic faculty support and writing consulting rooted in compassion and authenticity. A former professor and faculty developer, she now partners with academics to reclaim their voices, sustain their careers and write with purpose.

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  • Academic Staff Need Academic Freedom, Too (opinion)

    Academic Staff Need Academic Freedom, Too (opinion)

    Late last spring, something disturbing happened in my classroom. For the first time in 15 years of teaching, I opened by telling my students I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to speak. The class was an introduction to the philosophy of education, and months earlier I’d scheduled this day for our opening discussion on critical pedagogy. But in light of charged campus climates and broader legal threats facing institutions nationwide, I realized that as an academic staff member who engages in teaching and research, I was particularly vulnerable.

    What followed was one of the more important classes I’ve taught, though not about the subject I’d planned. We spent the hour investigating our institution’s academic freedom policies, asking questions of whom those policies included and excluded. We discovered the troubling reality: Although I was expected to facilitate complex educational discussions, I lacked clear protections to do so safely.

    My situation reflects a growing crisis in higher education that has received little attention. While much has been written about the vulnerabilities of contingent faculty, there has been almost no discussion of the academic freedom needs of one of higher education’s most rapidly growing workforces: third-space professionals.

    The Rise of the Third Space

    Over the past two decades, universities have dramatically expanded what researcher Celia Whitchurch terms “third-space” professionals: staff who blend academic and administrative functions but operate in the ambiguous territory between traditional faculty and staff roles.

    These roles aren’t new or unprecedented. The American Association of University Professors has long recognized that librarians, despite often holding staff status, require academic freedom protections given their integral role in teaching and research. What’s new is the scale and diversity of academic work now performed by nonfaculty academic professionals.

    This growth represents the contemporary evolution of a workforce shift that began in the 1970s, when academic support roles developed in response to diverse students entering colleges through open admissions policies. The 1990s brought expansion into new fields like faculty development and community-based learning, as colleges recognized these roles could enhance teaching practices institutionwide. Most recently, colleges have seen explosive growth in data-driven student success and enrollment management roles.

    What unites these professionals is their expertise in designing and delivering on the academic mission of the university, with special emphasis on student success. They lead pedagogical and curricular initiatives, make decisions about learning interventions, analyze data that reveals uncomfortable truths about institutional performance, and advocate for evidence-based policy revisions. They also regularly teach college courses, write and receive major grants, and publish in peer-reviewed journals. In essence, they do academic work, but without academic protections.

    Why Academic Freedom Matters for Third-Space Work

    The problem is easy to name but difficult to address. Institutions have radically restructured how academic work gets done based on the shifting needs of students and priorities of institutions, without a reciprocal restructuring of how academic work gets supported or protected. Third-space professionals need academic freedom protections for four key reasons.

    1. Educational decision-making: These professionals make pedagogical and curricular choices about student learning interventions, program design and educational strategies. Without academic freedom, they face pressure to implement approaches based on administrative convenience, pressure from faculty or donor preferences, rather than evidence-based best practices. What happens, for instance, when a faculty member feels the writing center’s approach to writing pedagogy conflicts with their own vision for writing in their classroom?
    2. Data interpretation and reporting: Student success professionals analyze retention, graduation and achievement data that may reveal uncomfortable truths about institutional performance or equity gaps. They need protection when their findings challenge institutional narratives or suggest costly reforms. What happens when an institutional researcher’s analysis shows that a flagship retention program isn’t working, but the administration has just featured it in a major donor presentation?
    3. Policy advocacy: Their direct work with students gives them insights into institutional policies and processes that harm student success. They should be able to advocate for necessary changes without fear of retaliation, even when those changes conflict with administrative priorities or departmental preferences. What happens when an academic adviser discovers that the prerequisite structure in a major is creating unnecessary barriers for students, but changing it would require difficult conversations with powerful department heads?
    1. Research and assessment: Many third-space professionals conduct and publish research on student success interventions, learning outcomes and institutional effectiveness. This scholarship requires the same protections as traditional academic research. What happens when assessment reveals the ineffectiveness of first-year seminar teaching, but presenting findings could damage relationships with faculty colleagues?

    The Problem of Selective Recognition

    Universities have already recognized that faculty work has diversified and requires differentiated policy structures. Many institutions now distinguish between research professors (focused on scholarship and grant acquisition), teaching professors (emphasizing teaching practice) and professors of practice (bringing professional expertise into academic settings). Each category receives tailored policies for promotion, performance evaluation and professional development that align with their distinct contributions.

    Yet on the staff side, institutions continue to operate as if all nonfaculty work is identical. A writing center director publishing on linguistic justice, an assistant dean of students developing crisis-intervention protocols for student mental health emergencies and a facilities director managing building maintenance are all governed by the same generic “staff” policies. This isn’t just administratively awkward: It’s a fundamental misalignment between how work actually happens and how institutions recognize and protect that work.

    Applying Consistent Logic

    The way forward isn’t revolutionary, but simply the application of the same logic that most universities already use for faculty. Rather than the outdated single “staff” category, colleges and universities need at least three distinct categories that reflect how staff work actually happens.

    1. Academic staff: Professionals engaged in teaching, research, curriculum design and educational assessment, including learning center directors, faculty developers, institutional researchers, professional academic advisers and academic program directors. These roles require academic freedom protections, scholarly review processes and governance representation.
    2. Student life staff: Professionals focused on co-curricular support, belonging and student life, including residence life coordinators, activities directors and counseling staff. These roles need specialized professional development and advancement pathways that recognize and support their expertise in student development.
    3. Operational staff: Professionals handling business functions, facilities and administrative operations. These roles can continue with traditional staff policies and support structures.

    This framework enables differentiated policy environments and support structures across multiple areas. Critically, academic freedom policies can be tailored to protect inquiry for staff who engage in this kind of work, while recognizing that other staff have different professional needs.

    The expansion of third-space/academic staff roles represents higher education’s recognition that effective student success requires diverse forms of expertise working collaboratively. But without policy frameworks that acknowledge and protect this academic work, institutions risk undermining the very innovations they’ve created. When the professionals responsible for student success cannot engage in free inquiry, challenge ineffective practices or advocate for evidence-based approaches, everyone loses—especially students.

    Aaron Stoller is associate vice president for student success and a lecturer in education at Colorado College.

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  • How can universities win back public support?

    How can universities win back public support?

    This blog outlines a speech given by Professor Sasha Roseneil, Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Sussex at a HEPI panel at the Labour Party Conference on the 29 September 2025

    ‘How can universities win back public support?’ was the question set for a panel discussion of Vice-Chancellors at the 2025 Labour Party Conference yesterday. But, with all due respect to HEPI’s Director, Nick Hillman, who posed this question, I do not accept its premise.

    There is compelling evidence from multiple sources to suggest that key stakeholders – students, prospective students, parents, and grandparents – are strongly supportive of higher education.

    First and foremost, students are very positive about their experience at university. The overall positivity score in the 2025 National Student Survey, which gathers the opinions of all final year students, was 86%, with 87% of students positive about teaching on their course, and 88% reporting that they felt able to express their ideas, beliefs and opinions at university. All over 85%. And HEPI and Advance HE’s 2025 Student Academic Experience Survey found that, whilst tuition fees are clearly not popular, more students consider that they receive good value for their fees than not – 37% versus 29% feeling that they receive poor value for money.

    Second, young people continue to want to go to university: the number of people applying to university was 1.3% higher for 2025 entry than the year before, with a record number of 18-year-old applicants, and 2% increase on 2024, and a 4.7% increase in the number of 19-year-olds (and only mature student applicants declining).

    And, according to a recent YouGov survey sponsored by University Alliance, members of the public across the political spectrum overwhelmingly want university for their loved ones: 84% of parents and grandparents want their children to go to university, and only 8% are against. Amongst Conservative voters, 90% want their children or grandchildren to go to university, the same as Green voters, slightly higher than the 89% of Labour voters, and slightly lower than the 93% of Liberal Democrat voters, with 72% of Reform voters also wanting their young family members to go to university.

    The YouGov survey didn’t ask why – but I would suggest that it is implicitly understood by members of the public that higher education opens up worlds and improves lives for individuals, and that graduates are generally wealthier over their lifetimes, healthier, and happier than non-graduates. People might not have read David Willetts’ report for the Resolution Foundation but they seem to have tacit knowledge of its findings.

    So where does the idea that universities have lost public support come from?

    Above all, it comes from the media – from a cacophony of newspapers that feed a daily diet of anti-university stories, circulating and recirculating the same ideas. It is my contention that these stories are grounded in one key thing – a more or less explicit rejection of the democratisation and expansion of access to higher education that has taken place over the past twenty years, and that has been part of the wider processes of cultural and social liberalisation and equalisation that have been in train since the late 1960s.

    Steeped in nostalgia for the days when higher education was the preserve of a privately and grammar school educated elite, some newspapers hark back to a time when university guaranteed access to the upper echelons of society. Their view is often based on an implicit understanding of university education as being about the reproduction and transmission of established bodies of knowledge, and thus the wider status quo. From this standpoint, they have waged a long and relentless campaign against universities. Universities are presented as one of the biggest social problems of our time, as the propagators of ‘woke ideologies’, as the source of blame for the reduction in the graduate premium, and for the failure of some graduates to rapidly realise their career or income aspirations.

    Such stories are written by journalists who almost all went to university themselves (although to a limited range of universities) and have children whom they expect to go to a similarly limited range of universities. It is other people’s children going to university that is the problem, taking places away from those who should naturally enter their preferred universities. And it’s the ideas and identities that those young people might encounter, and that they might develop for themselves, at university that  concerns them.

    There were, of course, similar concerns several decades ago about what went on in the new universities that were established in the 1960s – but far fewer young people were exposed to the university experience in those days and it cost the public purse much less to educate them. But perhaps most importantly, the middle class was rapidly expanding and the middle class parents’ ‘fear of falling’ – that their children will not achieve the social and economic status that they have been born into –  was not at all prevalent in the way that it is today.[1]

    Those earlier generations of students were, of course, also much more generously supported in their studies, and therefore much more able to take full advantage of all that higher education had to offer, and much less likely to have to undertake the very significant amount of paid work that today’s students are doing – at very real cost to the time they have for independent study. And they didn’t have to pay the fees that lead to questions about student attitudes to value for money.

    And so there is now a discourse that suffuses public culture that going to university is a waste of time and money, that only some universities are worth going to, and only some courses are worth studying. And, by implication, only some students are worth educating to a higher level. The more young people go to university and the more widespread across society the expectation and desire to go to university, the louder and more vociferous the attacks on higher education.

    The idea that universities lack public support also provides ‘look over here’ distraction from the real problem that faces higher education – an unprecedented funding crisis. Across the country, universities are engaging in repeated rounds of ever deeper cuts, losing thousands – tens of thousands – of highly skilled jobs, and closing courses and departments. There is no national oversight of the impact of this on subject provision across the country, on students’ ability to access higher education in the full range of subjects locally (which impacts disproportionately on students from lower socio-economic backgrounds and from marginalised groups, who are much more likely to study close to home), on regional economies, and on our sovereign capability in critical industries and priority growth areas.

    Last week’s report from the Institute of Physics sounded the alarm bell in relation to the health of this vital, foundational STEM discipline, and the British Academy has done the same for the humanities and the social sciences – particularly modern foreign languages, linguistics, anthropology and classics, with English, history and drama likely to follow soon.

    If this were any other sector in which the UK was an undisputed world leader, and the rapid helter-skelter unplanned contraction which will cause enormous harm to the economies and civic life of cities and regions around the country, there would be stories in the news every day about the crisis. And there would be urgent government action to intervene.

    Instead, universities are lambasted every day in the press and then told by government that we are independent autonomous bodies that need to solve our financial problems ourselves. This is despite the fact that universities are increasingly heavily regulated, and despite our main sources of income being home student fees, which are determined by government, and international student fees, the source of which has been under attack because international students are an easy target in the context of commitments to reduce net migration, and which is further threatened by the imposition of an international student levy.

    The reality is that universities cannot solve our problems ourselves, either individually or collectively. We are all seeking greater efficiencies. We are all looking at how we can cut back on everything that is not absolutely essential to the student experience in the here and now.We are all considering carefully how we might collaborate with others to do more with less. Research is being radically squeezed, and labs and equipment are not being repaired and renewed, in order to try to ensure our financial survival.

    But what now really must be called out is the failure of the competitive quasi-market model under which higher education operates. It is this that is source of our problems, and we need government to act.

    The question then really should be: how can universities win government support to enable us to fulfil our primary purpose of education and research for the common good?

    And the answer to that has to be by means of careful, rational, evidenced argument – with a flourish of rhetoric – of the sort that universities were established to propagate and which is so vital to the future of liberal democracy. We need to articulate and demonstrate our value, our vital importance, and our need for calm, considered and creative policy attention.

    The global excellence of UK universities rests on decades, and in some cases, several centuries, of public investment in knowledge creation and learning for the public good. But that quality is in imminent danger. We urgently need government action to support our universities to continue conducting the world-leading research, catalysing the growth-producing innovation, and providing the transformative education and advanced skills that we are capable of doing – before it is too late.

     There is active, deliberate government-led destruction of higher education and research taking place elsewhere. Don’t let’s do that here too by falling for the idea that the public doesn’t care about universities, and by failing to act in time.

    [1] Ehrenreich, Barbara. Fear of falling: The inner life of the middle class. Twelve, 2020

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  • A Student’s Guide to Success: Six Strategies to Reduce Team Conflict – Faculty Focus

    A Student’s Guide to Success: Six Strategies to Reduce Team Conflict – Faculty Focus

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  • The PM’s announcement on higher level participation is a win for the HE sector

    The PM’s announcement on higher level participation is a win for the HE sector

    You could read “abolishing the 50 per cent participation target” as a vote of no-confidence in higher education, a knee-jerk appeal to culturally conservative working-class voters. But that would be both a political/tactical mistake and a fundamental misreading of the policy landscape.

    To recap: in his leader’s speech to Labour Party Conference on Tuesday, Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that two thirds of people under 25 should participate in higher level learning, whether in the form of academic, technical, or work-based training, with at least ten per cent pursuing technical education or apprenticeships by 2040.

    So let’s start by acknowledging, as DK does elsewhere on the site, that the 50 per cent participation target has a totemic status in public discourse about higher education that far outweighs its contemporary relevance. And, further, that party conference speeches are a time for broad strokes and vibes-based narrativising for the party faithful, and soundbites for the small segment of the public that is paying attention, not for detailed policy discussions.

    An analysis of Starmer’s speech on Labour List suggests, for example, that the new target signals a decisive break with New Labour, something that most younger voters, including many in the post-compulsory education sector, don’t give the proverbial crap about.

    True North

    What this announcement does is, finally, give the sector something positive to rally around. Universities UK advocated nearly exactly this target in its blueprint for the new government, almost exactly a year ago, suggesting that there should be a target of 70 per cent participation in tertiary education at level four and above by 2040. Setting aside the 3.333 percentage point difference, that’s a win, and a clear vote of confidence in the post-compulsory sector.

    Higher education is slowly recovering from its long-standing case of main character syndrome. Anyone reading the policy runes knows that the direction of travel is towards building a mixed tertiary economy, informed if not actively driven by skills needs data. That approach tallies with broader questions about the costs and financing of dominant models of (residential, full time) higher education, the capacity of the economy to absorb successive cohorts of graduates in ways that meet their expectations, and the problematic political implications of creating a hollowed out labour market in which it it is ever-more difficult to be economically or culturally secure without a degree.

    The difference between the last government and this one is that it’s trying to find a way to critique the equity and sustainability of all this without suggesting that higher education itself is somehow culturally suspect, or some kind of economic Ponzi scheme. Many in the sector have at times in recent years raged at the notion that in order to promote technical and work-based education options you have to attack “university” education. Clearly not only are both important but they are often pretty much the same exact thing.

    What has been missing hitherto, though, is any kind of clear sense from government about what it thinks the solution is. There have been signals about greater coordination, clarification of the roles of different kinds of institution, and some recent signals around the desirability of “specialisation” – and there’s been some hard knocks for higher education providers on funding. None of it adds up to much, with policy detail promised in the forthcoming post-16 education and skills white paper.

    Answers on a postcard

    But now, the essay question is clear: what will it take to deliver two-thirds higher level learning on that scale?

    And to answer that question, you need to look at both supply and demand. On the supply side, there’s indications that the market alone will struggle to deliver the diversity of offer that might be required, particularly where provision is untested, expensive, and risky. Coordination and collaboration could help to address some of those issues by creating scale and pooling risk, and in some areas of the country, or industries, there may be an appetite to start to tackle those challenges spontaneously. However, to achieve a meaningful step change, policy intervention may be required to give providers confidence that developing new provision is not going to ultimately damage their own sustainability.

    But it is on the demand side that the challenge really lies – and it’s worth noting that with nearly a million young people not in education, employment or training, the model in which exam results at age 16 or 18 determine your whole future is, objectively, whack. But you can offer all the tantalising innovative learning opportunities you want, if people feel they can’t afford it, or don’t have the time or energy to invest, or can’t see an outcome, or just don’t think it’ll be that interesting, or have to stop working to access it, they just won’t come. Far more thought has to be given to what might motivate young people to take up education and training opportunities, and the right kind of targeted funding put in place to make that real.

    The other big existential question is scaling work-based education opportunities. Lots of young people are interested in apprenticeships, and lots of higher education providers are keen to offer them; the challenge is about employers being able to accommodate them. It might be about looking to existing practice in teacher education or health education, or about reimagining how work-based learning should be configured and funded, but it’s going to take, probably, industry-specific workforce strategies that are simultaneously very robust on the education and skills needs while being somewhat agnostic on the delivery mechanism. There may need to be a gentle loosening of the conditions on which something is designated an apprenticeship.

    The point is, whatever the optics around “50 per cent participation” this moment should be an invigorating one, causing the sector’s finest minds to focus on what the answer to the question is. This is a sector that has always been in the business of changing lives. Now it’s time to show it can change how it thinks about how to do that.

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  • A quarter of students still drop out – Campus Review

    A quarter of students still drop out – Campus Review

    Some equity student retention rates are trending upwards even though one in four students still drop out of university, new Department of Education data has revealed.

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  • How unis can do more on social media – Campus Review

    How unis can do more on social media – Campus Review

    Too many universities overlook the richness of the human stories that define them, relying instead on polished marketing campaigns and generic social media content to attract the next generation of students.

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  • Unis need lectures worth showing up for – Campus Review

    Unis need lectures worth showing up for – Campus Review

    On Campus

    Technology can help lecturers engage with students who are attend in-person via polls, live questions and chat threads on their phones or devices

    Hugh GundlachOctober 1, 2025Last Updated: October 1, 2025

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    In-person lectures have been a staple of university learning for centuries.

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  • Is there a place for LEO in regulation?

    Is there a place for LEO in regulation?

    The OfS have, following a DfE study, recently announced a desire to use LEO for regulation. In my view this is a bad idea.

    Don’t get me wrong, the Longitudinal Outcomes from Education (LEO) dataset is a fantastic and under-utilised tool for historical research. Nothing can compare to LEO for its rigour, coverage and the richness of the personal data it contains.

    However, it has serious limitations, it captures earnings and not salary, for everyone who chooses to work part time it will seriously underestimate the salary they command.

    And fundamentally it’s just too lagged. You can add other concerns around those choosing not to work and those working abroad if you wish to undermine its utility further.

    The big idea

    The OfS is proposing using data from 3 years’ after graduation which I assume to mean the third full tax year after graduation although it could mean something different, no details are provided. Assuming that my interpretation is correct the most recent LEO data published in June this year relates to the 2022-23 tax year so for that to be the third full tax year after graduation (that’s the that’s the 2018-19 graduating cohort, and even if you go for the third tax year including the one they graduated in it’s the 2019-20 graduates). The OfS also proposes to continue to use 4 year aggregates which makes a lot of sense to avoid statistical noise and deal with small cohorts but it does mean that some of the data will relate to even earlier cohorts.

    The problem is therefore if the proposed regime had been in place this year the OfS would have just got its first look at outcomes from the 2018-19 graduating cohort who were of course entrants in 2016-17 or earlier. When we look at it through this lens it is hard to see how one applies any serious regulatory tools to a provider failing on this metric but performing well on others especially if they are performing well on those based on the still lagged but more timely Graduate Outcomes survey.

    It is hard to conceive of any courses that will not have had at least one significant change in the 9 (up to 12!) years since the measured cohort entered. It therefore won’t be hard for most providers to argue that the changes they have made since those cohorts entered will have had positive impacts on outcomes and the regulator will have to give some weight to those arguments especially if they are supported by changes in the existing progression, or the proposed new skills utilisation indicator.

    A problem?

    And if the existing progression indicator is problematic then why didn’t the regulator act on it when it had it four years earlier? The OfS could try to argue that it’s a different indicator capturing a different aspect of success but this, at least to this commentators mind, is a pretty flimsy argument and is likely to fail because earnings is a very narrow definition of success. Indeed, by having two indicators the regulator may well find themselves in a situation where they can only take meaningful action if a provider is failing on both.

    OfS could begin to address the time lag by just looking at the first full tax year after graduation but this will undoubtedly be problematic as graduates take time to settle into careers (which is why GO is at 15 months) and of course the interim study issues will be far more significant for this cohort. It would also still be less timely than the Graduate Outcomes survey which itself collects the far more meaningful salary rather than earnings.

    There is of course a further issue with LEO in that it will forever be a black box for the providers being regulated using it. It will not be possible to share the sort of rich data with providers that is shared for other metrics meaning that providers will not be able to undertake any serious analysis into the causes of any concerns the OfS may raise. For example, a provider would struggle to attribute poor outcomes to a course they discontinued, perhaps because they felt it didn’t speak to the employment market. A cynic might even conclude that having a metric nobody can understand or challenge is quite nice for the OfS.

    The use of LEO in regulation is likely to generate a lot of work for the OfS and may trigger lots of debate but I doubt it will ever lead to serious negative consequences as the contextual factors and the fact that the cohorts being considered are ancient history will dull, if not completely blunt, the regulatory tools.

    Richard Puttock writes in a personal capacity.

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  • How Higher Education Can Lead the AI Shift – Campus Review

    How Higher Education Can Lead the AI Shift – Campus Review

    Artificial intelligence is no longer a fringe experiment in education; it is reshaping how institutions design learning, support students, and organise academic work. Although pilot programs and experimentation environments are becoming more common, few institutions have successfully scaled AI to achieve real transformation.

    The new white paper, From Pilots to Transformation: Scaling AI for Student Success in Higher Education, produced by Ellucian and Nous Group, offers research-based recommendations for moving from experimentation to institutional-scale impact.

    Drawing on insights from sector leaders, global references, and lessons from neighbouring industries, the paper explores the need for deep cultural and strategic alignment in scaling AI initiatives.

    It emphasises the importance of incorporating equity, ethics, and student trust into AI projects from the start, while also examining how AI is profoundly reshaping academic work, learning experiences, and governance.

    Additionally, the paper provides practical steps that institutions can take to move beyond isolated pilot programs toward sustainable, sector-wide transformation.

    Zac Ashkanasy, Principal at Nous Group, frames the challenge clearly: “The real transformation lies in how institutions prepare their people, redesign their roles, and embed AI responsibly into their operating models,” he says.

    For institutions across Australia, the message is clear: students are adopting AI faster than staff. Institutions that lead with purpose today will shape the future of the sector, while those that hesitate risk falling behind.

    Find out more and download the white paper to discover the strategies and actions that will help your institution scale AI responsibly and unlock the next era of student success.

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    Email [email protected]

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