Speech to UUK Conference and NUS’ 10 Years After Dearing event

Below is the speech I delivered to a Universities UK Conference on ‘Satisfying Student Demand’, which I adapted for the conference I ran to mark the 10th anniversary of the publication of the Dearing Report.

Introduction

Good morning.

I want to focus my contribution today around two significant challenges facing the sector:

Changing Student Behaviour

Students are paying more and therefore expect more. Some already view students as customers - including some students themselves - and it's not difficult to understand why.

Lessons From Down Under

We should look with concern and trepidation to the Australian experience. Professor Richard James, Director for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Melbourne has written extensively about the change in student behaviour brought about by marketisation. He reports:

Worrying stuff.

It was undoubtedly a concern about these sorts of trends developing in the UK that led Baroness Deech to remark in the House of Lords in 2005 that "It is taken as axiomatic that higher education has to do with higher earning power in a lifetime. I beg to differ. I am unhappy that students see themselves as consumers with rights and contracts" (Ruth Deech, November 2005, House of Lords)

Sleepwalking into consumerism

We are in danger of sleep walking into a system where students become customers and a degree becomes a commodity to be bought and sold in the market place.

A system where students go simply to be certified, rather than educated.

And a system where education is a means to an end, rather than an end in itself.

Returning to Baroness Deech's comments in the Lords, it's important for me to point out that students have always had rights. But the rights we have been afforded so far

These rights have been afforded on the basis that students are an integral part of the academic community, co-producers of learning and knowledge. Those rights and relationships are not those you can expect when shopping for electricals at Comet or Currys.

At what point can we expect university prospectuses to be emblazoned with an imprint saying 'this does not affect your statutory rights'?

So when institutions complain about consumerism and greater tendencies towards litigation amongst students and their parents - I share your concerns.

But when institutions attempt to protect themselves from the customers they've created with one-sided student contracts, get out clauses and armies of lawyers I say: you cannot have your cake and eat it.

You cannot on one hand, complain about the erosion of academic values and growing consumerism whilst on the other hand pursuing a market model that makes these trends and behaviours inevitable.

We have difficult choices ahead. I don't want to see students' unions transformed into glorified consumer rights bodies or NUS publishing the HE equivalent of 'Which?' magazine every month.

But if the path of consumerism and marketisation is the one that government and the sector chooses to follow, students will become more consumer-like and we will demand consumer rights.

Students have growing expectations of the quality of teaching and services, seeking '24/7' access to resources and 'just-in-time' access to information and staff support. And yes, they expect feedback that is useful, timely and a two-way process where students not only receive feedback on their own work, but can feedback – and be listened to – on aspects of their course, including teaching. There is nothing wrong with any of this in itself - we all strive for quality improvement - unless of course we all lose sight of the fact that higher education is about the co-production of the outcomes.

Co-production and Active Partnership

If we needed evidence that we aren’t simply training today’s graduates for the jobs market, then we should consider one of the findings of research sponsored by the Scottish Institute for Enterprise that suggested that today’s average graduate has 7 different careers, 3 of which are yet to be invented.

Higher Education in the 21st century ought to involve:

active in the sense that knowledge isn’t just given to students by a lecturer or teacher, but is explored, shared and produced through a genuine academic partnership

It should be:

learning is often a difficult and frustrating experience and we need to find ways in which students demand an engaging and challenging experience, recognising that happy students may not be maximising their learning

And it should be:

That part of HE isn’t just an exploration of course material, but an exploration of the person’s identity and their place within society as active citizens with something to contribute

If we’re serious about satisfying student demand and exceeding expectations – and I truly believe that all of us are – then we need to find ways of involving students in an ever greater way in discussions around quality and their learning experience.

There are a variety of ways in which students need to be involved as co-producers to enhance the quality of the learning experience.

We need to move away from a two-dimensional model of student involvement where we talk about how we involve ‘representatives’ and ‘ordinary students’ to discussing how we wish to involve students and then discuss to what degree different groups of students require to be involved.

Meeting the equality challenge

Because involving students in their shaping their own experience only becomes more important as we seek to collectively meet the equality challenge in Higher Education.

So much of the widening participation agenda focuses on admissions – and understandably so. We’ve made tremendous leaps forward in getting more young people into higher education, but progress in numbers has not seen significant progress in the proportion of students from under-represented backgrounds studying in Higher Education. And if we drill down to an institutional level, or consider groups of institutions, we see that some have further to go than others. Sure, there are diverse groups of students in HE, but that doesn’t mean that each and every campus is diverse, particularly when you consider, for example, that there are more afro-Caribbean students studying at London Met than there are in the entire Russell Group.

I recognize, of course, that asking the higher education sector to ride in on its white horse and rectify the educational disadvantage that was created much earlier in the system, is unhelpful and unreasonable. That only 6 per cent of care leavers enter Higher Education undoubtedly says more about the care system in Britain – and the way that the UK treats some of its most vulnerable citizens – than it does about HE.

But we can ask the sector to place as much emphasis on equality in the student experience, as we do on fair admissions. The challenge is to create a learning environment and a student experience in the widest sense that are all tuned and finessed to promote diversity and ensure equality of opportunity.

A mass higher education system requires us to think in different ways about the way that the curriculum is designed and delivered. Diversity brings clear pedagogical challenges: the challenge to ensure that courses cater for a range of learning styles and approaches; the challenge to ensure that the curriculum is culturally diverse and international in its outlook; the challenge to ensure that students see something relevant to themselves and the learning course they wish to chart throughout their experience, whilst at the same time having the opportunity to explore ideas and areas outside of their own comfort zones.

An inclusive experience is about more than the curriculum though and we have a shared responsibility – students’ unions and institutions together – to break down outstanding barriers that still prevent some students from having an equal chance of academic success and an equal chance of social and cultural reward.

Understanding the new patterns of student engagement and accommodating the modern, non-traditional student

On paper, higher education ought to be more accessible. More students study part-time and some now have the ability to undertake ‘compressed’ two-year degrees. There are greater routes for progression, not least through foundation degrees.

But I wonder if we’re really up to scratch when it comes to accommodating students’ needs? Do we have adequate childcare facilities on campus for student parents? Are the ‘reasonable adjustments’ we’ve made to become DDA compliant geared towards what disabled students think are reasonable, or what we think are reasonable? Are we catering for the diverse faith groups on campus? Do we understand when and why it’s not appropriate to serve alcohol or why timetabling can be a sensitive issue at certain times and certain days?

And are we accommodating the ‘working student’? Evidence shows students working a 25-hour week, across all subjects, on study. At the same time, students who undertake paid employment do on average a 14-hour week. That’s a 40-hour week! And the more difficult and demanding the subject, and the assessments, the longer the weeks become. Is the full-time student at risk of extinction?

A third of all students don’t belong to any club or society. Why? Beyond that already worrying statistic, there’s also evidence that shows that non-participation in clubs and societies rises to 50% for ethnic minority students. Club and society membership may not seem like the heart of the equality challenge – but I think we can all accept and understand that learning and exchanging ideas and values doesn’t begin and end at the door of the library or the lecture theatre.

In the NSS, we saw that satisfaction across almost every indicator was lower for ethnic minority students. By no means were they were lower to the extent that we would say there was a serious malaise in terms of racial discrimination in our universities, but they were consistently lower by 5-10%, and I think this points to an increasing sense of disenfranchisement ‘within’ the experience, even though participation is widening.

There’s a real challenge for the sector in improving feedback and assessment, especially as systemic problems with feedback and academic support disproportionately affect those who may not have had the easiest process of adjustment to higher education.

The solutions to these challenges are not always that straightforward. I’m not saying that NUS always gets it right either. We’ve been too slow to catch up with a rapidly changing sector. Like institutions, students’ unions have a key role in delivering and enhancing the student experience and an uphill journey to ensure that our political priorities and our service provision match the needs and expectations of an ever-growing and ever-changing student population. And we have a responsibility to face these challenges together, in partnership.

I believe that higher education can be – and often is – truly transformational. As we look forward to a change at the top of government that public policy towards higher education in the future places as much importance on what higher education has to offer our society as it does on what it contributes to our economy.

Thank you

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