As in previous years, the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement has provided a clear steer for the future of HE. For those who don’t see HE as being driven by the Treasury view, then look no further to the announcement in 2013 on the scrapping of Student Number Controls.

This year the headlines for HE are:

International students: numbers to grow;dependants of postgraduates on courses lasting more than a year will be welcome to come and work.

Widening participation: work with the Director of Fair Access to ensure universities take more responsibility for widening access, including collaborating on outreach to reduce inequality in admissions

Postgraduate support: lift the age cap on new loans to postgraduates from 2016-17 so they are available to all those under 60.

Part time support: introduce new part-time maintenance loans from 2018-19 to support the cost of living while studying.

ELQs: For all STEM subjects, tuition loans will be extended to students wishing to do a second degree from 2017-18

Widening the range of providers: £20 million competition to set up a new Institute of Coding; create a new university in Hereford focused on engineering in 2016; help to fund the £100 million development of a new campus in Battersea for the Royal College of Art.

Research: protecting today’s £4.7 billion science resource funding in real terms; long term science capital commitment of £6.9 billion between 2015-2021 to support the UK’s world-class research base; introduce a new body – Research UK – which will work across the seven Research Councils, review of the Research Excellence Framework

For detailed analysis of the figures, and in particular the implications for the changes to student loans , then read Andrew McGettigan over on Wonkhe.

So – area of concerns: two leap out straight away, firstly, there is the change to support for students in nursing and midwifery from the 2017 intake, who will now access loans in the same way as other student. This may have an impact on attractiveness of such courses, although in other areas the change to funding did not, overall, lead to a decline in applicants.

The second area of concern is around the student opportunity fund. The focus on social mobility is strongly articulated in the recent Green Paper, and the opportunity for funding for part time students and those wishing to study WLQs can be seen as part of the same narrative. A worry for a while has been that the Student Opportunity Fund within the  BIS HE budget was an easy target   The fund in itself is safe for now but:

The government will work with the Director of Fair Access to ensure universities take more responsibility for widening access and social mobility, and ask the Higher Education Funding Council for England to retarget and reduce the student opportunity fund, focusing funding on institutions with the most effective outcomes

And again, this could be seen as part of the continuum with the Green Paper, where some of the proposal for the higher levels of Teaching Excellence Framework will reward those institutions who perform well on this agenda.

Those universities that receive significant amounts of SOF will be looking hard at their income and the possible related outputs – here I’ve drawn together the 15-16 funding allocations, with data from league tables on entry tariff, good degrees, and degree completion. More detailed analysis will be needed to consider how to measure part time students, but a few hours playing with Heidi data might reveal how individual institutions are performing

As I’ve written before when looking at TEF, this is another example of a great opportunity for institutions to get clever about how they can use data to measure their performance, not just for the sake of creating a set of metrics, but as a way of measuring the efficacy of interventions, and using this to provide better evidence-based decision making.

There are some opportunities in this autumn statement for us as well – for example the more welcoming statement about  international students, although this still conflicts with the broader negative views around immigration, and for us would rely on assuming that students in our target market have dependents.

Availability of loans for postgraduate study is to be welcomed, increasingly higher level qualification will be needed for certain routes into employment, or as ongoing staff development.

The changes to availability of loans for part time study should also be welcomed, as indeed should the opportunity of funding for ELQs in STEM subjects.

Overall – it could have been a lot worse for HE – the BIS budget wasn’t cut as much as predicted, but with the Green Paper currently out for consultation, we probably have enough on our plates to be going on with!

Not the chant at a football ground, but a question we could be asking of ourselves – how well do we know our students?

At an institutional level, or indeed course level we can do two  things. Firstly we could carry out market segmentation that might tell us so much – games designers like to play computer games in their free time for instance. Secondly we can realise benefits through a data-centric approach to supporting teaching. If we can identify for instance, that for a given module, more than 50% of the students taking it entered university with BTEC qualifications, then maybe there are some conclusions for the lecturer to draw in terns of how to deliver and in particular how to assess. As we move into the era of TEF, then this ability to use data to measure outcomes might be come ever more important, with the comments made recently by Jo Johnson on the differential performance of students from WP or BME backgrounds

In terms of having a holistic view of who we teach, are there some generalities we can consider to give a holistic view, and will this help us to understand some of the current trends in higher education?

The dominant narrative in HE is always about 18-21 year-olds who are studying full time. These are the students who, for most institutions, generate most of the income, and also provide the outcomes that are subsequently used in league tables and are most likely to be used in the Teaching Excellence Framework. While recognising the importance of other groups of students, this article focuses on this grouping, since their behaviours tend to dominate policy.

Firstly we can think of how this generation of students can be defined in terms of their attitudes to technology. Born in 1997, they have never used a computer that was not controlled with a mouse or a touch interface. They have been used to having a mobile device all their lives, and a tablet computer for the last 5. So through senior school and public exams, they have been used to having easy access to the web. They can’t even envisage a time when the web wasn’t ubiquitous. They operate in a  world defined by online social media networks and physical storage is a strange concept. Clearly for us to be able to work with these students, we need to have our own high levels of digital capability, and this is a topic I will be returning to in coming weeks.

As well as understanding the technology expectations that these students bring to university, we can also look at some of their motivations. Focusing on young full time undergraduates, then they are what was termed in today’s Observer as  Generation K, or Katniss. (You may need to have teenaged children to understand this reference.)

…the economist and academic Noreena Hertz, who coined the term Generation K (after Katniss) for those born between 1995 and 2002, says that this is a generation riddled with anxiety, distrustful of traditional institutions from government to marriage, and, “like their heroine Katniss Everdeen, [imbued with] a strong sense of what is right and fair”

This generation worry about getting a job and this is understandable after major economic downturn, but the impact it might be having on these students’ attitude to higher education education is that they perceive HE as a means to getting a job. Although this is understandable, within the academy we still have a responsibility to show that higher education is more than that.

Writing in the same newspaper, WiIll Hutton, author of “The State We’re In” and now Master of Hertford College, Oxford, tackles the issues of the freedom to argue and the freedom to be challenged within universities. Hutton is primarily concerned with the retreat of liberalism and the diminution in importance of the idea of a public realm:

This disdain for notions of publicness has created a vacuum occupied by the rise of a libertarian individualism that indulges belief over reason. Non-falsifiable belief systems used only to be the hallmark of ideological communism or religious zealotry. Now, ideas, especially on the right but also to a degree on the left are less and less tested in a public realm by debate, with evidence marshalled to justify them. Instead, they are asserted as valid because the holder believesthem.

This new individualism, alongside the decline of the public, has provoked a mounting tide of, at best, siloed thinking, impervious to criticism, and, at worst, the indulgence of rank prejudice. Thus, on the right, if I feel that Britain is being swamped by immigrants, climate change is bogus, maleness is being overwhelmed by “femininazi” women or the welfare system is transfixed by cheating, then, whatever the facts, my feeling is valid because I hold it. That suffices without proof or evidence. In any case, there will always be some article in a rightwing paper to justify it.

Again, this individualism can be expressed by students – being risk-averse and not willing to be challenged or taken out of their comfort zones leads to behaviours that create “safe spaces” on campus, where we can no longer  hear certain views in case others are offended. In the same way, we might have a group of students who don’t want to be challenged too much in their learning, seeing a degree as a commercial transaction, rather than a transformational experience, the benefits of which may only be realised many years after completion. We ask students every year in the National Student Survey whether they felt their course was intellectually stimulating. We want our students to engage with their discipline, not as passive recipients, but as active scholars providing contribution and challenge. To do this though, we will need to remind ourselves of the tendency to be risk-averse, to want to be treated as a consumer and to be challenged just enough – but not so much it becomes too hard. We would do well to remember that as well as being stimulating, courses are supposed to challenge, be intellectually difficult  and to provide arguments that question individual beliefs.

Finally, this generation of students perceive themselves to be consumers. As argued in her book “Consuming Higher Education”, Joanna Williams of University of Kent argues that this attitude to consumption doesn’t come about just because of the introduction of tuition fees. Instead, Williams argues that we have a generation who have been led into this interpretation of what higher education is about, in part by the behaviours of universities:

“Rather than universities challenging the idea that a degree is an entitlement, institutions instead strengthen this notion. The provision of quantifiable information on contact hours assessment patterns and employment prospects suggests students are correct to to perceive of a degree as a product.”

Individual institutions can’t turn around and say we are having no part of this agenda as we are obliged to publish this information and no doubt will provide more in future. What we can do is explain better what the quantifiable data actually means, and more importantly, what it does not mean.

As we all write our responses to consultations on quality assurance, on the teaching excellence framework, and as we redevelop our own strategy documents in the light of a forthcoming Green Paper, we need to remind ourselves that universities do exist as more than degree factories that are there to produce “satisfied” customers. Understanding more about the backgrounds of our students and recognising the reasons for their consumerist behaviours may help us in the long term to be able to better articulate what the wider benefits of HE are, and the role of universities in liberal society.

Higher Education is currently entering a maelstrom of change – we are waiting with bated breath the publication of the Green Paper, and as suggested previously in this blog much of what is possibly going to change is intensley political and driven much by the treasury. More early hints appeared on the ConservativeHome website this week:

Johnson’s proposals begin with the student experience. Some University teaching is excellent; too much is “execrable”, to borrow a word sometimes used in the department. To help raise the standard, he wants Universities to be rewarded for better teaching. The metrics used will include lower drop-out rates, good graduate outcomes for disadvantaged students, and an improved national student survey. His friends claim that evidence shows students value better teaching above lower fees: there is an reflection here of Nick Hillman’s finding, over at the Higher Education Policy Institute, that they are “less motivated by student issues, like tuition fees, than has often been supposed”.

and as we know there will be changes to QA processes:

If the new inspection body is to be the stick, there will also be a carrot. As George Osborne announced in the Budget, Universities that teach better will be allowed to raise fees in line with inflation from next year. Permitting further rises later has not been ruled out. There will be no shortage of objections to all this. Some Universities don’t want to be challenged by new entrants. There will be questions of detail, such as whether the metrics will work. There will be those of principle, such as whether it is really government’s business to tell the Universities how to conduct theirs.

More locally, we have our own disruption, reflecting on ” Smarter Futures”, and looking at the kind of university we want to be in the future as we enter a period of strategic planning. As part of that we are embarking on updating the  Academic Strategy for the university. So far, this has been discussed in various management groups and committees and is about to be available for wider consultation.

The rest of this blog piece will focus on the changes to the learning and teaching section of that strategy. Smarter Futures asks us on: recruitment and retention: challenging and supporting our students; and finally making sure they can achieve and become employable.

Writing a distinctive strategy is never easy – the aims of all universities to an extent can tend to be the same, as has been reported in a blog article on the Times Higher website this week – where it is suggested that a lack of boldness leads to all strategies looking like a whiter shade of pale.

I know that in writing this, we were urged to make sure we strived for excellence.  At the risk of this becoming a race to mediocrity and an “all shall have prizes” mentality, we’ve tried to highlight the areas we we feel we will be excellent, and those key strategic themes that we need to address.

However, we mustn’t lose sight of what a university is supposed to be – we may be driven by various metrics, both internal and external, but there has to be an underpinning commitment to the ideas of scholarship, for both students and academics, if we are to  attract both groups to be part of our community.

We have to support the notion of higher education as a transformational experience, not just a  transactional marketised service. We should be aware that we are changing lives through what we do, and this should influence the way in which we teach. As Thomas Docherty writes in “For the University, Democracy and the Future of the Insitution“:

Facts are, of course, important in teaching; but, if teaching and learning are to be historical, if they are to be allowed to make a difference to people’s lives in such a way as to give those pupils the autonomy necessary for the assertion of their own authorities, then facts become subservient to experience. It used to be ‘a fact’, for example, that the world was flat; but the experience of circumnavigating the globe changes this ‘fact’, and the experience produces new facts that are themselves, in turn, subject to further modification. If learning is anything, it is a process of transformation and most certainly not of transmission or transfer. It is a process in which I can become something, and in which I can become something other than I am at present. Learning puts me in possession of new facts; and it does this not simply by a process of abstract rationalization, but primarily through historical experience.

Working in an environment where still there are confused manifestations of marketisation and consumer behaviour then we should use our learning and teaching strategy to reinforce the broad goals of HE and scholarship, as well as delivering the right outcomes for external metrics. As Joanna Williams concludes in her book “Consuming Higher Education, Why Learning Can’t be Bought”:

Students and lecturers need to be united in the common goal of developing and interacting with disciplinary knowledge. Too often lecturers and students are presented as being on opposite sides with mutually exclusive interests – lecturers perhaps seeking to protect research time, students to ensure a better service.Learning often depends on the relationships between lecturers and students, and such relationships are prevented from developing if opposition is assumed.

Williams ends with questioning the funding for HE but reiterates the need for “the purpose of education (to be) placed at the heart of the university rather than job training or social inclusion”

As a university committed to success of all of our students, we’ve included sections on employability and inclusion but in the context of offering transformational education.

So here are our six themes, and what we mean by them.  We have tried to identify what we want to do, without reducing ourselves to something less than the ideals of higher education.

1.Developing confident and capable learners

Our learning and teaching has to be able to support all students once they arrive with us, and show them how to become lifelong learners.This is the key which will allow the fullest benefits of higher education to be attained. This is where we tall about students engaging with discipline knowledge as well as wider attributes

2.Providing challenging and supportive learning and teaching

We want to create amazing learning environments – both physical and virtual. Lots of work is already going on to change campus, and we need to keep looking at what others are doing. This week for example I visited the new Diamond building at Sheffield University – an incredible space, open 24/7 for student learning and teaching, including laboratories, workshops, study areas and a lecture theatre. We will be making sure all our new rooms, as aprt of Campus Transformation are designed to allow learning to flourish.

Online we need to transform the way we support learners. We have a  generation of first year undergraduates who  went through secondary school, with BBC iPlayer and a smartphone in their pocket that could access the web no matter where they were. Putting PowerPoint slides (that we read out earlier) into BlackBoard won’t cut it any more. I’ll be writing another short piece this week about how we will be embracing digital in future

3.Raising attainment and achievement.

This has been raised many times before in this blog – we want our students to achieve to their maximum potential. We’ve got lots of work already ongoing this year as part of the Raising Attainment Roadmap, but this remains a key strategic focus. Higher education is meant to be challenging, so we want our students to be challenged and then supported to be able to achieve.

4.Developing Employability

This blog has long argued that higher education is a transformational process, not a simple instrument to lead students into jobs. Nonetheless, improved employabiliity is a key outcome of HE, and it could be argued that many of the other benefits of HE that accrue come about partly through enhanced employment opportunities. As well as all the work already ongoing in employability, the new strategy picks up on three key issues: social and cultural capital; numeracy and data handling, and digital fluency or capability, The first will help students get through the door in the first instance, and the second two will provide enhanced skills in two areas that all graduates need today, based on the demands we see from major employers.

5.Delivering innovative learning and teaching

No L&T strategy would be complete without this – for us this means further development of enquiry and practice based learning, more use of alumni and employers in designing authentic learning tasks and an embedding of all the staff development and sharing opportunities that we have, to make sure we all move forwards.

6. Supporting a diverse population of students

As a modern university, we have a more diverse undergraduate body than many. We also have significant numbers of international students, of part time learners, of mature students. We know that we have one of the highest percentages of WP students in the country. In order to make sure that all of our students are able to attain, we will get better at mining our data to be able to identify trends in differential attainment, and build inclusive practice into all that we do, so that all student groups have an equal chance of success.

As well as these 6 themes, our strategy also talks about what it means to be an academic at Staffordshire University, as well as what it means to be a student.  I hope you’ll read and feedback on the detail once it goes out for consultation.

Once again a small number of hardy souls from the University will be taking part in the annual British Heart Foundation Midnight Bike Ride from Manchester to Blackpool, over the night of 26th-27th September.

If you’d like to join us, there is still time to book into the event via the BHF website – it’s not a race, so endurance is more important than speed, just let me know if you’re coming along and we can meet up at the beginning. And maybe the end.

Even better, it would be great if you could sponsor one of us – here is the link to my JustGiving page

(from visitblackpool.com).

I promise not to flood this blog next week with pictures of me or other senior colleagues dressed in lycra……

Every year, at around this time, we’ll see articles for students on what to expect at graduation, and how to get through the day.Our own university Facebook feed has promoted this blog by one of our students Queenie Goredema who rightly focuses on outfit and makeup.

Previously we shared with students 49 thoughts that everyone has at graduation. Some of these are a bit sweary.

What we never see is the rules and guidance for staff, so here are some pointers.

Academic Dress

This is the only time of the year that you will wear robes. However, unlike your graduating students, you must wear with studied nonchalance – oh this old thing, I just threw it on. And really, that is how it should look. Graduands want to look perfect. Staff need to be so other worldly that the hood can be worn in a more “casual” manner. But never on the head.

This is an opportunity to check out the robes and hence academic background of your colleagues. The rules here are easy. Simple robes represent old and highly respected universities. The newer the institution, the gaudier the robes. Robes with significant amounts of embroidery were rarely awarded for academic success. Robes with gold embroidery usually represent management in private sector or overseas providers.

Under the Robes

Having reinforced the stereotype of what robes look like, and how to wear them, then we must take a deep breath and look at what goes beneath.

No matter what the standard wardrobe during the teaching year might be, this is a day when for men a tie really is needed. This is because it will hide where the hood attaches to the shirt. Ties should not match robe colours.

Again for men, suits are expected. This is because in midsummer, a woolen jacket, topped off with a gown and hood (possibly fur lined) is ideal, particularly under the hot lights on stage.

For women, again smart business wear. And safety pins to attach that hood.

For either gender, skirts or kilts are a minefield. Possibly cooling on a hot summer day. Potentially disturbing to the audience  if too short and you are sitting on the front row of the stage.

The Procession

The families of graduands will take this opportunity to video and take photographs of you. Try to look as if this is something you do every day (and for some people next week there could be 10 ceremonies to attend). Look as though you are having a deep academic conversation with whomever you are walking with. Keep your voice down though – nobody wants their parents’ video memories of graduation to have recorded your comments on  the snacks available before the ceremony

The Speeches

Look interested. You may have heard the same speech several times for the last however many years. Remember to laugh at the joke. Not too heartily.

Speeches by recipients of honorary doctorates should be attended to carefully. This might give you an insight into their possible benefit to the institution in future. Although you will probably never hear of them again.

Presentation of Students to the Chancellor or Vice Chancellor

Keep clapping. And again, keep clapping. Look delighted. Do not express surprise to your neighbour when someone who failed your first year appears. Do not mutter under your breath “plagiairist”, appeal”, “complaint” as the more challenging students cross the stage.

Shoes have become a major part of the graduation wardrobe for students, so you might be expected to notice. Don’t bother, just hope no one falls over.

Cheer raucously when a student kisses the VC or high fives them. Follow this with mentally arranging your next meeting with HR.

Post Ceremony

Keep your robes on. You may now have lost several kilos in fluid, but you are now a prop for photographs. Here, if you have a degree from a lesser institution, with those gaudy robes, then you will be a prime candidate to appear in photographs for overseas students whom you are not sure that you have taught. But at least you look pretty.

If you can gatecrash the senior staff reception, then this is the place for the best snacks. Make sure you engage a visitor in deep conversation as soon as you can. It’s much harder to be thrown out when you are looking busy. Leaving the reception clutching a couple of bottles of stolen bubbly doesn’t go down well. Hide it under your robes.

Remember, this is a day for your students, so enjoy, and remember that no one expects you to be reading your email or having work related discussions with managers. Enjoy it. Tomorrow it’s back to normal.

A fellow blogger and former colleague recently wrote a piece in his Imperfect University series, entitled Apocalypse Now, where he reflected on various recent writings on the future (or not) of the university.

Like Paul, I disagree with the hubristic statements of Sir Michael Barber and Sebastien Thrun and see them as no more than attention grabbing headlines to draw the press to their visions of education that is “broken” and can be “fixed” with technology.

However, even when we ignore the clarion call of MOOC boosters, the academy, in the UK at least, is under threat primarily by changes to funding and the resultant impact on behaviours.

With cuts to the budget of the Department of Business Innovation and Skills of £450m announced it is clear that there will be even less money available from government in future for universities.

After Michael Barber’s paper on “An Avalanche is Coming“, Prof Steve Smith proposed that the true avalanche coming was actually finance.

His words were prescient – the changes to undergraduate student finance and the current loans scheme has made those universities that are heavily reliant on undergraduate income to try to behave in a neoliberal marketised way.

Further, the forthcoming cuts at BIS are almost certainly going to target the student opportunity fund, even at a time when OFFA has written to show the benefits of access agreements on improving access to university.

This week OFFA provided their annual monitoring of access agreements that showed:

• universities and colleges have met, or are on course to meet in the planned time, 90 per cent of the targets that they set themselves in their 2013-14 access agreements
• one in three targets has been met three years ahead of deadline
• 87 per cent of targets relating to disabled students, 87 per cent of targets related to gender and 79 per cent of targets related to ethnicity have been met, or are on course to be achieved in the planned time

Those universities who are the most committed to widening participation, evidenced through their student opportunity fund allocations, are likely to see a large percentage fall in their income. These are also the universities who might be less able to recruit on a national scale, and have missions focused on delivering higher education to their local communities.

Finally, in a recent publication for HEPI on “The Accounting and Budgeting of Student Loans” Andrew McGettigan shows how the financing of student loans is now driving HE policy. Under the options presented to show what BIS must provide to the Treasury, McGettigan suggest the cap on fees could remain to be frozen at £9000 which would not be popular with some if not all, universities, that the repayment threshold could be at a lower salary than £21000, which would be unpopular with graduates. Interest rates, repayment rates and write off rates could all be changed without need for legislation.

In sum, the Treasury appears to have imposed a settlement which requires BIS to improve repayment rates or risk seeing its other spending cut year-on-year. The accounting is pushing policymakers towards certain solutions, which may not be in the general interest of universities and colleges or students. At the very least, they need proper debate because higher education needs public goodwill, not just public money

The financing of higher education continues to create difficulty within the academy and within government. However, as Paul wrote on his blog:

Universities have to look to the long term and have to continue to invest. If we accept the most negative of these prospectuses we would all just give up now. But they aren’t true and we can’t let them be so. Our universities are not collapsing. The Humanities are not dying. There is and will continue to be huge demand for higher education in this country and across the globe.

It is of course much easier to call crisis, to identify failings and to attack, cry betrayal and criticise leaders. Sometimes this is justified. but when it becomes the dominant narrative then we are really not doing ourselves any favours in higher education.

This might apply to the sector as a whole, but within individual institutions we need to be aware of the dangers that marketisation and changes to financing will have on how we plan our futures, how we make sure that universities don’t collapse.

I am not as sanguine as my fellow blogger. I still believe in the need for a university such as the one I work in. I also believe that the current narrative is not favourable to us and we need to be ready to defend ourselves and explain why we are important, beyond the simple “chose a degree, chose a job, choose to pay tax, choose life” narrative. There is a continuous attack on the academy (other than on the “top” universities), on the humanities, on anything that cannot be simply monetised. This will become the intellectual  crime of the century – just pick up a Daily Mail to “read all about their schemes and adventurings”. As we define what we want our universities to be, we mustn’t become complicit:

Who are these men of lust, greed, and glory?
Rip off the masks and let’s see.
But that’s no right – oh no, what’s the story?
There’s you and there’s me
That can’t be right

(lyrics by Supertramp)