by Rob Cuthbert
In SRHE News and Blog a series of posts is chronicling, decade by decade, the progress of SRHE since its foundation 60 years ago in 1965. As always, our memories are supported by some music of the times. This is the last of the series.
2015 was a troubled year, as wars and terrorist outrages proliferated. Russia had invaded Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014 and a supposedly agreed ceasefire in 2015 broke down within days, as had a previous agreement in 2014. The war in Iraq involving Islamic State, which had started in 2013, would not end until 2017. Islamic State were also involved in the Syrian civil war, drawing in more and more major powers on opposite sides. It would continue until the Assad regime was overthrown in 2024, but elsewhere the Arab Spring popular uprisings had mostly faded. Massacres in Nigeria by Boko Haram killed more than 2,000 people. Al Qaeda gunmen killed 12 people and injured 11 more in Paris at the offices of newspaper Charlie Hebdo. Al-Shabaab killed 148 people, mostly students, at the Garissa University College in Kenya. A terrorist bomb probably brought down Metrojet Flight 9268, an Airbus A321 airliner which crashed in Sinai, killing 224 passengers and crew. Another Airbus was deliberately crashed by its first officer in the French Alps, killing all 150 people on board. An earthquake in Nepal killed 9000 people, and at least 2200 people died in a stampede at the Hajj pilgrimage in Mecca.
Xi Jinping had been leader of China since 2012, as had François Hollande in France; Angela Merkel was in her tenth year as German Chancellor and Barack Obama was halfway through his second term as US President. The UK general election in 2015 was won by the Conservatives under David Cameron; their former coalition partners the Liberal Democrats suffered their worst result in recent history, paying for their betrayal of Nick Clegg’s “pledge” before the 2010 election to abolish HE tuition fees, even though they almost said sorry. The Labour Party elected Jeremy Corbyn as leader. Queen Elizabeth II became the longest-serving British monarch. The Paris Agreement at COP 21 saw countries agreeing to “do their best” to keep global warming to “well below 2 degrees C” and Greece became the first advanced economy ever to default on a payment to the International Monetary Fund.
Australia beat New Zealand to win the Cricket World Cup, jointly hosted by Australia and New Zealand. The Rugby World Cup was held in England but the hosts flopped as New Zealand beat Australia in the final. Microsoft launched Windows 10, and a new startup called OpenAI was founded.
Higher education in 2015
In 2015 the dominant theme in higher education was internationalisation. A 2016 book by Paul Zeleza (Case Western Reserve University, US), The Transformation of Global Higher Education 1945-2015 argued that “Internationalization emerged as one of the defining features of higher education, which engendered new modes, rationales, and practices of collaboration, competition, comparison, and commercialization. External and internal pressures for accountability and higher education’s value proposition intensified, which fueled struggles over access, affordability, relevance, and outcomes that found expression in the quality assurance movement.”
The Economist leader in March said the world was going to university but: “More and more money is being spent on higher education. Too little is known about whether it is worth it”. Students in Canada, Netherlands, UK and elsewhere were still protesting, trying to hold back the river of commercialisation, but they were just washed away.
Simon Marginson (by then at the UCL Institute of Education) naturally provided the authoritative commentary in his 2016 article in Higher Education: “Worldwide participation in higher education now includes one-third of the age cohort and is growing at an unprecedented rate. The tendency to rapid growth, leading towards high participation systems (HPS), has spread to most middle-income and some low-income countries. Though expansion of higher education requires threshold development of the state and the middle class, it is primarily powered not by economic growth but by the ambitions of families to advance or maintain social position. However, expansion is mostly not accompanied by more equal social access to elite institutions.“
The Going Global conference in 2015 in London had 1000 VCs and others debating “the impact of the greatest global massification of higher education ever experienced”, as NV Varghese, Jinusha Panigrahi and Lynne Heslop reported for University World News on 27 February 2015. Oxford University provided its own report on International Trends, and there was continuing progress towards a common European Higher Education Area, as the 2015 Implementation Report said: ““The European Higher Education Area (EHEA) has evolved towards a more common and much more understandable structure of degrees. There is, however, no single model of first-cycle programmes in the EHEA.” No single model for pop music either, as the Eurovision Song Contest in Vienna was won by Sweden with “Heroes” (no, me neither) and George Ezra’s European tour included Budapest.
UK HE in 2015
In 2015-2016 there were 162 publicly-funded HE providers in the UK; HESA held data on all of them, plus the decreasingly private University of Buckingham. In addition there was HE provision in FE colleges and other places. Of the 2.3million HE students, 60% were full-time undergraduates. 56.5% of all students were female, 43.5% male. Total numbers had been falling since 2011-2012, because the decline in part-time numbers had outstripped the continuing growth of full-time and sandwich student numbers, up by 5.8% over the same period. Business and administrative studies was the most heavily populated at both UG and PG levels, as in previous years; at PG level Education was second. Reflecting the globalisation of HE, UK universities in 2015-2016 had over 700,000 students registered in transnational education.
The 2004 Higher Education Act (2004 c. 8) had established the Arts and Humanities Research Council and provided for the appointment of a Director of Fair Access to Higher Education. It set out arrangements for dealing with students’ complaints about higher education institutions and made provisions on grants and loans for FHE students. Then came the 2005 Education Act (2005 c. 18), which renamed the Teacher Training Agency (established by the 1994 Education Act) as the Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA). The Learning and Skills Council was set up by the 2007 Further Education and Training Act (2007 c. 25) and the 2008 Sale of Student Loans Act (2008 c. 10) allowed the government to sell student loans to private companies. The school leaving age went from 16 to 18 under the 2008 Education and Skills Act (2008 c. 25) and the2009 Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act (2009 c. 22) created a statutory framework for apprenticeships, and established among other things the Young People’s Learning Agency for England (YPLA), the office of Chief Executive of Skills Funding and the Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation (Ofqual).
Labour might have had a head full of dreams, but many of their new structures were dismantled after the coalition government was elected in 2010. There was bad blood between Education Secretary Michael Gove and the teacher unions’ ‘blob’; his 2011 Education Act (2011 c. 21) put an end to the General Teaching Council for England, the Training and Development Agency for Schools, the School Support Staff Negotiating Body, the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency and the Young People’s Learning Agency for England. The Act also ended the diploma entitlement for 16 to 18 year olds and abandoned Labour’s aim of making 18 the upper age limit for participation in education.
The tortuous rise of HE fees for undergraduates was usefully summarised in a 2015 House of Commons Library Briefing Note. The £1000 fee introduced in 1998 had risen to £3000 after 2006, in a move which almost brought down the Labour government. The 2010 election saw the Liberal Democrats renege on their pre-election ‘pledge’ to abolish tuition fees, instead agreeing with their Conservative coalition partners to triple them instead, which had many asking ‘What do you mean?’ The £9000 fees were partly a consequence of the Browne Review, but the government as always cherry-picked the recommendations it liked and ignored the package which was proposed. A 2010 vote set fees at between £6000 and £9000, but as everyone had predicted – except the Universities Minister David Willetts – English universities scrambled en masse to charge £9000, for fear of otherwise being labelled as inferior. The £9000 fees took effect in September 2012, while in other parts of the UK tuition fee arrangements increasingly diverged from England’s world-beating fee levels. The fee rose with inflation to £9250 but was then frozen, fiscal drag which would cost HE many £billions in revenue and lead to today’s widespread financial problems.
In June 2011 the government published the White Paper Higher Education: Students at the Heart of the System, but the anticipated Higher Education Bill did not follow. Minister David Willetts was not letting go; he brought forward a package of reforms to change HE regulation: placing the funding council in an oversight and coordination role; establishing a Register of Higher Education Provision; introducing designation conditions for HEIs, and a new designation system for alternative providers; updating the Financial Memorandum; reforming student number controls, including a system for alternative providers; and creating a Designation Resolution Process. Once again Sue Hubble of the House of Commons Library provided a definitive record in September 2013, noting some commentators’ criticisms that such sweeping changes had been achieved by administrative procedures rather than primary legislation.
In July 2015 DBIS updated the statistics on widening participation, which showed continuing but erratic progress despite too many policy interventions. We had to wait until November 2015 for a Green Paper, Fulfilling Our Potential, which proposed establishing a Teaching Excellence Framework, abolishing the Higher Education Funding Council for England and replacing it with the Office for Students. It would not be until 2017 that the Higher Education Reform Act confirmed and enshrined these changes in statute. HEPI Report 161, edited by SRHE member Helen Carasso (Oxford), looked back on the 20 years since HEPI’s formation in 2022-2023. It included a chapter by SRHE Fellow Michael Shattock (UCL) on how ‘self-governed’ universities (I doubt if we’ll see you again) were forced to say Hello to a ‘regulated’ university system: “The year 2003 can be seen as starting point in a process of systemic governance change in UK higher education.”
SRHE and research into higher education in 2015
By 2015 research into higher education had been noticed even in the furthest corners of academe. A 2012 book chapter by philosopher Andre V Rezaev (St Petersburg State University) was thinking out loud: “… to articulate a possibility for integrating a number of perspectives in studying higher education as a scholarly subject in current social science. We begin with the reasons for such an undertaking and its relevance. We then develop several basic definitions in order to establish a common conceptual basis for discussion. The final section presents new institutionalism as one of the ways to integrate several approaches in understanding higher education. This chapter is rather theoretical and methodological in its outlook. We develop the basic approach that, in many respects, is still a work in progress. We take in this approach a set of arguments that open up new research agenda rather than settled a perception to be accepted uncritically.” Even latecomers were of course welcome.
With due ceremony SRHE staged a 50th Anniversary Colloquium in London on 26 June 2015. The congregation of more than 200 people included almost everyone who had been anyone in HE research in the UK, and many places beyond, gathered in Westminster for discussion and celebration, primed by ‘think pieces’ from SRHE Fellows past and future. The themes encapsulated the scope of research into HE: Learning, Teaching and the Curriculum (Marcia Devlin); Academic Practice, Identity and Careers (Bruce Macfarlane); The Student Experience (Mary Stuart); Transnational Perspectives (Rajani Naidoo); Research on HE Policy (Jeroen Huisman); Going Global (Paul Ashwin); Access and Widening Participation in HE (Penny-Jane Burke); and, Reflective Teaching in HE (Kelly Coate).
The Society had managed to shake off its financial woes and was flourishing in financial and academic terms. The chairs from 2005 were Ron Barnett (UCL), George Gordon (Strathclyde), Yvonne Hillier (Brighton), and Jill Jameson (Greenwich). The successful series of books published by the Open University Press had ended when it was swallowed by McGraw-Hill, but a seamless change led to a new and even more successful series with Routledge from 2012. SRHE News was reimagined and relaunched in February 2010, and the SRHE Blog followed from 2012. The Society’s office moves continued, switching in 2009 from the Institute of Physics in Portland Place to a brief sojourn at Open University offices in 44 Bedford Row, London, before finding a longer-term home on the second floor at 73 Collier Street in London. In 2009 the annual Research Conference was held for the first time at Celtic Manor in Newport, Wales (where François Smit might often have said shut up and dance). It would return every year until 2019, just before Covid disrupted the world, including the world of research into higher education. The Society would however emerge even stronger, having discovered the power of online meeting (if you don’t believe me, just watch) to expand its global reach, as a more prominent complement to the still essential face-to-face meetings in networks and conferences.
Rob Cuthbert is editor of SRHE News and the SRHE Blog, Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Management, University of the West of England and Joint Managing Partner, Practical Academics. Email [email protected]. Twitter/X @RobCuthbert. Bluesky @robcuthbert22.bsky.social.