Tag: Wonkhe

Higher education misunderstands neurodivergence | Wonkhe

The term “resilience” is everywhere in higher education.

It shows up in strategic plans, wellbeing frameworks and graduate attribute profiles.

Universities want students who cope well with pressure, bounce back from problems, and adapt quickly to change.

But this obsession with using resilience as the cure all is quietly doing damage – particularly to neurodivergent students, and risks perpetuating a culture that conflates survival with success.

Resilience, as it is often used in policy or wellbeing guidance, makes assumptions about a universal baseline.

All students (and staff) are under pressure to “cope” with the demands of higher education, including anything from deadlines, group work, feedback, through to accommodation moves. It is as though everyone is starting from the same place, with the same resources.

But neurodivergent students often come into higher education already managing complex internal landscapes – sensory overwhelm, executive dysfunction, rigid routines (or lack of), social anxiety, rejection sensitivity dysphoria, and demand avoidance, to name but a few.

These are not just barriers to learning in an abstract sense but are, in fact, daily realities.

And when we talk about resilience without consideration of this as a baseline for some, we begin to measure students by how well they endure suffering, not how well they are supported.

A lack of adaptation becomes lack of success.

Surviving is not thriving

Neurodivergent students often go to extraordinary lengths to meet the expectations of higher education.

They may appear to be coping, attending lectures, submitting assignments, and even achieving high grades.

But this superficial success can be very misleading. What is often interpreted as resilience is, in many cases, a form of masking, a conscious or unconscious effort to suppress traits, needs, or behaviours to fit in.

This is not a sign of thriving – it is a survival strategy.

Masking is emotionally and physically exhausting. It can manifest as mimicked social behaviours, hiding sensory issues, or continuing despite major executive dysfunction. Over time, this leads to chronic stress, anxiety, and burnout.

The student may be praised for their work, but inside they are struggling to maintain the illusion. The cost of appearing resilient is often invisible to staff and friends, yet it can be devastating.

This is where the resilience narrative becomes dangerous. It rewards students for enduring environments that are not designed for them, rather than prompting institutions to question why those environments are so difficult to navigate in the first place.

A student who seems to be “doing well” may be on the brink of collapse. Without understanding the hidden labour behind this apparent success, we risk reinforcing a system that values endurance over wellbeing.

Support as self-blame

While the rhetoric of resilience is often framed as empowerment, in practice it can move responsibility away from universities and onto students, especially neurodivergent students.

Support services may focus on coping strategies, stress management, or time management techniques. These can be helpful, but when offered in isolation, they imply the problem is that the student cannot adapt satisfactorily, rather than with the system’s failure to accommodate.

This framing can lead to a harmful cycle of self-blame. When students struggle, with rigid timetables, inaccessible assessments, or overstimulating environments, they are told to be more resilient. But resilience, in this context, becomes a term for tolerance of unsuitable conditions.

When students inevitably reach their limits, they may internalise this as personal failure, that they didn’t try hard enough or put enough effort in.

The reality is that the burden of adaptation is not equally shared. Institutional structures can be inflexible, and staff may lack the training or resources to provide robust accommodations.

This creates a scenario where neurodivergent students are expected to conform to a model of academic success that was never designed with them in mind. When they can’t, they disengage, not because they lack resilience, but because the system has failed to support them.

This creates a vicious cycle. The student struggles. They perseverate on that as personal failure. And yet, ultimately, they are encouraged to be more resilient. And when that doesn’t work, as masking and self-management have reached their limit, this is when neurodivergent students disengage or drop out.

Whilst national statistics are not readily available due to underreporting and also confusion around definitions, research does point to these issues. The British Psychological Society (2022) reports that due to an over-reliance on self-disclosure, as well as inconsistent support systems,

ND students face a disproportionate amount of challenges in higher education. Furthermore, the Office for National Statistics (2021) report that only 21.7 per cent of autistic adults were employed in 2020, demonstrating systemic barriers which students may face when transitioning to work.

They will blame themselves.

Rethinking resilience

That is not to say resilience is inherently bad. The ability to manage setbacks and adapt to change is fundamental but, for neurodivergents, that can only be when it is coupled with appropriate support, inclusive systems and compassionate pedagogy.

In its current format, the discussion around resilience become a deflection. It reframes structural exclusion, such as inaccessible or rigid assessment methods, inflexible teaching patterns, and overstimulating spaces, as personal challenges that they must overcome.

An example of this may be that many universities still require in-person attendance for some assessments. For a student with sensory or processing issues, this could effectively provoke masking, which could lead to overwhelm and/or burn-out. Despite us having the power to change it, we instead expect students to improve at surviving the experience.

A solid example of where this has been integrated, in terms of flexibility, is the University of Oxford’s (2024) NESTL toolkit, which demonstrates how applications of moving adaptations throughout the programme can, in the first instance, support ND students, but actually could have implications for all students in terms of authentic assessment and individualised learning.

From resilience to responsibility

If universities are serious about supporting neurodivergent students, they must start by reframing resilience not as an individual concept but as a systemic responsibility. Rather than asking students to become more resilient, the more important question is how institutions can reduce the need for resilience in the first place.

This begins with designing systems that are accessible from the outset. Instead of relying on individual adjustments, universities should embed flexibility into their base structures, with adaptable deadlines, varied assessment formats, and alternative ways for students to engage with learning. These changes not only support neurodivergent students but enhance the experience for all learners.

Creating a culture of safety is vital. Disclosure should not trigger a bureaucratic process but should be met with empathy, understanding, and timely support. It would be a bonus if staff training could go beyond basic awareness and involve critical reflection on how teaching practices can embody inclusion and empower educators to make meaningful changes.

Finally, institutions must place ND students in the centre throughout the design and review of policies, curricula, and spaces. Lived experience should not be treated as an optional perspective but as a foundation. Only by shifting from a format of individual endurance to one of collective responsibility can we begin to challenge the structural barriers that resilience discourse too often obscures.

The myth of the resilient student is appealing and offers a neat solution to complex challenges. But it also permits institutions to bypass important discussions about structural exclusion, academic tradition and the limitations of current support models. We have to rethink the system from the ground up, and not just ask students to endure it.

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August 13, 2025
The estate we’re in | Wonkhe

Sometimes you walk through a city and the city changes around you.

There’s a subtle modulation in feel – the style and tenor of the place is renewed, the rhythm of green spaces shifts, the architectural language expands. Statements made in concrete, brick, limestone, and plate glass are more assertive.

And a new form of power and control begins to be felt. You see what look like guard posts, staffed by a private police force. Gates and passes dictate where you can and cannot go. Parking a car holds a byzantine mystery of its own. Signs are branded, sometimes incomprehensibly, for the attention of an elite you suddenly feel you are not part of.

And who runs these places? Well, you don’t get to choose. What do they do? You don’t get a say. This part of your city is not your city.

It’s a university estate.

Special economic zones

If you like, a university is a freeport – where the goods coming in and out are ideas. It is, to be clear, absolutely a part of a nation state – but it is a separate polity – designed and separated for a purpose. Individually these areas are tiny, but when you start adding things together it gets interesting.

The total population (the FTE of every staff member and student that could be counted as a “citizen” of our higher education zones) is 2.4 million – that’s around the size of Slovenia or Latvia. Staff FTE is closer to 396,000 – larger than the population of Iceland.

University sites extend across 12,887 hectares of land in the UK – that’s more space than Bristol (the unitary authority area), and larger than Jersey. But for the number of people involved that isn’t a lot of space: the population density (again, using FTE here) is 0.02 FTE/m2 (behind only Macau and Monaco in global terms).

Financially, we are looking at £48bn in income and £39bn in expenditure (these as reported in the Estates dataset, not the Finances dataset, giving us a positive (if weak) balance of trade. Gross national income per FTE (if we use staff only) is £12,192 (that’s 16,518 USD at current prices, a higher equivalent GNI per capita than Russia!)

Land management

According to the Association of University Directors of Estates (AUDE, using last year’s data) our hypothetical micronation spends around £200m on defence (or security if you’d rather) each year. If you include maintenance and repair – another essential way to protect the value of your estates assets, we’re pushing our total up beyond £1bn. And if you factor in all spending on premises (cost centre 205, which includes things like taxes, rental payments, energy, and insurance) – we are talking in the region of £6bn.

This spending covers a lot of work. Higher education involves the use of just under 16,000 buildings – everything from student accommodation and office blocks, from nuclear reactors to wind tunnels, from listed buildings to literal pigsties. It isn’t published in the open data, but last year AUDE tells us the proportion of buildings rated as being in condition C (operational but major repair or replacement needed in the short to medium-term) and D (inoperable or serious risk of major failure or breakdown) was 23.8 per cent – the building stock is deteriorating, year on year, as repair and maintenance backlogs grow.

What we do see in published data is display energy certificates (DEC) and and energy performance (EPC) certificates, two broadly comparable ways of rating the environmental performance of buildings. It’s not a direct line that can be drawn, but a well maintained estate (or an estate where old buildings are replaced with new) is likely to become more energy efficient over time and a poorly maintained estate will tend to lose efficiency. This year 28.21 per cent of sector non-residential estates were in categories E, F, or G – broadly the same as last year, for a larger estate that still includes a number of older buildings that are never going to reach modern efficiency standards, but still a concern.

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Though higher education involves the creation of intangible assets (everything from intellectual property to the future value of graduates in wider society), the estate represents the sector’s tangible assets. Should we lose a provider to the financial storms the sector faces, it is to the estate that creditors (or potential buyers) might look to release funds.

Zero and below

The UK’s COP29 pledges – in the service of a global “net zero” carbon in 2050 – have become increasingly politically controversial as the costs of doing pretty much anything have risen (due to a range of geopolitical factors far too well-known and tedious to go into here having an impact on supply chains and labour availability).

In our hypothetical UK higher education micronation – given what is popularly imagined to be a progressive, science-informed, population – you would expect an element of leadership in sustainability and decarbonisation. And indeed, this has been the case. But this stuff comes at a cost.

OfS’s review of the financial stability of providers in England in 2024 suggested that a key driver of continued financial challenge was:

The affordability of necessary estate maintenance and development and the significant cost of investment needed to reduce carbon emissions as part of providers’ commitments to achieve net zero.

A year later, the mention of net zero had been scrubbed entirely:

the significant cost of investment needed to reduce carbon emissions as part of a commitment to tackling environmental sustainability

Despite governments having an interest in the improving the sustainability of, and reducing emission from campuses (for example the education system sustainability and climate change strategy, first published by DfE in 2021 under the auspices of noted doyenne of woke activism Nadhim Zahawi) there is no statutory energy and carbon reporting route in English higher education(as there is for FE colleges and schools). The closest OfS gets is to gently ask those bidding for historically tiny amounts of capital to offer “assurance that providers have considered practical solutions towards achieving environmental sustainability as part of their bid”.

Our UK HE micronation, as well as being a good global citizen, also has an interest in driving down long-term costs. Fossil fuels are only going to get more expensive in the long run, switching to alternatives and moving to greater efficiency makes business sense even if there are initial costs. There has been some progress with scope 1 and 2 emissions (another fall last year), though this is limited compared to what could be achieved last decade: much of the “easy” work has already been done. That said, we’re still talking about 1.4m tonnes of carbon a year, equivalent to a small African country (Eswatini, formerly Swaziland, is a decent comparator) – and this is only scope 1 and 2 (direct) emissions, factoring in the supply chains and travel within scope 3 is another matter.

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Zones of proximal development

So, while it is undeniably fun to see UK higher education at the scale of a small country, it still remains firmly rooted in the four home nations. But the exercise prompted me to think – are there other zones within the UK that have been designed to optimise specific benefits for the areas and nations around them?

These days its all industrial strategy zones, but in terms people may recognise we might think about enterprise zones designed to stimulate economic growth by offering incentives to business – there are 48 in England. We have the internationally focused freeports, of course – 12 of them in the UK, and 7 investment zones (to date) that aim to unlock opportunities for business. In each of these examples the actual zones are quite small (almost like campuses, in fact) but the focus is on the impact on a wider local area (where workers may commute from, for example).

Zones like this reflect a global trend towards special economic zones (SEZs) which disapply national rules (around tax, customs, state aid, planning and so on – in some international examples we get as far as labour laws and immigration rules) in the interests of commercial activity. The wilder fringes of policies like this are pretty terrifying, but the UK does appear to be open to paddling in the shallower waters.

Which prompts the question – if universities are like freeports (better than freeports, in fact, as they have a proven track record of providing local benefits) why not offer the relaxation of some national regulations to encourage them to expand and develop in the areas that we want them to? Perhaps it should be easier for UK higher education to recruit international staff – perhaps there should be reductions of employer national contributions with respect to UK staff. Perhaps planning could be easier around established campuses? Perhaps it should be easier to unlock state investment to improve estates without triggering the rules that would drag us into the public sector? Perhaps we could unlock investment and incentives for clean electricity generation and area heating systems?

In the absence of an increase in tuition fees or income from OfS, a special economic zone (or zones) for higher education might be a way forward. The ideas of universities as largely self-administrating state-like entities within a country is an old one (the early days of Oxford featured a parallel judicial system, that ended up provoking riots and the foundation of Cambridge!) and perhaps worth revisiting.

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July 24, 2025
National Student Survey 2025 | Wonkhe

After a few years of rapid changes and exogenous shocks we are pretty much back to normal on the national student survey.

The 2025 results tell an overall tale of graduate improvement – of students being generally content that they are getting what they have been led to expect (or, for the cynics, having modulated their expectations appropriately), and of a sector where the majority of students are content with pretty much every area of their academic experience.

The positivity is always worthy of noting as it balances out a popular image of unhappy students, poor quality courses, and failing universities. The inconvenient truth is that UK higher education as a whole is pretty good, and remains so despite the efforts and fervent wishes of many.

Overall

The main utility of the National Student Survey is to draw gentle but persistent external attention to the kind of internal problems that decent providers will already be aware of. If you know, for example, there is a problem with students receiving timely feedback on your undergraduate architecture course, the temptation in these times of budgetary restraint may be to let it slide – a negative NSS finding focuses attention where it is needed.

Michelle Donelan (where is she now?) famously took against the framing of students being “satisfied” in her jeremiad against the old NSS – but the NSS has, since inception, acted as a tool to get students some satisfaction.

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Our first chart looks at the four home nations and the UK as a whole – you can examine subject areas of interest at three levels, choose to see registered or taught students, of all undergraduate levels and mode, and filter out areas with low response numbers. From this we learn that food and beverage studies is probably the most challenging course in the UK, with 94.8 per cent of respondents responding positively to question 4 (“how often does your course challenge you to achieve your best work”).

In Wales, medical technology students were least likely to be positive about the fairness of marking and assessment. In England, maritime technology students are least likely to feel their student union represents them. To be clear, at CAH3 we are often looking at very small numbers of students (which may pertain to a single course in a single provider) – cranking things up to CAH1 means we can be much more confident that veterinary science students in Scotland find their course “intellectually stimulating”.

By provider

It gets interesting when you start comparing the national averages above to subject areas in your provider, so I’ve built a version of the dashboard where you can examine different aspects of your own provision. I’ve added a function where you click on a subject dot it updates the bar chart on the right, offering an overview of all responses to all questions.

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This helps put in perspective how cross your computer games and animation students are with your library resources – it turns out this is a national problem, and perhaps a chat to a professional body might be helpful in finding out what needs to be done

Of course, there’s a whole industry out there that uses NSS results to rank providers, often using bizarre compound metrics now we don’t have an “overall satisfaction” question (if you’ve ever read nonsense about nursing students in a provider being the most satisfied among modern campus universities in the East Midlands then this is how we get there).

There is a value in benchmarking against comparators, so this is my gentle contribution to this area of discourse which works in the same way as the one above (note that you need to select a subject area as well as a subject level). For the people who ask every year – the population sizes and response numbers are in the tooltips (you can also filter out tiny response numbers, by default I do this at fifty).

I’ve not included the confidence intervals that OfS’s dashboard does because it simply doesn’t matter for most use cases and it makes the charts harder to read (and slower to load). You should be aware enough to know that a small number of responses probably doesn’t make for a very reliable number. Oh, and the colour of the dots is the old (very old) TEF flags – two standard deviations above (green) or below (red) the benchmark.

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Characteristics

Beyond national trends, subject level oddities, and provider peculiarities the student experience is affected by personal characteristics.

While there may be a provider level problem, many of these could equally be a national or UK-wide issue: especially when linked to a particular subject area. We get characteristic statistics up to CAH level 1 (very broad groups of subjects) in public data, which may be enough to help you understand what is going on with a particular set of students.

For instance, it appears that – nationally – students with disabilities (including mental health struggles) are less likely to feel that information about wellbeing support is well communicated – something that is unlikely to be unique to a single provider, and (ideally) needs to be addressed in partnership to ensure these vulnerable students get the support they need.

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Conclusion

If you take NSS at face value it is an incredibly useful tool. If we manage to leave it in a steady state for a few more years time series will add another level to this usefulness (sorry, a year-on-year comparison tells us little and even three years isn’t much better.

As ammunition to allow you to solve problems in your own provider, to identify places to learn from, and iterate your way to happier and better educated students it is unsurpassed. It’s never really convinced as a regulatory tool, and (on a limb here) the value for applicants only really comes as a warning away from places that are doing outstandingly badly.

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July 9, 2025
What SHAPE graduates do | Wonkhe

As debates continue about the value of degrees, and the role of universities in society and the future economy, understanding graduate outcomes is more important than ever.

Yet much of the current discussion – and policymaking – is shaped by narrow metrics, which over-focus on graduate earnings.

This approach overlooks many of the ways graduates contribute to society and distorts our understanding of the value of different subjects.

The right SHAPE

The British Academy represents SHAPE disciplines; social sciences, humanities and arts for people and the economy. SHAPE graduates develop crucial skills like critical thinking, creativity and problem solving. These skills help them contribute to tackling many of today’s most pressing challenges, from climate change to the ethical deployment of AI.

However, we wanted to know more. How do they use these skills? What do SHAPE graduates do after university? How can we best measure the full breadth of their contribution to the UK economy and society? And do we have the data to address these questions comprehensively?

To help provide answers, the British Academy has launched a new data-rich policy resource, Understanding SHAPE Graduates, which illustrates exactly how SHAPE graduates contribute to the UK economy and society. The toolkit consists of an interactive data dashboard, a series of key findings drawn from the data, and a policy briefing contextualising the measurement of graduate outcomes.

SHAPE graduates and the economy

The toolkit offers several myth-busting insights into SHAPE graduate activity, some of which we will outline here. Importantly, it challenges the narrative that SHAPE graduates have weak labour market prospects, showing that their employment rates are strong: 87 per cent of SHAPE graduates were in work in 2023, compared to 79 per cent of non-graduates with level 3 qualifications and 88 per cent of STEM graduates.

SHAPE graduates also earn significantly more than non-graduates, with an average real hourly wage of £21 in 2023 – £5 higher than the average for those with at least two A levels or equivalent. And you can increasingly find them working in the UK’s fastest growing sectors; between 2010 and 2022, the top three sectors by GVA growth – manufacturing; transport and communication; and professional, scientific and technical services – saw growing numbers of SHAPE graduates. These sectors are outlined in the Government’s Industrial Strategy green paper, and SHAPE graduates comprised 52.8 per cent of the graduate workforce in all of them combined in 2023, up from 45.8 per cent in 1997.

They are also well represented in the UK’s most productive regions. In 2023, SHAPE first-degree graduates accounted for 71 per cent per cent of the graduate workforce in London, 64 per cent in the North West and 58 per cent in the South East of England – the three regions with the highest GDP levels that year.

What the data doesn’t show

While the Academy’s policy toolkit marks a step forward, it also highlights the limitations of current graduate data. For example, while broad categories like SHAPE and STEM are useful, they can mask significant variations between disciplines.

The toolkit uses the Labour Force Survey (LFS) and the Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) dataset. Most significantly, both LEO and LFS focus primarily on earnings and employment. This narrow lens misses non-financial aspects of graduate impact – such as contributions to public life, wellbeing, culture, and civic engagement – which are especially important in understanding the SHAPE disciplines.

Limitations in longitudinal graduate data also present specific challenges. Response rates to the LFS have declined in recent years, affecting its robustness, particularly for smaller cohorts like doctoral graduates. And the LEO dataset, which offers rich England-only data by tracking individuals from education into the labour market, has its own knowledge gaps. For example, LEO does not distinguish between full-time and part-time work, making it harder to interpret earnings data, especially for female graduates who are more likely to work part-time due to caregiving responsibilities. LEO also struggles to fully capture self-employed graduates, including freelancers in the creative industries and other sectors, due to its reliance on PAYE data.

Looking ahead, the HESA Graduate Outcomes Survey (which replaced the Destination of Leavers from Higher Education (DLHE) survey in 2018) offers promise. Over time, it will offer increasingly longitudinal insights to help us deepen our understanding, and it is encouraging to see that HESA is already exploring non-financial measures of graduate activity. We plan to incorporate these into future work.

Starting the conversation

The Understanding SHAPE Graduates toolkit shows that SHAPE graduates are vital to the UK economy. As we approach the government’s Comprehensive Spending Review and await the publication of its refreshed Industrial Strategy, we must remember that the UK’s future success depends on drawing talent from across all disciplines.

We want to continue exploring how we capture non-financial outcomes, to reflect the full value of a university education.

At the British Academy, we will continue to champion the diverse and vital contributions that SHAPE graduates make across society and the economy. We look forward to working with the sector to develop better data, better metrics, and better understanding.

You can see and use the data here.

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June 9, 2025
Podcast: Efficiency, EDI, speed | Wonkhe

This week on the podcast we examine Universities UK’s efficiency and transformation taskforce report. What do shared back-office services, federation models and subject cold spots tell us about the sector’s financial pressures?

Plus we discuss Research England’s new EDI action plan, and explore whether the UK’s rapid three-year degree model is harming student wellbeing and learning outcomes.

With Rille Raaper, Associate Professor in Sociology of Higher Education at Durham University, Jess Lister, Director (Education) at Public First, Mack Marshall, Community and Policy Officer at Wonkhe SUs, and presented by Jim Dickinson, Associate Editor at Wonkhe.

Our drop-out and pace miracle is harming students’ health and learning

Universities UK’s new era of collaboration

Fixing the potholes in postgraduate funding

The spending review is a critical moment for UK science and innovation

There are better politics, big ideas, and future trade-offs in Research England’s new EDI action plan

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June 5, 2025
Podcast: Governance, apprenticeships, trends | Wonkhe

This week on the podcast we examine the OfS penalty imposed on Leeds Trinity over subcontractual partnerships oversight. What does the £115,000 fine and a new proposed code of “ethical” governance tell us about decision-making at the top?

Plus we discuss the government’s decision to axe level 7 apprenticeships from levy funding, and explore incoming OfS chair Edward Peck’s ten trends shaping the future of campus universities.

With Alex Stanley, Vice President for Higher Education at the National Union of Students, Pam Macpherson Barrett, Head of Policy and Regulation at the University of Leeds, David Kernohan, Associate Editor at Wonkhe and presented by Mark Leach, Editor-in-Chief at Wonkhe.

Read more

Poor quality teaching and student outcomes. But where?

The new OfS chair identifies ten trends

A code of ethical university governance is overdue

Should governance reform be horizontal or vertical?

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May 29, 2025
Asking students about value | Wonkhe

To value something (or not) is a curious thing.

You can value anything; someone’s opinion, their feelings, their house, indeed nothing is out of the scope of being valued.

In its broadest philosophical sense, value can be considered as the importance of any object, feeling or an action, prescribed by an individual before, during or after the fact.

If we consult the ancient texts, then Plato offers a binary view of value. There is instrumental value, where something serves as a means to another end, and then there’s intrinsic value, which is just that.

Its value exists by virtue of its own existence, it does not need to enable any other end or objective.

The value of higher education

So, is a degree and any student loan repayments just a means to graduate employment and taxpayer ROI (instrumental value), or is being within university education in of itself valuable (intrinsic)?

I’m going to dodge the question early doors, to be honest, and instead invite discussion alongside a presentation of the student view of all of this. I’m nearing the end of a three-year longitudinal data collection process, whereby I’ve been annually surveying and interviewing the same cohort of undergraduate students from five different HEIs since the end of their first year back in May 2023. This has largely been in service of my part-time PhD, but with a day job in student experience and enhancement there’s some ready employment applicability.

How did we get here?

Please do check out my PhD literature review when it’s published for a fulsome answer, but in summary, a series of neoliberal policy interventions since the 1963 Robbins Report have led us to where we are today. The commodification of HE has crept in over time, and instruments like the NSS launched in 2005 (happy 20th anniversary!) and a new market regulator in 2017 are not insignificant markers of this creep.

“Value for money” as a phrase, for the full villain origin story, appeared in the 1980s via the Local Government and Finance act, defining value for money in terms of 3Es: economy, efficiency and effectiveness. With the creation of the aforementioned HE regulator in 2017, value for money became part of regular policy parlance, given it was a central feature of the OfS’ strategy documentation and purpose. It also inspired people like myself and others to get under the skin of what it actually means in this context.

Right here, right now

By annually surveying and interviewing the same cohort of students across five institutions throughout their university education so far, I’ve found a few threads to pull on that I want to share. The first one is all about time and the temporal location of student value for money perceptions.

Current policy is at odds with how students think about the value of their education. It looks into a hazy future of graduate earnings and loan repayments, with the higher of each being the better for all concerned. From my research, and the addition of a ‘temporal location’ to all my survey interview responses, student perceptions of value for money are located in the present day or recent past. They are not looking to a near-future and PAYE potential; they are looking at what they currently get versus the expectations they had and that is the challenge for institutions to overcome.

Non-users and peer influencers

A second research thread to dangle for readers here is that of non-user bias in student value for money perceptions. From my data, students are more likely to rate a particular aspect of their student experience as negative value for money when they haven’t used it. They don’t opt for neutral ratings; they go for negative as “I don’t know what they do.”

As a counterpoint from my data, those students who do engage are far more likely to rate aspects as good value for money and on the whole are receiving excellent customer service (their words, not mine!). These two things in tandem really are a challenge for institutions, as while engagement leads to positive perceptions, very few will have the resource capacity to cater for all of their students.

The influence of near-peers also can’t be understated. Students in my research will think something is bad value for money if a peer tells them so. This isn’t perhaps a shocking revelation, but what it can create is a barrier to that student ever engaging with that service for themselves, as it didn’t work out for their friend (as is their perception).

How do you deliver timely (and personalised) messages to students in order to make them aware of the variety of things on offer for them? In an NSS context this is vital because students who think over the course of their degree that something hasn’t happened or not been available may well score you as such.

Value for money when money is tight

In my research I ask students about their value for money perceptions of student services and support. For positive perceptions one thing is very apparent in that they are largely driven by a direct engagement with any particular service, and doubly that their expectations of that service were met. They got what they thought they came in for.

If you want students to think you offer value for money, then any investment you have in student support ought to focus on providing an excellent service, and meeting student expectations of that. This sounds simple, and indeed rather basic, but a bad experience leads to that student telling their peers, who may then not engage when they themselves need to access that particular service. In the current era we can’t give every student everything, and nostalgia for a more affluent time won’t help. All you can do is excel at the services you do offer to students and feed that positivity cycle.

Dark and dangerous times lie ahead

The sector is in a tricky financial situation, resources are shrinking, international numbers are in flux and your current and next incoming cohort are going to feed your APP, NSS, and TEF metrics for the remainder of this decade. Looking through a value for money lens, the things that drive positive student perceptions are excellent service levels that align to what they were expecting to happen. Focus on doing that very well is what you have to do when expansion and new projects aren’t an option.

As one last bit of insight from my research, I ask students each year if they feel like they know what their tuition fee is spent on, and the majority say no. I also ask them to rate their overall university experience for value for money, and 44 per cent give it a very good or good rating. That 44 per cent is slightly above what you see in the annual HEPI Student Academic Experience Survey, but for those in my data who do feel like they know where their tuition is spent, this rises significantly to 73 per cent. You don’t need an itemised Council Tax type bill, but something not far off that demonstrates the breadth of fee spend could work wonders.

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May 11, 2025
Podcast: Portugal special | Wonkhe

This week on the podcast the SUs team has been on a study tour to universities in Lisbon in Portugal, and have reflections on everything from space to food, from interdisciplinarity to curriculum design and from Praxe to ribbon burning.

With Khadiza Hossein, VP Education at UWE SU, Emillia Zirker, Student Representation Officer at Lincoln SU, Gary Hughes, CEO at Durham SU, Mack Marshall, Community and Policy Officer at Wonkhe and hosted by Jim Dickinson, Associate Editor at Wonkhe.

Those who fight don’t always win, but those who don’t fight always lose

Students should be co-authors of their education

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April 25, 2025
Inclusivity beyond the buzzwords | Wonkhe

Universities highlight language support programs as proof of their commitment to inclusivity, yet these offerings are often expensive, overly prescriptive, optional, and poorly integrated.

Pre-sessional provision comes with hefty price tags, making language support a privilege rather than a right. Students who cannot afford them are either excluded from higher education or forced to struggle in degree programs where linguistic preparedness is assumed rather than supported.

I once supported a postgraduate student from East Asia who was excelling in her subject knowledge but consistently received vague feedback like “lack of critical engagement” on her assignments.

She was deeply confused – she had addressed all the questions and provided detailed analysis. In our one-to-one tutorials, it became clear that the issue was not her understanding of the topic, but that she hadn’t been explicitly taught what criticality looks like linguistically in UK academic culture.

No one had ever shown her how to signal argument structure or contrast ideas subtly in writing. Despite her intelligence and effort, she was left to decode these expectations on her own, and it affected both her grades and her confidence.

What does it say about our commitment to inclusion when students are expected to navigate invisible academic norms alone?

Supplementary or fundamental?

To make matters worse, in-sessional provision, where available, is often treated as an afterthought rather than an integrated resource, leaving students struggling to meet academic demands or seeking help on their own time while managing intensive timetables, packed with lectures, assignments, and deadlines.

This approach positions language support as a supplementary service rather than a fundamental component of academic success, reinforcing the notion that multilingual students must “catch up” instead of valuing their linguistic abilities as assets.

In one programme I supported, attendance at in-sessional sessions was minimal at first – not because students didn’t need them, but because they didn’t know they existed. There was limited to zero visibility of these educational initiatives, and many students were unaware of how language development related to academic success.

It wasn’t until we launched a more systematic approach to promotion – class presentations, VLE announcements, email campaigns, ads on campus screens, fliers, and peer recommendations – that attendance noticeably increased. Word of mouth became our most effective tool, which was both encouraging and telling. If in-sessional provision only gains traction through backdoor advocacy, how inclusive is that, really?

Shortcomings, however, appear to extend far beyond language provision. Pedagogical practices in many institutions remain stubbornly monolingual, built on the assumption that a single teaching model can work for all students, regardless of their linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

This one-size-fits-all approach, which assumes uniformity in learning needs and styles, disregards the diverse ways students engage with knowledge. Standardised teaching methods leave little room for flexibility, forcing students to conform rather than allowing for adaptability and meaningful engagement.

Conformity or critical thinking?

Nowhere is this more evident than in assessment. Universities continue to rely on rigid, English-centric evaluation methods including essays, presentations, and exams graded against standardised linguistic norms, disadvantaging multilingual students rather than valuing their perspectives.

If inclusivity truly mattered, assessments would prioritise critical thinking, originality, and academic engagement over strict linguistic conformity. Instead, institutions uphold traditional models that often disadvantage students from diverse linguistic backgrounds. For example, I once co-marked a brilliant essay that presented a nuanced critique of policy frameworks. It was downgraded – not for weak argumentation – but for not aligning with “expected” academic language norms.

Despite offering original insights and drawing on a range of interdisciplinary sources, the essay was penalised for its occasional non-standard syntax and limited use of discipline-specific vocabulary. Rather than recognising the intellectual rigour of the argument, the feedback focused almost exclusively on surface-level language issues. How does that reflect the critical thinking we claim to value?

While universities struggle to create truly inclusive academic environments, the burden of making the system work falls on EAP practitioners and frontline educators, who are expected to foster inclusivity despite being overstretched, underpaid, and under-resourced. Many receive either little or no formal training in multilingual pedagogies, yet they are tasked with ensuring student success within a rigid system that resists adaptation. From personal experience, I can say that navigating this contradiction is emotionally and professionally draining.

I’ve sat in staff meetings where the pressing need to be inclusive was discussed, only to return to classrooms with no budget for updated materials, no time allocation to work on such updates, and no training on how to implement the very principles being endorsed.

At times, I’ve been expected to “embed inclusive practice” without any clear guidance on what that actually means in context, leaving me to interpret and apply vague directives on my own. This disconnect creates a sense of frustration and helplessness – wanting to support students meaningfully but lacking the structural backing to do so effectively.

The disconnect is glaring – universities promote inclusivity in their policies while shifting the responsibility of implementation onto educators who lack the necessary resources, training, and structural support to make meaningful change. Institutions seek improvement without providing the means to achieve it.

On top of this, accreditation bodies, which should act as enforcers of inclusivity, are complicit in this shortcoming. While they promote the idea of inclusivity as a core value, their competency frameworks remain vague and unenforceable, allowing institutions to check superficial boxes rather than implement meaningful change – without ever being truly held accountable.

Instead of pushing institutions toward equitable assessment strategies, embedded language support, and multilingual pedagogies, accreditation bodies enable them to maintain the status quo while advertising themselves as champions of inclusion.

Integrating EAP

If universities and accrediting bodies are serious about inclusivity, they must dismantle their one-size-fits-all approach and invest in flexible, student-centered models. EAP should not be an expensive privilege but an embedded, fully integrated component of degree programs.

Language support must be available without financial barriers and tailored to students’ actual needs rather than forced into a standardised mold that ignores their diverse experiences. Institutions must move beyond the outdated view that multilingualism is a problem to be fixed and instead embrace it as an academic strength that enhances learning for all students.

For example, multilingual writing workshops, co-delivered by faculty and language specialists, have shown success in small-scale pilots. Why not scale them? Similarly, peer mentoring across language backgrounds fosters both inclusion and academic development. These are not costly solutions, but they do require intention and planning.

Assessment practices must undergo reform. Universities should move beyond evaluating students solely through rigid linguistic norms and instead adopt translingual, context-sensitive assessments that measure intellectual engagement, not just English proficiency.

Traditional assessment models often privilege students who are already proficient in standardised academic English, disregarding the depth of thought, creativity, and critical analysis that can be expressed through diverse linguistic resources.

If higher education truly values critical thinking and originality, its assessment models must reflect that rather than simply rewarding those who conform to narrow linguistic standards. Practical steps might include offering multilingual glossaries during assessments, encouraging multimodal submissions (like presentations or podcasts), and designing rubrics that focus on analytical rigour rather than grammatical precision. These shifts do not dilute standards—they redefine them to reflect actual learning.

Beyond reforming teaching and assessment, universities must stop offloading the responsibility for inclusivity onto individual educators. Institutions must invest in faculty development, providing structured training in multilingual pedagogies and equitable assessment models.

Educators should not be expected to figure out inclusivity on their own – institutions must offer policies with clear, actionable steps that guide them in creating learning environments that serve all students, rather than relying on vague inclusivity statements that sound aspirational but achieve little. This might include mandatory training modules for new staff, collaborative spaces where educators can share inclusive teaching strategies, and formal incentives for inclusive curriculum design.

At the same time, accreditation bodies must reimagine competency frameworks and accreditation schemes to ensure that inclusivity is not just encouraged but required. These frameworks should move beyond broad, generic statements and introduce enforceable, transparent standards that hold institutions accountable.

Accreditation should no longer be granted based on superficial inclusivity measures but tied to real, measurable efforts in integrating multilingual pedagogies, equitable assessment strategies, and accessible language support. Regulatory bodies must stop allowing universities to simply claim inclusivity and start demanding that they prove it.

The future of inclusive higher education hinges on institutions and accrediting bodies being willing to rethink not just their policies but their entire approach to teaching, assessment, and faculty support. Without structural change, inclusivity will remain more of a promise than a practice – a feel-good slogan that limits accountability while leaving students to navigate an inequitable system.

And for those of us who teach, support, and listen to these students every day, that’s not just a policy failure – it’s a deeply personal one. So, the question remains: are universities truly committed to inclusivity, or are they merely preserving the status quo under the illusion of progress? If it’s the latter, then higher education is not meeting the needs of the very students it claims to support. It’s not enough to say the right things – it’s time to do the right things.

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April 16, 2025
Podcast: Easter special | Wonkhe

This week on the podcast it’s our Easter special – and we’re diving into the highlights from The Secret Life of Students, our event that looked at a new vision for the student experience.

We hear from student officers, sector experts, and campaigners on everything from the myth of the full-time model, to the pressures of placements, to the problems faced by international students. There’s testimony from nursing students, fire from SU officers challenging tokenistic consultation, and reflections on race, identity, and institutional indifference. Plus we zoom out to explore commuter challenges, disabled students, student cities and the global call for student solidarity. Hosted by Jim Dickinson, Associate Editor at Wonkhe.

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April 9, 2025