Category Archives: League Tables

Guardian University Guide 2017

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The second big university league table of the year, the Guardian University Guide, was published today, one which the compilers say is the most student friendly,as it focuses on subject level scores in more detail, and measures things that are of importance to students. In other words, research is not a part of the table.

“The methodology focuses on subject-level league tables, ranking institutions that provide each subject area, according to their relevant statistics.

To ensure that all comparisons are as valid as possible, we ask each institution which of their students should be counted in which subject so that they will only be compared to students taking similar subjects at other universities.

Eight statistical measures are employed to approximate a university’s performance in teaching each subject. Measures relate to both input – for example, expenditure by the university on its students – and output – for example, the probability of a graduate finding a graduate-level job. The measures are knitted together to get a Guardian score, against which institutions are ranked.“

A lot of emphasis is given to student experience, through the outcomes of the National Student Survey, and entry grades are dealt with twice – firstly in the details of entry tariff, and secondly in the measure of “value added”, which is an assessment of good degrees, but related to the entry grades of individual students.

The top 4 places are unchanged – Cambridge, Oxford, St Andrews and Surrey. The entrant into the top 5 is Loughborough.

The big winners this year are: Manchester Met, Northumbria City, Bradford, Anglia Ruskin, Derby, Liverpool Hope, Sunderland.

While going down are:Liverpool John Moores, Queen Margaret, Brunel, Brighton, Cumbria ,Birmingham City.

Staffordshire University have pleasingly gone up 14 places to 69th.

guardian2017

 

 

 

 

 

League Tables – WhatUni Guide

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Before the heavy hitting university league tables are produced, we get the results of some others.

First is the Whatuni.com guide, which is produced based on student views.

The to 10 this year were:

  1. Harper Adams University
  2. Loughborough University
  3. Swansea University
  4. Bangor University
  5. University of Leeds
  6. University of Exeter
  7. Nottingham Trent University
  8. University of South Wales
  9. St Mary’s University, Twickenham
  10.  Leeds College of Art

So clearly not the same as one of the “normal” league tables.

Staffordshire has risen from 96th in 2015 to 76th in 2016, so it’s pleasing to see a better response from our students.

 

Presentation to Academic Group Leaders

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We regularly hold a forum at Staffordshire University for our Academic Group Leaders – these are the senior academic staff who are responsible for line managing and leading groups of academic colleagues.

This week I led the forum, with a presentation on league tables and on some of the implications of the recent Green Paper “Fulfilling our Potential. Teaching Excellence, Social Mobility and Student Choice“.

The slides can be viewed here at Slideshare

 

Politics and the TEF

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Prior to the general election, I wrote a blog post reviewing the various parties’ views on HE. Following the conservative majority I wrote another piece which concluded with “What is still not clear is how universities might be regulated, how quality mechanisms will operate in future, and how the regulatory and quality regime will be changed to encompass the more diverse range of providers”

Following the various party conferences we now enter a period when we await, with bated breath, the green paper on higher education. For an insight into the Conservative conference, then I recommend “Welcome to the Northern Powerhouse of Cards” by Martin McQuillan of Kingston University

There’s little point in looking at the other parties right now – there is not likely to be an election till 2020, and Labour haven’t identified their position on fees, let alone how they will carry out the role of opposition to the green paper.

The Conservatives are in an interesting situation. Cameron as leader, who has acted as a CEO has already indicated his intention to step down. Hence for everyone else it “eyes on the prize”. As deputy CEO, Osborne has been calling the shots on HE policy, since the Treasury is dictating policy more clearly than any other department. May is setting out her stall, and showing clear opposition to overseas students which will win her no friends in universities. Boris is harrumphing around the margins, and looking more widely Hunt is exerting everyone to work harder.Meanwhile, Javid is happy to drive through large cuts at BIS, and we can expect that many of the organisations that currently work in the HE sector may cease to exist.

It’s into this environment, with his boss supporting 40% cuts to BIS, that Johnson will need to produce  a green paper and ultimately drive legislation through parliament

All of a sudden,this looks threatening to HEFCE. The HEFCE consultation on QA is in tune with government and seems to promote a move to a deregulatory ideology and imply the demise of QAA. More recently though, with questions being asked about whether the remaining amounts of funding could be administered from elsewhere, and the need for a body to run TEF, then HEFCE themselves look more vulnerable.

The Teaching Excellence Framework will clearly be a big part of the green paper. It was a commitment from Osborne (that Treasury driver again) and is detailed in the government’s productivity plan “Fixing the foundations:Creating a more prosperous nation”

Excellence in teaching
4.7 The government will introduce a new Teaching Excellence Framework to sharpen incentives for institutions to provide excellent teaching, as currently exist for research. This will improve the value for money and return on investment for both students and the government, and will contribute to aligning graduate skills and expectations with the needs of employers. The government will consult later this year on how a Teaching Excellence Framework can be developed, including outcome-focussed criteria and metrics. The Teaching Excellence Framework will inform student decision-making, continue to support a high average wage premium for graduates and ensure that students’ hard-won qualifications keep their value over time.
4.8 To support teaching excellence, the government will allow institutions offering high quality teaching to increase their tuition fees in line with inflation from 2017-18, and will consult on the mechanisms to do this. This will reward excellent institutions with higher fee income, while ensuring students get good value from the tuition loans that the government underwrites.

Johnson now needs to steer this through parliament, at the same time as BIS is facing large cuts, and he needs to produce something that will work, both as a fix in the short term, and as a longer term evaluation of teaching.

To be able to have variable fees from 2017-18 will mean measures in place during the current academic year. Inevitably this will be based on existing measures – NSS, Hesa returns, DLHE initially.

Longer term though, then a new set of measures will come in which will provide challenges to the sector, and to individual institutions. From the Times Higher Johnson has made it clear how he would like the metrics to be set up:

Widening participation and access will be intimately linked to the TEF. One of the core metrics we envisage using in the TEF will be the progress and the value add [for] students from disadvantaged backgrounds, measuring it for example in terms of their retention and completion rates. And their [universities’] success in moving students on to either further study or graduate work.

On having an impact on further marketisation, then Johnson says:

the system should “not only have the capacity for more rapid market entry, but we [should] have the capacity for more rapid market share shifts between universities than we have hitherto seen in the sector”.

and  that

he wanted a system where “market share can shift towards where teaching quality really resides. Our teaching excellence framework will be an important signal to students of where quality resides, discipline by discipline, institution by institution.”

He’s asking an awful lot from a set of metrics that are not yet defined, and that will have numerous questions raised by many in the sector.

In the meantime, what can individuals and institutions do?

Firstly there is the opportunity to respond to the government’s inquiry into assessing the quality of HE, which asks specific questions such as:

  • .What should be the objectives of a Teaching Excellence Framework (‘TEF’)?
  • What are the institutional behaviours a TEF should drive? How can a system be designed to avoid unintended consequences?
  • What should be the relationship between the TEF and fee level?

Secondly we can  start looking at the various measures of value added or learning gain for different groups of students. HEFCE are already supporting a range of projects involving over 70 institutions to look at learning gain.

One of the unintended consequences that TEF might bring about is a gaming of the system. I’m not suggesting that data returns that feed into league tables are inaccurate, but one part of a successful league table result is a set of carefully constructed data returns. It’s equally likely that it will be possible to do something similar with any TEF submission, so all institutions will learn very quickly how to report data in the best possible way

Finally, recognising that TEF will be used to drive rapid shifts in market share (a euphemism?) then we will all need to get very good, not only at supporting the widest range of students, but also at understanding how the metrics apply to us, and how we can build internal systems to replicate them.

 

 

 

Good University Guide 2016

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The final big league of the year was published today – the Good University Guide, which comes from the Sunday Times.

Details of methodology and subject tables are available on the Sunday Times website, behind a paywall, so won’t be discussed here, however this iteration of this guide does use the results of REF2014, and unlike the other major guides published this year uses the NSS data published last month.

Big winners this year are Harper Adams, Bath Spa, Manchester Met while biggest drops are from Arts Bournemouth, Chester, Arts London, Cardiff Met, BCU, Cumbria.

The great news for Staffordshire is that we have risen a further 6 places, which means a rise in all the league tables this year.

Our individual data shows:

Performance Measure Score Rank
Teaching Quality 81.80% 49=
Student Experience 82.80% 80=
Research Quality 16.50% 55
UCAS Entry Points 274 118
Graduate Prospects 58.40% 111
Firsts and 2(i)s 63.20% 98=
Completion Rate 78.40% 115
Student-Staff Ratio 16.8:1 59=
Services/Facilties Spend £1,620 81

Notable results for us then are our ranking in research – although we submitted a relatively small number of academics, the editorial in the paper does comment on our increased size and scope of research, noting our best results were in Sport and Exercise and with psychology scoring high for external impact.

The impact of our teaching quality score is pleasing,and if we can improve this together with the overall student experience score, we will see further improvements in this guide next year.

The new work we are doing this year to enhance student employability together with our Roadmap for Raising Attainment, both of which will be reflected in the new Learning and Teaching Strategy, will lead to further improvements in good degrees and graduate prospects.

As alluded to earlier, the tables are behind a paywall, but parts can be constructed from the press releases from the Sunday Times as below:

Name Ranking 2016 Ranking 2015 2015 National student survey Teaching excellence 2015 National student survey Student experience Graduate prospects Completion rate
(%) (%) (% in professional jobs or graduate-level study) (%)
Cambridge 1 1= 83.8 86.3 89.3 98.4
Oxford 2 1= 83.1 86.8 87.1 96.3
Imperial College 3 4 79.8 87.8 91.1 96.5
St Andrews 4 3 83.2 86.8 83.3 95.3
Durham 5 6 81.9 86.7 84.4 96.6
Warwick 6 8 79.6 85 79.8 96.7
Exeter 7 7 82.6 87.7 79.8 95.7
Surrey 8 11 86.9 90.3 78.8 92.2
LSE 9 5 72.1 78.4 78.5 94.8
University College London 10 9 74.2 81.3 83.1 94.6
Lancaster 11 12 82.3 85.4 82.5 93.5
Bath 12 10 82.7 87 85.2 96.1
Loughborough 13 13 84.5 89.3 83.7 93.2
Leeds 14 17 83.7 88 78.4 93.5
York 15 16 81.7 86.6 76 94.3
Southampton 16 18 79.3 86.5 78.1 92.5
Birmingham 17 15 80.8 84.2 86.7 94.8
East Anglia 18 14 83.2 88.8 70.3 91.9
Sussex 19 25 78.6 85 84.1 92.9
Bristol 20 19 75.5 81.5 79.6 96.6
Sheffield 21 21 81.3 87.2 75.7 94.4
Edinburgh 22 22= 74.5 82.4 78.6 91.3
Newcastle 23= 22= 82 88.4 79.1 95.1
Kent 23= 30 81.5 85.4 76.7 90.7
Nottingham 25 22= 79.5 83.9 81.3 93.2
Glasgow 26 26 80 86.9 79.3 88.4
King’s College London 27 29 73.9 79.7 85.7 92.8
Leicester 28= 20 77.5 84.4 72.1 92.5
Manchester 28= 28 79 84.7 78.5 92.9
Aston 30 34 83.3 87.9 78.8 90.9
Reading 32 33 80.5 85.8 70.3 92.3
Cardiff 33 27 80.7 86 80.1 93.4
Queen Mary 34 37 80.5 83.3 73.3 91.2
Essex 35 32 83.7 88 64.1 85.6
Royal Holloway 36 34 82.6 84.1 62.7 92.3
Dundee 37 45 84.4 87.1 80 86
Liverpool 38= 36 77.9 83.4 76.1 91.3
Heriot-Watt 38= 41 80.8 84.2 78.1 87.4
Buckingham 38= 48 88 88.4 83.4 86.3
City 41= 46 82.7 85.6 78.9 86
Swansea 41= 43 82.6 86.5 81.4 89.7
Keele 43 40 87 90.2 76.1 90.8
Soas 44 31 75.2 80.8 68.3 80.7
Aberdeen 45 44 77.4 83.7 76.2 84.1
Strathclyde 46 39 76.2 85.6 72 87.6
Coventry 47 42 87.6 89.3 74.2 85.8
St George’s 48 – 78.7 81.6 93.4 92.7
Harper Adams 49 63 82.6 89.3 73.3 90.6
Stirling 50 53 78.7 82.3 73.3 85.7
Royal Agricultural 51 – 79.3 85.6 69.7 96.3
Bangor 52 50 85.8 87.8 67.7 81.8
De Montfort 53 54 82.4 84.6 76.9 86.5
Nottingham Trent 54 52 83.6 85.8 67.6 89.6
Oxford Brookes 55 49 83.2 85.7 69.2 89.4
Falmouth 56 51 83.7 83.5 74.5 85.4
Bath Spa 58 70 85.8 85.8 55.1 89.9
Portsmouth 59 57 83.4 85.9 66.9 87.6
Brunel 60 47 78.2 83.8 63.4 87.7
Norwich Arts 61 – 83.8 83.5 63.4 88.7
Lincoln 62= 60 81.1 84.6 70.7 87.6
Creative Arts 62= 74 82.7 81.5 52 85.8
Northumbria 64= 66 82.9 85.1 66.3 87.6
Winchester 64= 61 84.2 85 60.7 85.2
Goldsmiths 66 55 76.6 76.3 56 82.4
Hull 67 58 80 83.8 66.7 86
Edge Hill 68 72 83.2 83.5 63.8 86.2
Huddersfield 69= 77= 82.2 84 74.1 83
Robert Gordon 69= 64 80.6 83.5 83.1 83.4
Chichester 69= 65 84 85.3 57.5 89.9
Sheffield Hallam 72 62 80.9 83.9 64.7 86.9
West of England 73 68 80 82.5 70.8 84.9
Liverpool John Moores 74 71 81.6 85 63.3 84.2
Bradford 75 76 78.8 84.4 75.2 83.8
Hertfordshire 76 79 78.6 82.8 75.3 86
Manchester Metropolitan 77 89 81 82.2 63 84.4
Roehampton 78 73 78 79.9 60.9 81.7
Liverpool Hope 79= – 86.8 86.4 53.9 82.8
Aberystwyth 79= 93 78.4 80.4 62.5 89.3
Arts Bournemouth 81 59 81.4 80 61.4 92.3
Northampton 82= 56 82.3 84.1 60.7 85
Bournemouth 82= 88 75.2 78.8 66.4 86
Derby 84 81 84.4 85.3 60 83.7
Middlesex 85= 75 78.7 81.8 64.9 77.8
Plymouth 85= 80 82.3 84.1 60.2 84.8
Chester 87 67 82.7 83.7 63.6 80.5
Gloucestershire 88 83 79.8 82.6 55.7 86.3
York St John 89 87 82.4 83 65.3 90.4
Brighton 90 82 78.6 80.9 66.9 86.9
Leeds Trinity 91 91 83.5 82.3 65.8 81.7
Central Lancashire 92 77= 80.4 83.5 62.4 81.6
Edinburgh Napier 93 97 80.2 83.7 69.1 81.2
Glasgow Caledonian 94 84 77 82.5 70.2 83.2
Staffordshire 95 101 81.8 82.8 58.4 78.4
Queen Margaret, Edinburgh 96 86 78.9 82.3 59.6 82.4
Abertay 97 106 80 83.1 65.6 75.5
Salford 98 105 80.1 80.9 59.5 79.5
Arts London 99 85 75.9 74.5 59.2 85.5
St Mary’s, Twickenham 100= 100 80.5 84.5 66.7 83.7
Worcester 100= 107 81.4 84.5 63.9 85.8
Teesside 102 94 82.9 84.3 59.8 80.8
Cardiff Metropolitan 103 90 79.1 81.8 59.8 82.2
Sunderland 104 99 82.5 84.2 62.3 81.4
Birmingham City 105 91 78 79.3 64.8 84.4
Greenwich 106 98 79.2 82.4 58.2 84.7
Canterbury Christ Church 107 96 80.7 81.9 57.8 82.3
Anglia Ruskin 108 110 82.5 83.9 65 79.3
Buckinghamshire New 109 116 81.5 81.1 57.6 82.5
Bedfordshire 110 108 80.4 82.7 58.3 80.1
Kingston 111 117 76.1 79.9 60.7 82.2
Bishop Grosseteste 112= 102 80.9 80.6 69.1 90
South Wales 112= 114 77.5 78.3 59 81.7
Leeds Beckett 114 111 78.5 82.7 58.5 78.8
Westminster 115= 112 72.9 80.6 55.1 80.4
Southampton Solent 115= 115 79.5 82.1 54.6 76.8
Newman 115= 104 83.1 84.6 54.6 73.3
West of Scotland 118 118 81.8 81.8 65.7 70
Cumbria 119 95 76.9 77.6 64.9 85.7
London South Bank 120 122 77 81.3 67.9 74.6
West London 121 109 76.9 77.5 60.5 73.9
Glynd?r 122 113 80.5 79.3 66.3 75.8
Bolton 123= 120 81.6 80.8 60.1 71.2
St Mark & St John, Plymouth 123= 102= 76.3 77.3 60.4 82.6
London Met 125 123 76 78.6 47.7 75.3
Highlands and Islands 126 121 78.8 76.5 56 68.6
East London 127 119 75 78.5 45.6 67.5

Guardian University Guide 2016

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The latest Guardian University Guide has just come out.. This is the league table that doesn’t have any reference to research impact or intensity in its metrics, and so is the one used by universities who focus on being teaching led institutions.

A lot of emphasis is given to student experience, through the outcomes of the National Student Survey, and entry grades are dealt with twice – firstly in the details of entry tariff, and secondly in the measure of “value added”, which is an assessment of good degrees, but related to the entry grades of individual students. It’s notable that in previous years, Oxford had the highest value added score, so it is more a measure of good degrees than an assessment of supporting widening participation.

The headlines from this year’s guide are:

Cambridge remains in the top spot, with Oxford second

Coventry rises to 15th, placing it above some Russell Group universities, and making it teh highest placed post 92 university. How do they do it?

John Latham, vice-chancellor of Coventry University, says the university’s success is down to its focus on students’ needs. “We’re a modern university, but not just in the sense that we haven’t been around for as long – we’re very modern in our approach. We’re challenging the system. We’re bringing in new forms of pedagogy and listening to students.”

The university has three objectives: “teaching students well, making sure that students are listened to, and making sure they get good jobs at the end of their course,” says Ian Dunn, deputy vice-chancellor for student experience at Coventry.

Other big winners – Hull go up 21 places, Liverpool John Moores 22 places, De Montfort 20 places, Roehampton 22 places, Leeds Trinity 27 places, Sussex 24 places, Falmouth 22 places.

Going the other way – Northampton drop 17 places, Derby 23 places, UWE 30 places, UCLAN 18 places, Plymouth 19 places, Glyndwr 39 places.

Staffordshire University rise 7 places to 83rd – a third year of steady rises through the table, with better SSR results, improved value added and satisfaction with teaching.

guardian14-16

 

What Uni Guide

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As we move deeper into league table season, then the next set of information to come out is the result of the WhatUni.com Student Choice Awards.

This is not based on the range of metrics that the main league tables use, rather it is based more on opinions of students. It will be interesting later in the year to compare the views expressed where, with those that come out of the National Student Survey.

The top 10 universities this year are:

position Position last year University
12 3 Loughborough
2 7 Harper Adams
3 1 Swansea
4  n/a New College of the Humanities
5 8 Falmouth
6 10 Surrey
7 15 Bangor
8 6 Bath
9 12 UEA
10 17 Glasgow

Staffordshire remain in the same 96th place as last year

Looking at the different categories for SU:

Category This year Last year Top uni
Job prospects 107th 71st Nottingham
Course and lecturers 53rd 90th New Coll of Humanities
Student Union 60th 52nd Loughborough
Accommodation 81st 61st Loughborough
Uni facilties 69th 84th Surrey
City life 104th 70th Bristol
Clubs and societies 78th 59th Bangor
Student support 79th n/a Harper Adams

 

So some good news for us here in “Course and Lecturers” and in “University Facilities”.

 

Times Higher Student Experience Survey 2015

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This year’s THE Student Experience Survey has been published, with few surprises among the top performers.

Despite several new entries into the top 10 this year, both the University of Cambridge (fourth place) and the University of Oxford (fifth) retain their high positions, as do the University of Exeter (eighth, down from seventh) and the University of Leeds (unchanged at ninth). “This year’s results reinforce how much can be achieved by those universities most committed to improving the student experience,” says James MacGregor, director of YouthSight, which provides the data for THE’s Student Experience Survey. “The relative stability of rankings between years highlights the remarkable gains made by a few.”

Bath University come out top and the reasons provided by their VC include:

  • nurturing environment for excellent enterprising minds
  • Student liaison groups in each department
  • a strong relationship with the students’ union
  • spending more than £1 million a week on improving the infrastructure over the past year

As last year, I still think that the results should be taken with a pinch of salt, based on the relatively small sample size of students For instance for this university, the results are based on responses from 116 students, recruited through UCAS. So, a small sample, and one that does not represent the fuller and wider student population.

However Staffordshire University’s position has moved as follows:

year position
2015 88
2014 97
2013 60

So a gradual improvement, and looking at all of the various factors, we can see an improved score in all but three of the areas:

  • Good environment on campus/around university
  • Good security
  • Good library and library opening hours

The ongoing campus investment, and the recently revised library hours will hopefully improve student satisfaction in these areas, and we will see the benefit in the forthcoming NSS results

“Good” Degrees

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We all know that gaining a good degree is important, perhaps more so now than ever. The increasingly consumerist approach by students might be enshrined in “what do I need to do to get a 2(i)?”, but in many cases this is also accompanied by a commitment to work that was perhaps less of a focus when I first studied. That might be also be attributable to the changing perceptions that students have of their higher education – seeing it as a transaction in which they engage to gain clearly defined outcomes, rather than the wider exploration that HE might have been considered to have been in some non-existent golden era.

A good degree is understood to be a benefit to the individual – it’s likely to help open doors in getting that first graduate job. It’s also beneficial for institutions for their students to be successful in this way: all university league tables include “good degrees” or some variant thereof in their analysis, and so the university that awards high numbers of good degrees can expect to reap the rewards in league table position. Of course there is also virtuous circle effect here – universities that are at the top of the tables may be the most selective, and able to recruit the students with the highest entry tariff scores in the anticipation that they will thrive. Other institutions will argue that they provide a greater amount of value added to students with lower entry grades.

In January, HESA published its first data release, which showed the range of degree classifications as follows:

071277_student_sfr210_1314_chart_9

72% of first degrees undertaken through full-time study in 2013/14 achieved first or upper second classifications compared to 54% of those undertaken through part-time study.

Now that more detailed data has become available through Hedi, then we can look to see how the different institutions perform on this measure – and whose outputs have changed significantly.

So here are the top 10 universities for awarding good degrees in 2013-14:

Institution 2013 % 1sts and 2(1)s 2014 % 1sts and 2(1)s difference
The University of Oxford 92% 92% 0%
Conservatoire for Dance and Drama 91% 91% 0%
Guildhall School of Music and Drama 87% 91% 4%
Central School of Speech and Drama 88% 88% 0%
The University of St Andrews 88% 88% 0%
The University of Cambridge 87% 88% 1%
University College London 87% 88% 1%
Royal Academy of Music 77% 88% 11%
Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine 88% 87% -1%
University of Durham 85% 87% 2%

And at the other end of the results….

Institution 2013 % 1sts and 2(1)s 2014 % 1sts and 2(1)s difference
London Metropolitan University 51% 55% 4%
University of Bedfordshire 48% 55% 7%
The University of East London 54% 54% 0%
Glynd?r University 54% 54% 0%
University College Birmingham 46% 54% 8%
University Campus Suffolk 56% 53% -3%
University of Wales Trinity Saint David 49% 51% 2%
SRUC 44% 51% 7%
The University of Buckingham 43% 51% 8%
The University of Sunderland 54% 50% -4%

For those of us who have an interest in league tables, then the interesting thing to look at will be those universities which have seen significant changes in the percentages of good degrees that they award. Hence we might look to see some league table gains (ceteris paribus) for the following:

Institution 2013 % 1sts and 2(1)s 2014 % 1sts and 2(1)s difference
Leeds Trinity University 56% 69% 13%
Royal Agricultural University 51% 63% 12%
Royal Academy of Music 77% 88% 11%
Bournemouth University 65% 76% 11%
Glasgow School of Art 59% 69% 10%
The University of Wolverhampton 50% 59% 9%

noting that Wolverhampton doesn’t engage in league tables.

The biggest drops are for:

Institution 2013 % 1sts and 2(1)s 2014 % 1sts and 2(1)s difference
University Campus Suffolk 56% 53% -3%
Writtle College 52% 49% -3%
Heythrop College 83% 79% -4%
Royal Conservatoire of Scotland 79% 75% -4%
The University of Sunderland 54% 50% -4%
The Royal Veterinary College 75% 66% -9%
University of the Highlands and Islands 71% 58% -13%

As well as looking at the percentages of good degrees, with a little bit of Heidi magic we can look to see how various student characteristics have an impact on outcomes. A particular interest of mine is attainment of students from a BME background, and in considering how any attainment gap can be reduced. This will form the subject of a later post.

Yet More League Tables?

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As if analysing and reporting on the main UK league tables (Complete University Guide, Guardian Guide and Times/Sunday Times Good University Guide) wasn’t enough, then there are plenty of other to keep policy wonks busy in the winter months.

First out this month is the People and Planet University League. This is most notable this year for two things: firstly the methodology and level of detail have changed from last year, and secondly, the refusal of a large numbers of universities to take part.

As reported in the Guardian

A number of universities seem to have become frustrated over time with the “green league”, which has also this year been renamed to remove the word “green” from the title. Concerns centred on the time involved in collating the information required, some criticisms of aspects of People & Planet’s methodology, and perceived goal-post changing.

Our own position appears to have fallen this year, no doubt in part to the changes in methodology and the kinds of data requested. The diagram below shows the relative rankings of million+ universities

greenleague 2014

The second ranking that is about to come out will be launched in February. Spiked Online, a website that promotes free speech, and also supports a campaign against the “no platform” policies of Students’ Unions, is launching the Free Speech University Rankings.

Before the Charlie Hebdo tragedy, #JeSuisCharlie and the inevitable post-Hebdo backslide into the illiberal status quo, free speech was already a flashpoint issue in UK universities. A combination of a creeping, risk-averse bureaucracy at the heart of university administrations and an openly censorious culture in students’ unions devastated freedom on campus. It undermined the traditional role of the academy as a space in which students and academics could think the unthinkable and say the unsayable…….In February, spiked is launching the Free Speech University Rankings (FSUR), the UK’s first ranking of universities according to their commitment to freedom of speech. Researched and developed in partnership with students across Britain, it’s a nationwide study that will provide students and academics with the weight of evidence they so badly need to take their censorious institutions to task

In light of the discussions taking pace across universities on the approach we should take to free speech on campus, then this looks like an interesting addition to the debate. At a time when individual staff feel that certain topics may be considered “unsafe” to discuss, and when the proposed new powers in the Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill put a duty on specified public authorities, including universities, to “have due regard, in the exercise of its functions, to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism”, then a robust understanding of freedom of speech and expression becomes central to the role of a university.