After a quiet time on the wonk front, last week saw the publication of the White Paper and two new reports on employability of STEM graduates, announcement of a Higher education bill in the Queen’s speech, and the launch of the technical consultation on the Teaching Excellence Framework, not forgetting the previous week’s plans for consulting on the future of DLHE. Anyone would think that HE wonks had been twiddling their thumbs for a while, with nothing to critique or criticise. For a really good set of resources on this, it is worth looking at WonkHE.

The White Paper contained few real surprises – changes to quality arrangements, making it easier for new entrants to the market, the introduction of a teaching excellence framework, changes to the landscape and research support – all were previously consulted on in the previous Green Paper. Overall, the sector has not been unreservedly supportive, but even with a small parliamentary majority, the bill is likely to become law, and so we need to learn how we can work as well as possible within this revised landscape.

Overall, the changes are to drive further the marketisation of higher education – no matter how we might suggest that HE does not operate as a fully open market, the government is wedded to the idea that increasing competition will drive up quality. Hence, the idea that new entrants  – “challenger” institutions will be able to provide competition to existing incumbents. Similarly, the teaching excellence framework is touted as providing more information to prospective students, hence helping them to make more informed decisions. There is, of course, little evidence that students make decisions purely on data, and for many students, there may not be a free choice of where they study, based on financial circumstances, and family or work commitments.

Nonetheless, we will have a TEF, and so it’s important to understand what will drive success in this, so that we can get the best possible outcome which reflects our performance. One piece of good news is that the government did listen to the sector in terms of timing of implementation, even if concerns about the metrics to be used fell upon stony ground.

From the technical consultation, we know that the following principles should underpin TEF:

• keep bureaucracy and burden to a minimum
• be voluntary, allowing providers to consider the benefits and costs of applying before deciding whether or not they wish to
• allow for diverse forms of excellence to be identified and recognised
• support rather than constrain creativity and innovation
• respect institutional autonomy
• be based on peer assessment
• be robust and transparent
• result in clear judgements about excellence for students, employers and other stakeholders
• avoid driving perverse or unintended behaviours in the pursuit of demonstrating excellence
• be sufficiently flexible to allow for further development as the TEF evolves.

From year 2 of TEF, institutions who choose to be assessed can be judged to meet one of three outcomes: Meets Expectations, Excellent or Outstanding. To get to this, we would be assessed on: teaching quality, learning environment, student outcomes and learning gain.

And the part we need to be mindful of is how this will be assessed.

Teaching quality will be based on questions 1- 9 of the National Student Survey (teaching and assessment and feedback). Learning environment will be judged on questions 10-12 of the NSS (academic support) and non-continuation data from HESA, while outcomes will be assessed by the results of DLHE.

This does look remarkably like a league table, and so institutions will work harder than ever to make sure that their NSS results and DLHE figures show outcomes in the best possible light.

In addition to the data, providers will provide a written submission of no more than 15 pages. This is where we will be able to provide more context to what we do – examples cited in the document discuss: use of student surveys, collecting and responding to module feedback, staff development activities, timeliness of feedback, use of employers on validation panels, levels of contact time and independent study.

This is going to be a lot to cover in 15 pages, so it will be key for institutions to have their policies really clearly defined in terms of how their various mechanisms work, and how they can be shown to improve student experience and outcomes.

Our recent work on changing module evaluation processes and observation of teaching, and our review of quality processes will put us in a good position to explain how we manage our academic delivery to provide the best experience for students. We will clearly need to focus more on some of our student survey scores, and get to the bottom of why we have such a wide variety of reported experiences.

Next steps for us will be:  how we review our student survey outcomes; how we deliver our new employability strategy; how we ensure that we use the information from module evaluations and teaching observations to optimise student success, and how we review the performances of all of our courses.

There will no doubt be an ongoing resistance to TEF – the metrics chosen are still not ideal, and when we move to looking at subject level analysis, then there will be concerns regarding reliability of data – but this is a system we are going to have to work with. It would make sense to make sure we are best prepared as we can be.

The first of the major University league tables, the Complete University Guide, is published today.

This table uses metrics  on ten measures: Student Satisfaction, Research Quality, Research Intensity, Entry Standards, Student: Staff Ratio; Spending on Academic Services; Spending on Student Facilities; Good Honours degrees achieved; Graduate Prospects and Completion.

From the CUG press release:

Dr Bernard Kingston, principal author of TheCompleteUniversityGuide.co.uk, said: “There is a considerable degree of stability at the upper end of the league table this year. While dramatic changes may be newsworthy, this stability indicates that the rankings are robust and credible for young people seeking a university place – our primary purpose.”
This year’s release sees TheCompleteUniversityGuide.co.uk publish a number of new rankings. Alongside new subject tables for Creative Writing, Forensic Science and Occupational Therapy, there is now a Creative and Performance Arts table, containing 14 institutions that do not feature in the Main Table.
Dr Kingston said: “We have simultaneously released a survey of universities’ relative success in resolving student complaints. This shows significant variations between universities and is an important source of information for prospective students who what to know that their complaints will be effectively resolved.” (See attached Press Release and Table).
“Last year’s Higher Education Green Paper, Higher education: teaching excellence, social mobility and student choice, stated that applicants need access to robust, timely and objective information, based on criteria that are straightforward and easily understood.

So the top ten are:

Not really any surprises there. Staffordshire falls 6 places to 109th.

What is always of more interest are the big movers, both up and down, and the identification through reading the individual subject tables to see why these changes have happened.

So this year’s big winners are:

• Manchester Met – up 16
• Harper Adams – up 14
• Buckingham – up 14
• Liverpool Hope – up 14
• Sunderland – up 14
• Falmouth – up 12
• Winchester – up 12
• Edge Hill – up 11
• Middlesex – up 11

At the other end we have

• Oxford Brookes – down 11
• St Mark and St John – down 12
• Brighton – down 14
• Queen Margaret – down 15
• Royal Agricultural University – down 17
• Arts University Bournemouth – down 19

The section on complaints and their resolution will be of interest to academic registrars. Over a 3 year period, the number of completion of procedure letters issued after exhausting internal complaints process per 1000 students is ranked. The ranking here does not follow any meaningful pattern – it might be assumed that students at one type of university are more likely to use a complaints procedure than others, or that part of the sector would be better at dealing with complaints but this is clearly not the case. Pleasingly, the figure quoted for Staffordshire is considerably better than for some. Whether this data is of any meaningful us to prospective students is debatable.

As revealed in legislation last year, the government has been keen to see the impact of subject studied, and where, on the earnings of graduates.. The initial research has now been carried out by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and looks at data that is more long term that the current DLHE data, and crucially considers student loan repayments and  tax returns.

Graduates from richer family backgrounds earn significantly more after graduation than their poorer counterparts, even after completing the same degrees from the same universities. This is one of many findings in new research published today which looks at the link between earnings and students’ background, degree subject and university attended

Having carried out the research, some of the the findings could be considered as underwhelming:

• students from wealthy backgrounds out-earn others, when studying the same subject at the same institution
• graduates in creative arts earn less than others.

Inevitably the reaction from some places has been to roll out the “more means worse” arguments, for instance here in the Daily Telegraph, where Fraser Nelson writes:

If a book is ever written about the mis-selling of higher education, it might start with such adverts. There’s no doubt that doctors and lawyers earn a bomb; no doubt that an Oxbridge degree opens many gilded doors. But studying urban dance at Peckham University or media studies at the University of Scunthorpe is another story entirely.

Yes, the average graduate premium may be generous. But today, all too many ropey institutions hide behind the word “university” – offering dismal courses that serve neither students nor society. And by the time the students realise that they’ve been sold a pup, it’s too late.

A more detailed reading of the paper would reveal that although there may be 23 institutions where the median salary for male graduates is lower than for non graduates (as shown in this almost indecipherable graph), the authors state:

At the other end of the spectrum, there were some institutions (23 for men and 9 for women) where the median graduate earnings were less than those of the median non  graduate ten years on. It is important to put this in some context though. Many English higher education institutions draw a signicant majority of their students from people living in their own region. Given regional differences in average wages, some very locally focused institutions may struggle to produce graduates whose wages outpace England-wide earnings, which include those living in London etc. To illustrate regional differences, employment rates in the period under consideration varied between66% in the North East and 75% in the East of England, and data from the Annual Survey of Hoursand Earnings suggests that average full-time earnings for males were approximately 48% higher
in London than in Northern Ireland, and around 34% higher for females. Regional differences are therefore important and we take them into account in our analysis of graduates’ earnings.

More interestingly though is how this data might be used in the future. In  this paper, the authors have not published results against all named institutions, although most of the Russell Group universities are named. In future, the intention would be to show this. One argument could be to use the data to allow differential fees, or to have differential RAB charges by subject or institution. Alternatively the information could be used to provide better student information and to challenge policies on social mobility. A recent article in the Times Higher looks at the different views from across the sector.

A clear message for us however might be to continue with our focus on developing students’ employability skills and being prepared to make sure that these skills which might currently be missing, are deeply embedded into courses or into extra-curricular activities. For instance, we can do more to develop numeracy and digital capability skills, by understanding exactly what it is that potential employers want to see in the graduates that they employ.

More challenging is around the issue of social capital. As a university that has at its heart a belief in education as a transformational activity, and a commitment to widening participation, we might do well to understand more how we can help our students develop social and cultural capital – without this they will always find t more difficult than those for whom university was an expected rite of passage. It’s very likely that for many students- especially those who are local or who commute in daily – that their sense of bonding capital is high. The corollary is that the level of bridging capital – that which they need to develop new networks – is lower than for students with different backgrounds. Identifying activities that will help our students develop this could be key. Some possible areas are placements, internships, and cross-disciplinary projects, where students have to work on real world problems but with student from other subjects, to pull them out of their comfort zone.

Over the next few weeks it will be instructive to see how politicians react to this new data, and from this for us to identify specifically what we should do to respond.

Last week HEFCE published their revised operating model for quality assessment. This is based on the responses from the sector consultation that took place last year, and where we, and many other universities, identified areas that were of concern to us. Some of these have been addressed. However, this is also part of the current sectoral land grab to have the responsibility for qualit; at the same time as publishing, HEFCE has put out to tender various aspects of its quality work.

Key points to note from the revised operating model:

• “future quality assessment arrangements should seek to encourage innovation in learning and teaching, rather than driving providers towards risk-averse activities and homogenised provision.”
• “approach for implementation is therefore designed to be proportionate, risk-based and grounded in the context of each individual provider and its students”
• a set of baseline regulatory requirements will still based on parts of the existing quality code and the framework fr higher education qualifications
• fore new entrants there will be a gateway process followed by a developmental period of enhanced scrutiny and support
• for established providers, a review of their own review processes, followed by a data-based Annual Provider Review and a revised periodic review visit

Some common areas of contention from responses from the sector were: comparability of standards; a potential national register of external examiners, and the roe of governing bodies.

A large section of the document covers comparability of standards, and classification algorithms used.The document states that when reviewing the original proposals:

Arguments mobilised against the proposals included:
• an opposition in principle to the funding bodies acting in an area where institutional autonomy is prized
• a view that there was no particular problem to be resolved, or that the specific proposals would not resolve whatever problems might exist
• a series of more practical concerns relating to increasing the burden on external examiners, thereby disincentivising the people on whom the successful operation of the system depends.

But that “student and PSRB respondents were much clearer that modernisation in this area was important, with some suggesting that the proposed reforms did not go far enough”

HEFCE have moved away from the proposal for a national register of external examiners, but talk instead of training of examiners to ensure that they are able to check comparability of standards – there is still a worry that good degree rates are rising and that these may not be defensible

The role of governors was an area that may universities had plenty to say about in the response to consultation, where it was felt that governing bodies may not be best placed to make direct judgements about academic quality. Again, HEFCE have clarified their expectation:

The role of the governing body would be to receive reports and challenge assurances from within the institution. It should not be drawn into quality management activities itself. We recognise the predominant role of senates and academic boards (or equivalent) in academic governance, and the responsibility of the accountable officer and senior executive team, and would expect an individual governing body to be clear about the formal relationships between the elements of the governance arrangements in its own institutional context.

There’s plenty more to digest. As always, WonkHe have a guide to how the new system will work, written by Louisa Darian.

What will be interesting now is the transitional arrangements and the pilots to be run during 2016-17.