When I grow up, I want to be spoon-fed.

There is a text version to download here (Word doc): THE feature 2011 Ramsden2

When asked about the best speaker, comments included :

Paul Ramsden from the perspective of questioning the changes taking place and the validity of supporting evidence

Paul Ramsden for blowing a hole in a number of assumptions made in the media and within HEIs. He had a clear perspective of govt policy and how to move forward in this rapidly changing HE landscape

Paul Ramsden because he presented a different perspective on the white paper

Prof Ramsden gave a very lucid analysis of the White Paper

Paul Ramsden generated the most interesting audience discussion of the day

Paul Ramsden – I liked his challenges to the current orthodoxy about the (necessarily) positive impact of competition and choice

Paul Ramsden because he gave an insightful and thought provoking perspective on recent developments in the HE sector.

Paul Ramsden Informative, well considered, relevant, interesting

Paul Ramsden – unbiased, honest and challenging. What a shame that he was tucked away at the end of the agenda

Paul Ramsden for his insightful and challenging presentation into enhancing academic quality. Interesting points made re. the White Paper’s links between contact time and quality

Paul Ramsden. Offered an alternative view, based on obvious experience. Refreshing to see real opinions expressed

Paul Ramsden – pushed the boundaries and made one think outside of the box which for the last session of the day was quite something to achieve!

Paul Ramsden for his political perspective

Paul Ramsden – he reminded us to question what was presented in the Paper. It would have been helpful to have had his session in the morning so that the day could have had a greater debate element to it

Paul Ramsden. A sophisticated and thought provoking presentation

Paul Ramsden – insight and reflection on the White Paper and the sector’s direction of travel

Paul Ramsden was definitely the highlight and it’s a shame it was left to the end and the other topics didn’t revolve/link-in more with his really interesting take on the white paper

Here I’m looking at the 18 recommendations listed under ‘Improving the student experience’ in the Executive Summary (pp 9-11). There are actually a few sensible ideas…

1. “We will expect higher education institutions to provide a standard set of information about their courses, and we will make it easier for prospective students to find and compare this information”

Comment: This is the Key Information Set, over which a group chaired by Janet Beer has laboured assiduously for some time. It must be a good idea to provide prospective students with better information about what university will be like, but the KIS has problems. It doesn’t tell potential students much about the nature of the experience – it’s merely a set of numbers designed to enable comparisons, and some of the numbers are notoriously unreliable. Student-designed websites tell you more about the actual quality of the experience, and are more useful because they recognise explicitly that different things suit different people. The fact that the KIS combines individual items from the NSS to produce a single aggregate score is dodgy. The KIS also has unavoidable opportunity costs for universities (they could be using the resource required for producing this stuff to support students instead).

2. “We encourage higher education institutions to publish anonymised information for prospective and existing students about the teaching qualifications, fellowships and expertise of their teaching staff at all levels.”

Comment: Insipid and facile. This appears to be a watering-down of the Browne recommendation that access to funding should be conditional on academics getting qualified as teachers – a recommendation that never had legs. This recommendation is even worse: just short term pandering to some amateur notion of accountability. It takes no account of the differences between trained academics, experienced teachers, and those with teaching qualifications. The ‘encourage’ is a nice little excuse for HEIs not doing anything, however.

3. “We invite the Higher Education Public Information Steering Group (HEPISG) to consider whether a National Student Survey of taught postgraduates should be introduced, and whether to encourage institutions to provide a standard set of information for each of their taught postgraduate courses.”

Comment: A NSS for postgrads was recommended by the Smith Review and the 2010 review of the NSS that I led. This is old news indeed. The PGT NSS can be straightforwardly developed from the existing NSS at modest cost; what will probably happen instead will be a huge consultation exercise and an expensive ‘research’ project. The HEA’s old PTES is not suitable for a number of reasons articulated in my report to HEFCE – too long, not rigorously tested, and its results are confidential to HEIs.

4. “We are asking HEFCE to improve Unistats, so prospective students can make more useful comparisons between subjects at different institutions. From summer 2012, graduate salary information will be added onto Unistats.”

Comment: This has to be a good plan, though not for the implied reason given (that being able to make more useful comparisons will enhance quality). UniStats has got better, but much remains to be done.

5. “We will ask the main organisations that hold student data to make detailed data available publicly, including on employment and earnings outcomes, so it can be analysed and presented in a variety of formats to meet the needs of students, parents and advisors.”

Comment: It’s not clear how this would work in practice, or what costs it would imply.

6. “We are asking UCAS and higher education institutions to make available, course by course, new data showing the type and subjects of actual qualifications held by previously successful applicants. This should help young people choose which subjects and qualifications to study at school.”

Comment: A sensible idea in theory, but with potentially large costs.

7. “We have asked the Student Loans Company and UCAS to develop a single application portal for both higher education and student finance applications.”

Comment: So obvious. Like PQA, this has been an excessively long time coming.

8. “We consider the publication of a student charter to be best practice and we will review the extent to which they [sic] are adopted and in light of this consider whether they should be made mandatory in the future.”

Comment: An unoriginal notion. I was drafting one for the university I worked at back in 1994 and the concept wasn’t new then. Most places have them, or a version of them, nowadays. Why should government claim ownership of the initiative?

9. “We expect all universities to publish summary reports of their student evaluation surveys on their websites by 2013/14. Before this, we will work with HEFCE, National Union of Students (NUS) and others, to agree the information and format that will be most helpful to students. “

Comment: This appears to be the WP’s attempt at humour. No-one is laughing. Another example of ill thought out, evidence-free policy. Lots more work for the back office staff; no apparent benefit. Institutions’ student evaluations should be an input to internal quality processes – they don’t tell students much on their own. Nor, of course, do NSS scores (see 10 below).

10. “We will introduce a risk-based quality regime that focuses regulatory effort where it will have most impact and gives power to students to hold universities to account. All institutions will continue to be monitored through a single framework but the need for, and frequency of, scheduled institutional reviews will depend on an objective set of criteria and triggers, including student satisfaction, and the recent track record of each institution.”

Comment: In one sense this is a sop to older universities; certainly nothing to do with students holding universities to account. We used to argue for a risk-based approach to QA when I worked at a big research intensive – aka leave us alone and concentrate on the upstarts who pretend to be real universities. Unworkable in practice. Rather naïve to assert that low student satisfaction (NSS?) should trigger a review.

11. “We want the Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIA) to help higher education institutions resolve student complaints at the earliest possible stage. We are therefore asking the OIA to consult the sector on ways to promote and deliver early resolution.”

Comment: Fair enough. But what is it doing here?

12. “We have asked Professor Sir Tim Wilson to undertake a review into how we make the UK the best place in the world for university-industry collaboration.”

Comment: Very much along the ‘more research is needed’ line. If past experience is anything to go by, the government will resolutely ignore the results.

13. “We will continue to support the Graduate Talent Pool in 2011 for another year, helping graduates to identify internship opportunities.”

Comment: Window-dressing. Motherhood and apple pie.

14. “We will work with the National Consortium of University Entrepreneurs, the National Council for Graduate Entrepreneurship and the Quality Assurance Agency to encourage higher education institutions to support students to develop enterprise skills.”

Comment: This is another old scheme recycled.

15. “We are committed to opening up the higher education market, including to further education colleges and alternative providers, to meet the changing needs of employers, individuals and their communities.”

Comment: Who could disagree (apart from the unions)? But I’m not sure the authors understand what kind of market higher education is.

16. “We will free around 85,000 student numbers from current controls in 2012/13 by allowing unrestrained recruitment of the roughly 65,000 high-achieving students, scoring the equivalent of AAB or above at A-Level and creating a flexible margin of 20,000 places to reward universities and colleges who combine good quality with value for money and whose average charge (including waivers) is at or below £7,500.”

Comment: Basically moving the deckchairs around. There is no increased supply to meet student demand, just an attempt to get some universities to compete more for a fixed quota. What sort of reward is it to take in more students at rock-bottom costs? An unintended effect will be felt in institutions that do not fit the conditions for the 85,000 or the 20,000.

17. “We will expand the flexibility for employers and charities to offer sponsorship for individual places outside of student number controls, provided they do not create a cost liability for Government.”

Comment: Seems a nice plan, but its effects are likely to be minimal.

18. “We will consult on removing barriers to entry to the higher education sector. This includes changes to the criteria and the process for the award and renewal of taught degree awarding powers, including allowing non-teaching institutions to award degrees, and changes to criteria and process for determining which organisations are allowed to call themselves a “university”. “

Comment: Potentially revolutionary, of course. However, the uptake will likely be modest if international experience is anything to go by.

Too right, and nowhere more true than in the sections on the student experience.

The White Paper tells us that it aims to put excellent teaching back at the heart of every student’s university experience. I couldn’t argue with that, but I’m very unhappy about the way it tries to do it.

It does it essentially by peddling a fiction. The story is that if students know more about relative quality, largely through surveys and equivocal statistics such as ‘student workload’, then by a mysterious alchemical process university teaching will get better.

Chapter 2’s title articulates the myth: ‘Well-informed students driving teaching excellence’. The White Paper presents no facts to support the assertion that informed students produce improved teaching. Someone just seems to believe it’s true.

Chapter 2 itself starts badly, as it means apparently to go on, by incorrectly telling us that students are generally satisfied, but that they are not satisfied with assessment feedback. HEFCE’s own research concluded that the dimensions of the NSS can’t be compared like this, and that the NSS isn’t a satisfaction survey anyway.

It continues with dubious numbers from student self-reports about hours worked, misquotes a piece by Graham Gibbs to imply that the quantity of contact with academics determines quality — which it doesn’t — and uses all this to justify the production of the key information set — a collection of data which will ‘make the English higher education system more responsive to students and employers’.

This is mere dogma dressed up as policy and justified by cant.

The other main student experience chapter is number 3. It gets away in fine style by misattributing a report I wrote for a previous incarnation of David Willetts (gimme a break, guys!). It then descends into a rambling account of student charters, student complaints and a rather chancy risk-based approach to quality assurance designed as a sop to research intensive universities.

It also suggests publishing internal student evaluation results as a way of informing student choice and stimulating competition. This may be intended as a joke, but it doesn’t seem very funny. I suppose it means more opportunity costs for universities – more jobs in back offices, massaging module feedback and presenting it in a fit state for public consumption.

I could go on, but it’s getting too much like shooting fish in a barrel.

If all the increased control and mechanical box-ticking is the government’s idea of freeing up the system, then I hate to think what a more centrally-managed approach would imply.

What do I find most upsetting? Underlying it all is the derisive assumption that we have a lot of poor student experiences and bad teaching – and that this justifies more manipulation from on high. This is not only a fudge and wrong: it is terribly naïve for someone with the intellect of David Willetts.

You don’t need to justify improving the student experience by making up stories about how bad it is. It is generally pretty good, and that’s exactly the reason why it needs to get better and better.

Next post: The 18 policy recommendations on improving the student experience assessed individually. 

Agency apparachiks have rushed into press releases to welcome it. Other commentators have been less enthusiastic. This piece is a good example.

I hope to say more about the student experience parts later – there’s a particularly choice example of cherry picking ‘research’ results to make a political point, using an obscure report.

The flimsiness of the White Paper is epitomised in its inability to get simple things right, such as references to other work. I wrote a policy paper about the student experience at the invitation of one of David Willetts’ recent predecessors (read it here). It presents a personal view: I was asked to write it as an individual and not as the chief exec of the HEA.

A bit of it’s paraphrased with approval in the White Paper (page 33, I think) – some sort of fame, at last.

Alas no – it’s attributed to the Higher Education Academy. How irritating! On second thoughts, though, it’s probably better to remain invisible in a production as poor as the White Paper…

Instead we have hysterical visions of the future English higher education system. Nothing less than apocalypse, it seems, will follow the shifting of the costs of a degree from ordinary taxpayers to the students who benefit. Apparently this will undermine decades of effort to get students from diverse backgrounds into university, narrow the student experience, dishearten academics, and leave graduates with mountains of debt.

We can also enjoy economically-illiterate analyses by journalists who do not know what markets are (except that they don’t like them) and who think that students will be forced out of higher education because they can’t afford it.

Most of this is a compound of self-interest, arrogance and ignorance.

So let me return to the issue of student fees and question some of the assumptions.

The idea that students from poor families will be disadvantaged by the deferred loans system for fees in England is based on fantasy. On the contrary, they are being offered a golden opportunity, as a former president of the NUS shows here.

Why do we patronise students by arguing that they aren’t clever enough to factor in the benefits (not only financial) on offer versus the costs? The private rate of return to higher education is substantial, while every scrap of evidence from the UK and overseas points in the same direction: a system of deferred loans for tuition fees neither disadvantages nor deters students from less well-off families. However, not charging students a large proportion of the cost is effectively transferring money from the poor to the wealthy.

For those who say that universities will become less open to poorer students because the fees are too high, I would point out that all the universities I have worked at would give their eye teeth to attract the best candidates. They are self-interested enough to operate an admissions system that will deliberately seek out and support the students they want, working systematically to attract bright students from all backgrounds. There’s no need for heavy government interference in ‘widening participation’, the root problems of which are in any case laid down in early childhood and in schools.

It’s reasonable to assume that the money value of a degree from an English institution is about £120,000 (there are countless benefits to the individual in non-financial terms as well). As Mark points out, this means you pay £40k and get £120k back. In the old maths like what I was taught (which must have been phased out by the time Guardian journalists went to school) you gain £80k. This would be a brilliant deal even if you actually owed the £40k as a debt (you don’t, because you don’t have to pay if you can’t afford it).

Now the question of the quality of teaching, choice and tuition fees. It’s become a mantra that higher fees imply ‘more demanding’ students; and that student choice will drive up quality. If you keep on saying something often enough, people start to believe it must be true.

But I can think of no reason at all to suppose that paying higher fees will lead to higher expectations, or that choice will improve quality:

• First off, the fees are not an upfront payment or a mortgage
• Second, the choice is limited. If I want to study something near to my home, for example, I’ll select among local institutions. If they’ll let me in…
• Because in any case universities themselves do a lot of of the choosing – not their customers. It’s called admissions policy…
• Third, there’s no evidence that students actually use information about the quality of their likely experience way to make their decisions about where they’d like to go. Or to be more accurate, no evidence that they use information about the quality of teaching and services. They DO consider location and prestige. Higher education is both a ‘positional good’ (something whose value is a function of its desirability ranking, aka everyone will look up to you if you get a First from Cambridge) and a reason for having a good time among people like yourself.

Finally, the issue of public subsidies for teaching in higher education.

As far as I know, no-one commentating on the student experience has drawn the obvious conclusion from the facts. This is that, from the point of view of both equity and the quality of the student experience, there is no compelling reason for any public subsidy at all. Private returns considerably exceed public ones, and there’s no justification anyway to subsidise through taxes any business that provides public benefits as well as private ones.

But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t useful principles to remember about how to do it well. Here are some from derived from THE BOOK (click on the image on the right to buy it).

1. Interest and explanation

The job of every teacher is to make their subject interesting. So make your subject irresistible to students. Arouse their curiosity. Explain things clearly, remembering to clarify the reasons why a particular fact or skill is essential for understanding the whole.

2. Concern and respect for students and student learning

Tree-hugging and basket-weaving with students as equals? Not a bit of it. Just practical advice if you’re an expert and they aren’t (which is what teaching is about, after all). Get interested in what students know and don’t know. Be generous – give students the benefit of the doubt. Challenge them, but simultaneously make it easy for them to master the ideas and facts. Strive to make the difficult parts easy. Remember – you were once as ignorant yourself.

3. Appropriate assessment and feedback

Set the right assessments; match them to the material to be learned. Question students in a way that demands evidence of understanding. When you give feedback, make sure they appreciate what they still need to study to get it right. Make sure they know it’s OK to admit, like an expert, that they’ve got more to learn.

4. Clear goals and intellectual challenge

Consistently high academic expectations produce better student performance. Hard work never hurt anyone. Clear statements of what’s to be learned encourage a good fit between student effort and course goals.

5: Independence, control, and engagement

Get students engaged with content in a way that enables them to reach understanding. Give them enough space to learn at their own pace and in their own sequence. They need to feel in control over what they’re doing, as well as feeling that you’re directing them – the right balance is important, both for learning well and for enjoying it. There’s no rule against hard work being fun.

6. Learning from students

From students, do you say? Yes, because the previous five principles are necessary but not sufficient for good university teaching. Effective teaching means seeing the relation between teaching, learning and content as problematic, uncertain and relative. It involves constantly trying to find out how teaching affects learning, and adapting it in the light of the evidence you collect. This is ‘evaluation’ of university teaching: learning from students and modifying what you do to make it more effective.

All I know for certain is that each will reduce the quality of the student experience by diverting effort and funds from the front line.

On the one hand we have universities that should know better pretending that a deferred student contribution is an upfront fee. This can be the only explanation for Cambridge’s idea of reduced fees for students from poorer families.

Let’s just get this straight once and for all: deferred contributions do not dissuade students from ANY FAMILY from going to ANY university. You pay NOTHING upfront and you may well end up paying nothing for a lifetime – unless you earn good money later.

Turning now to the government: using higher fees to bully universities into submission over access is pitiable. As for Nick Clegg’s flaccid “warning“ to vice chancellors that they mustn’t accept students who are qualified to learn (from whatever “background”), but should instead act as instruments to increase social equality, and sad Simon’s bleat that universities currently educate too many students who went to private schools — well, just lay off, will you?

Why not ask Tesco and Sainsbury’s to create more equality, and Waitrose to reduce the number of its customers from better-off homes — if you think it’s a good thing?

But all this meddling has a function, and it’s nothing to do with the higher education student experience, or access, or social equality. It’s primarily to generate work for quangos, bureaucrats, regulators, and checkers of diversity targets (all of which are parasitic on higher education and bleed strength from teaching and learning). Expect much more red tape in the form of annual access agreements drafted by administrative apparatchiks and pored over by low ranking officials whose main aim in life is to defy common sense.

The interfering also covers up the government’s lack of political will to solve the real problem — a desperately weak state school system that has failed its customers badly. And it serves to make the government look as if it’s doing something tough. But could someone kindly tell them that hitting a victim who seems unwilling or unable to hit back is hardly a laudable activity?

Gosh, and now we’re going to get a beefed-up regulator. The office for fair access has been a failure, according to David Willetts. It hasn’t stopped universities accepting clever students who have a reasonable chance of success but who come from privileged homes. It hasn’t changed anything. Oh dear.

So we’ll do what governments do with failed quangos: give it more power, more staff, and more money, of course.

And the robust response from the Director General of the Russell Group? Only slightly re-phrased to make her point less obscure, it amounts to: “Sorry, David, we’ll try harder to do you what you want, but we’re only universities after all”.

But that’s another story.

One of Lord Browne’s home-grown curiosities, tucked away on page 48, is his idea that a university won’t get funding from student contributions unless it requires all its new academics to do a course in how to teach.

This notion, and its implication that academics will have to get licences to teach, has unsurprisingly been received with contempt.

However, it seems to me a good jolly good idea in principle that lecturers should learn how to teach. Not just in principle, either – in a previous life as a PVC in a research-intensive university, I distributed extra funding to departments depending on how many of their staff had done our training programme. It certainly helped to get the message home about the importance of good teaching.

And I’ve written a lot about how important it is for lecturers to learn how to teach, how they can do this (mainly by working it out for themselves) and how doing it might help make their jobs more exciting. I’m a believer!

But there are problems with the concept of compulsion. Incentives are one thing: making something so contentious into a condition of access to all funding from the graduates who have been educated by you is quite another.

Back in heady days of 1997, another review by Ron Dearing proposed the idea of compulsory training and licences for lecturers.

Its execution turned out to be a disaster. Academics stayed away from the grandiloquently-titled ‘Institute for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education’ in droves. It crashed and burned. Its toxic legacy has haunted the project of improving and recognising university teaching ever since.

The problems with ‘licences to practise’ in academia are several:

1. Many of the training programmes (though by no means all) are poor. Too much adult learning dogma, jargon and touchy-feely bullshit: not enough focus on how to teach your subject and on practical skills. And not enough emphasis on how ideas about teaching (‘theory’) and how to teach (‘practice’) can enlighten each other for the benefit of students’ experiences. A lot of educational development is self-serving claptrap dressed up with fancy names (I know of what I speak – in another life even more millennia ago I used to work in an ‘educational development centre’ myself).

2. Having an organisation (the HEA) whose purpose is to improve university teaching and learning act as the arbiter of whether a training programme meets the criteria for a licence. That’s an issue of quality and standards, regulation and oversight. Would you want to work on improving your practice with an organisation that’s pompous enough to say it has the right to judge you? Licences to practice descend like lead balloons in most quarters of academia – especially those that believe that research is a vital element of a university. Remember the dismal fate of the Institute for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education before sounding off about what a good idea it would be to coerce lecturers into doubtful qualifications in teaching.

3. The university independence issue. If the government’s version of Browne is put into practice, we face a more regulated, state-run future in universities. As I’ve blogged before, that’s a disaster waiting to happen for teaching quality and the student experience. As a VC, I’d want to appoint the best faculty I could find, not ones a controlling government with rather limited knowledge of the reality of academia wanted me to hire.

The belief that the state is the answer to all our problems is as strong in the current government as the last. So much for a freer market in higher education.

4. The tricky issue of students. Like they’re what it’s all about… despite the catastrophe for the NUS at Millbank last week, they are on the right lines about more student involvement and engagement in curricula and assessment. Who has consulted students about requiring universities to make all new academics do an ‘accredited’ training programme as a condition of getting their hands on customer money? (EDIT – 18 November: The NUS now seems to have come out on the side of stronger regulation, with not a word about student engagement. The deafening clatter of dummies being thrown from prams implies that they must now be keen on licensing).

5. Does anyone really believe that the HEA’s ‘accreditation’ processes are perceptibly different from form filling and cosying up to the assessors? (Needless to say, I’m not drawing on any inside knowledge here…). Does anyone really believe that pointless bureaucracy is a way to improve the student experience?

Just one more time: Helping lecturers to  teach better is good. Incentives that encourage them to do it are good. Imposing daft penalties on universities that won’t toe the latest statist line is … frankly bizarre.

But will they? I’d like to believe it. It’s a better way than forcing academics to acquire dubious qualifications in the theory of adult learning.

The flaw in reasoning, though, is that students don’t choose programmes based on variations in the quality of teaching. There’s even a recent HEFCE report on the information prospective students use to prove it. As long as the quality is reasonably ok (which it broadly is these days, barring some disasters) other considerations kick in – institutional reputation, local convenience, what parents and friends say, whether you’ve got the grades. And so on. The student experience may be worse if undergraduate teaching isn’t done by star professors (or maybe not), but students don’t seem to use this as a factor in deciding where to go.

It would also take years, possibly decades, for student choice based on teaching quality to have an impact through word of mouth.

A much more direct and rapid funding incentive would be needed to make a difference. The only realistic option, itself fraught with snags, is performance based funding. I’ll write a bit more about how this might work later.

VERY GOOD

• Freeing up universities to charge the tuition fees they want
• Deferred loans extended to part-time students
• Proper interest rate on the graduate contribution, linked to inflation

GOOD

• Making early repayment of graduate contribution possible
• Rejecting a graduate tax
• Injecting some competition into the system
• Increasing the number of student places
• Approving a professional standards framework (developed by Mike Prosser and colleagues when I was chief executive of the HE Academy) as the means of setting teaching standards in universities

NOT SO GOOD

• No deferred loans for postgraduate students
• No opportunity for students to pay graduate contribution fee upfront, at a discount

ODD/WEIRD/STATIST*

• Creating a regulatory agency that takes over the functions of the funding council and QAA
• Half-baked (and contradictory) noises about teaching quality
• Spinning increased government control as a boost for university autonomy
• Confusing teaching qualifications with better teaching
• Making the marginal tax rate (aka the levy) on student contributions received by universities as high as 75% (there’s a wonderfully deceptive table about this on page 37)
• Repeating the phony mantra that more information about courses and facilities will drive up quality by improving student choice

(* in all of which can be detected the heavy hand of government)

If I were Lord Browne, aka head of the review of student finances, I’d recommend things that would start to put the student finance system back on track and end the massive taxpayer subsidy we have that favours the better-off over poorer people.*

Let’s concentrate here on the tuition fee aspect:

1. Bring in a substantial increase in the graduate contribution (the deferred loan) to cover at least two thirds the cost of tuition (just to be clear on this, that’s the cost of teaching, not any research that the teachers do).

2. Charge proper interest rates on graduate contributions. The current system of zero interest is neither sustainable nor fair.

3. Allow fees to be linked to teaching costs and student demand, so that expensive courses that are in high demand (e.g. medicine) are priced higher than cheaper ones that are less popular (e.g. mathematics), and studying among dreaming spires is dearer than doing it in portacabins on the Hornsey Road.

4. Dump the link between ‘widening participation’ and the fees universities can charge (this is political oil spill territory, however, so it seems wildly improbable).

5. Extend the graduate contribution scheme to part time students. The best way to do this would be by charging a fee for each module completed, so that there’s no difference between the cost to students of different modes of study. You rack up a debit for each module, and you pay it back in the usual way if and when your total annual income exceeds the threshold. (If you do a degree that mixes different disciplines, you’ll eventually pay varying amounts for each module related to demand and cost, of course).

6. Give students the opportunity to pay their deferred fees upfront, at a substantial (say 25%) discount.

7. Get rid of the nonsense about students needing extra government-collected information about teaching quality to make them into more savvy consumers.

8. Do a big PR job to decouple the concept of student maintenance loans from tuition fees.

9. And do a similar job to rebrand ‘top up fees’ as graduate contributions.

It seems that in universities nothing fails like success.

We’ve fashioned a system of higher education in the UK which, for all its capacity to stand comparison with the best in the world, is teetering on the abyss of complacency. It looks more and more bothered about dispensing education efficiently than questioning whether it’s doing the right thing. Challenging students to think, which most academics would say is at the core of their job, is struggling against the twin tides of consumer satisfaction and pressure to produce obedient employees.

When I first wrote about the student experience of learning back in the early 1990s, no-one had ever heard of the idea. Now teaching and the student experience have never been higher on the policy agenda. But what kind of student experience?

Everyone teaching in a university should want to bring ideas, facts and principles to life in a way that will encourage their students to find out more for themselves. The heart of teaching in higher education is, as Whitehead put it, the imaginative acquisition of knowledge. A university education is nothing if it does not fire up a burning desire to learn. Imagination illuminates the facts and puts a pattern on them. It makes the dull and obscure parts of learning a challenge to be overcome rather than a burden to be endured.

In that frame of mind, students are ready to understand, and will want to share with other people the remarkable feeling that understanding brings.

Effective university teaching matters a great deal – but not because it has much to do with student satisfaction. That’s a by-product. It matters because it gets students to engage with abstract ideas in a way that allows them to make the subject their own.

Accomplished teaching is the single most important way of producing graduates who can reason and act for themselves, and apply theory to practical problems – precisely the skills that any graduate employer wants to see.

It’s not a simple equation of cause and effect. The other important thing is the resolve of the students themselves. They have to use effort to convert the opportunity into the outcome. Students decide their own destinies and lecturers only add or subtract value at the margins. Skilful teaching, by teachers who wear their learning with imagination, can inspire them to do more than they ever thought they could.

Teaching in higher education should never fool students into thinking there’s an easy path to success. Rather it should make the hardest road enjoyable to follow by communicating complex ideas clearly and succinctly.

The radical realignment of the undergraduate syllabus that I proposed in my contribution to the government’s “Higher Education Debate” in 2008 was part of this way of thinking. We need curricula that captivate students: ones that are transdisciplinary, extend them to their limits, develop their skills of inquiry and research, and enable them to find resources of courage and flexibility that cross international boundaries.

Yet a good student experience is not simply about first-rate content and effective teaching.

When I was a pro vice chancellor at Sydney, we substantially improved students’ experiences by tackling issues concerned with basic customer services such as departmental administration. We also improved the experience, however, by making a bit of a song and dance about the responsibilities of academics in a research-led university to profess their subjects and to share their scholarship with undergraduates. And we backed that rhetoric up with some quite strong management incentives.

To improve the student experience, by all means get the  basics right, and don’t make them seem trivial – they aren’t. But then get on with the much tougher task of making the subject so exciting that students will keep on coming back for more.

Sometimes people ask me if you can tell whether a department or a programme offers an excellent student experience – as I’ve described it – by some simple test. I think you can. It has nothing to do with contact hours, the time it takes to get a marked assignment returned, the positive ratings of professors by students, the number of staff accredited as competent teachers, or a strong RAE showing.

When I did audits of faculties at Sydney, or judged Swedish university programmes for quality awards, the students I interviewed would sometimes talk about how they saw it as their job to work with the staff to improve the quality of teaching and the experience that future students would enjoy. They felt a responsibility to get involved; they sparkled with liveliness and passion; they belonged on the team. And the staff, for their part, acknowledged their students as partners dedicated to the same goals.

The modern phrase for this is ‘student engagement’, which sounds a bit formal to me. It’s more like an acceptance that we’re jointly accountable for quality. It is an almost certain marker of a programme or a department where the teaching is outstanding and the outcomes will be excellent.

These are exceptional cases. Far too often we fail students by producing graduates who are good at learning facts and solving commonplace problems. They don’t throw themselves with passion and zest into their studies. They wander feebly through their assessments by faithfully repeating what they’ve heard and read.

This is a very poor kind of student experience.

Their lecturers have often developed the skills to get students active and test the knowledge they’ve acquired. They have schooled them to succeed, but not afforded them a higher education. If this sounds harsh, we should remember that like their students, staff are habitually casualties of a system that rewards universities for form-filling and hoop-jumping at the expense of eagerness and meaning. Collaborating with students goes out of the window; meeting the targets takes priority.

What makes higher education higher is insight, energy and imagination. This is the authentic standards issue: we risk not demanding enough from our students and being comfortable with them having only bits and pieces of knowledge. Knowledge is a necessary step towards good judgment, but it doesn’t take you far enough on its own. Self-critical awareness of one’s own ignorance in a subject is the only true precursor of further inquiry.

As Whitehead put it succinctly, ‘You cannot be wise without some basis of knowledge; but you may easily acquire knowledge and remain bare of wisdom’.

There are two secrets to cracking the problem of students who are not being challenged to become critical thinkers: scholarship and leadership.

Scholarship is an all-embracing word for research and the active re-interpretation of knowledge that goes beyond systematic empirical inquiry to the enlivening of  imagination. We have been acclimatised to the idea of research as experimental and pragmatic. But a lot of research is more intuitive, theoretical, puzzling, and uncertain than this implies.

What has scholarship to do with university teaching? A couple of years ago my colleagues and I tried to tie down the volatile idea of a ‘research-teaching nexus’ – (the old question about whether researchers make the best university teachers) — by interviewing successful academic researchers about their teaching.

Unexpectedly, it all became clear: the researchers who were good at teaching – who went about it by focusing on students and their learning (rather than their own teaching performance or transmitting information) – weren’t those who necessarily produced the most research. They were the ones who focused on the underlying structure of their investigations, on the broad conceptual framework of their subject, rather than isolated individual problems in it – the ones who were scholars in their discipline.

So asking whether researchers teach better or worse is asking the wrong question. It isn’t how active you are as a researcher, it’s what your research activity concentrates on. When you think about it, it makes sense – the lecturers who see the whole picture of their subject are the ones who can most help students to learn it.

It’s time to make use of this evidence in improving university teaching. Higher education needs people who are scholars in their disciplines rather than narrow specialists. This is more than ever true, now that research and teaching overlap in activities such as the production and use of knowledge across organisations. The world depends on the broadest distribution of knowledge in a way it never used to.

There are other reasons why research and teaching should get closer, including, as Peter Scott has argued, the need to validate and underpin an institution’s reputation, the rapid growth of postgraduate study, and the certainty that higher education students themselves appreciate the intellectual stimulus that comes from being energised through contact with the production of knowledge – by contact with lecturers who are also scholars. Higher education works best when it’s a partnership – between students, their teachers, and learning.

Unfortunately this all goes in a direction contrary to the one that UK higher education pursued after about 1995. In a telling critique of academic policy making, Duna Sabri has shown how the trend since then has been towards separating teaching from academic careers. Teaching has gradually been labelled as an activity that is professionally different from scholarship and research.

I remember battling at the Higher Education Academy, generally unsuccessfully, to overcome the attitude which said that the best means of enhancing the status of university teaching was to do down the academic as scholar. In vain did I try to dump unhelpful terminology such as ‘practitioners’ (instead of ‘lecturers’ or ‘academics’) from its lexicon.

The subject centres of the HEA were an exception. They steered clear of the flawed concept of improving professionalism in teaching through denying academic identity. Knowledge generation and knowledge exchange through teaching are properly indivisible. Subject matter is important, not just how you teach it.

That is why we so urgently need, for our students’ sake, to revitalise academic scholarship.

This takes us to leadership. If leadership is about anything, it is about optimism for the future. We are short of invigorating talk about university teaching. Direction and hope from governments and agencies are strikingly absent. Instead the discourse is chiefly one of timid pragmatism, heavily spiced with the language of centralist control. I can’t imagine a less exciting vision than forcing every lecturer to ‘qualify’ as a university teacher.

As the President of Penn State recently reminded us, government regulation has never created great universities. It will never create a great student experience either.

There is no technical fix, mandated or otherwise, for the problem of improving the quality of university teaching. We can only stimulate, incentivise and inspire it. Books and websites of the ‘3000 tips on feedback’ type profess to offer easy solutions for teaching in universities. They face a fruitless task because they focus on the methods and signs of teaching rather than what the methods and signs are meant to address. They are part of the attitude that puts efficient delivery and compliance with rules above questioning what it is we are providing.

We need to look at teaching the other way round. It is the content of subjects that matters above all else: what students are expected to learn, how they go about learning it, and how we can help them develop their understanding of it. Feeling you have something to say about your subject, and then thinking about it from the point of view of your students, are the two prerequisites of high quality teaching.

We need an agile system and spirited leadership, free from bossy interference, to kindle its fire.

The rationale for university teaching is not satisfying students or distributing information to them. Nor is it even to change students, as some people condescendingly say. Rather it is to enable students to change for themselves.

The essential leadership message about improving teaching is that the same principles apply to helping lecturers teach better. What will inspire both our students and our colleagues is the belief that reasoning out problems for yourself is the greatest gift that higher education has to offer.

The report on Enhancing and Developing the National Student Survey came out today, 3 August 2010. It was commissioned by the Higher Education Funding Council for England, and written by a team from Centre for Higher Education Studies at the Institute of Education. I was the project leader. *

Main messages:

The NSS has been one of the success stories of the quality assurance system for higher education.

It has generated a groundswell of growing confidence. Institutional representatives like its transparency, consistency and reliability. They are using it imaginatively. Student representatives are strongly in favour of the NSS, and have put its results to practical use.

As David Watson (one of my colleagues on the review team) has said, this is an asset to be treated with care.

The NSS has been actively deployed to improve quality in universities. This was originally intended to be one of its minor functions, but it’s become a dominant one. The people we interviewed agreed that the most positive practical outcomes are improvements to the student learning experience by individual higher education institutions, often with the support of their students’ unions.

The report recommends, among other things:

• Making even more use of the results of the NSS  to enhance the student experience
• Encouraging universities to report the changes they’ve made to the student experience because of NSS results
• Developing a version of the NSS for postgraduate students
• Not adding more questions to the NSS
• Not replacing the NSS with other types of survey, such as the North American National Survey of Student Engagement
• Not using it to make inappropriate comparisons, such as league tables of universities (the differences are usually too small to mean anything — not that this will have any effect on people who believe in meaningless comparisons, of course)
• Reviewing the whole thing more fully in 2015

The members of the project team were Denise Batchelor, Alison Peacock, Paul Temple, David Watson and me.

I have to say that I was surprised by the overwhelmingly positive attitude shown to the NSS by the university managers, academics and students whom we interviewed. Owing to their efforts, it really has made a difference to the quality of the student learning experience.

And that must be a good thing.

*Note: As you’ll read about elsewhere on this site, the NSS is based on the Australian Course Experience Questionnaire (CEQ) — which I developed in the 1990s. However, I wasn’t involved in the construction of the NSS and I have no special commitment to it. The reason for the positive reporting here is that people in our interviews said very good things about the NSS.

But the ‘core’ (as he put it) of the student experience (teaching, curriculum, assessment) should never fall prey to consumerism. The central part should be a joint venture between academics and students, with students in a vital but unavoidably junior role.

So he could maintain that students wouldn’t tolerate paying more for the same, or less, and that students will get more demanding, while retaining the view that teaching and learning should remain a cooperative endeavour.

Of course, some aspects of the student experience cover both the core and the services – such as contact hours with lecturers, or learning aids for disabled students. This is a problem, but not an insuperable one.

At the end of the session, Aaron risked a quick poll of the audience on the issue of how much (if anything) students’ contributions to the cost of their tuition in England should increase.

When a clear majority of those present voted for the option that there should be no restriction on what universities could charge (‘no cap’), he jumped down from the stage and shook his head in dismay.

The final word can be left to the President of Penn State, Graham Spanier, who reminded the conference that ‘Government regulation has never created great universities’.

Hope Vince and David are listening…

1. The student experience in the UK is a victim of its own success. Higher education is reluctant to admit it, but teaching and learning must be constantly re-invented if they’re to remain outstanding.

2. Teaching in higher education matters – probably much more than you think.

3. There are simple tests to assess whether a department or a programme offers an excellent student experience – I gave some examples of what they are.

4. We need to extend and inspire students if we’re going to produce graduates who are resilient and resourceful. That requires a certain kind of teaching.

5. Threats to maintaining the UK’s leadership in university teaching are unnecessary administrative processes and an emphasis on the signs of quality rather than the substance.

6. We have to revitalise the idea of academic scholarship. Effective undergraduate teaching requires a more robust link between knowledge production, scholarship and the student experience.

7. We need more vigorous, belief-driven leadership for teaching by national agencies and governments, as well as in universities.

I’m preparing a feature scheduled to appear in Times Higher Education, July 29 edition, which will be based on my speech. Watch this space for any updates.

The aim of the project is to review the efficiency, effectiveness and use of the NSS. Should it be updated or improved in the future?

The project team (Denise Batchelor, Alison Peacock, Paul Temple, David Watson and me) is based at the Institute of Education.

If you’d like to make any comments on the NSS, please drop me a line here.

Here’s an edited version of my talk, which was called ‘Teaching and the student experience: towards a joint venture’:

I want to speak today about the present, but also about the future.

This is the moment for something that we see very little of in politics and higher education just now. A time for vision and ambition rather than covering one’s back, bickering at rivals, bunkering down, and bemoaning reductions in taxpayer funding.

It’s nearly two years since John Denham, as Secretary of State with responsibility for universities, invited me and several others to contribute to a debate about important policy issues for the higher education sector. He asked me to write about teaching and the student experience, a topic to which I have devoted most of my professional life. Some of what I recommended found its way into government policy, but as is the way with politics, a good deal disappeared. Most of that part was the imaginative material about setting us up for what might happen in 10-15 years time.

The point of my contribution was to argue that we need to produce graduates who can play a full part in shaping and responding to the uncertain world of the future. They’ll have to find resources of courage, resilience and empathy that traverse national boundaries, no matter what subject they’ve studied. To do this, I said they’d require a different kind of student experience. And that in turn will demand remodelled curricula, new quality systems, different funding models, and a more flexible academic workforce. I am not going to talk about all that today, but about the essential underpinning that can make it happen.

The foundation of it all is a rather radical vision of student engagement – the idea of higher education as a joint venture between providers and students.

That’s not an appeal to nostalgia, to the fictional days when teachers and students learned together in a kind of hazy glow of self-satisfied academic bliss. It’s a practical way of ensuring quality and high standards. It’s based on personal observation and research evidence.

These coincide in my experiences of evaluating the quality of programmes in formal audits in Australia and Sweden. One thing that marked out the really high quality, high standards places was what the students said about their role in improving teaching and courses. Students in the top programmes invariably said they saw it as their job to work with staff to enhance quality, and gave concrete examples of how they did it. And they said it with immense enthusiasm.

This is at the other end of the scale from the consumer model of higher education, which makes the student experience into something that is determined by what the university offers rather by what the student can bring. It’s an out of date, intellectually barren and factually untrue way of looking at the student experience. I prefer the positions of the National Union of Students and the National Student Forum on the matter. An engaged partnership, with students playing a part in shaping teaching, curriculum, assessment, and quality processes, produces the best outcomes for students.

Now here is the central idea. Not hard, but it needs a little thought to grasp it thoroughly.

Fundamental to the idea of partnership is the fact that that the student experience is created by students in their contact with higher education. They are integral to the formation of the experience. Their relationship with higher education determines the quality of their learning and thus the standards they achieve. Students who are passive consumers, searching for ‘satisfaction’, learn at best an imitation of the subjects they’re studying. But students who are active partners in a learning relationship understand, remember, and can apply what they’ve learned to new problems, new worlds, new challenges. They become resourceful and confident. They can think for themselves. They can create imaginative solutions to real world problems.  They are ready to become the kind of graduates this country will need in the future.

If my analysis is right, then we should be actively promoting more student engagement and building on the growing recognition that students have a major role to play in the enhancement of teaching and assessment. Let’s not forget that we already have a system of HE that supports an outstanding student experience. I don’t share the dystopian vision of a system that’s broken. Universities and colleges are already positioning students as engaged collaborators rather than inferior partners in assessment, teaching, course planning and the improvement of quality, and are using student representatives as central contributors to the business of enhancing the student experience. Let’s do more of it, let’s incentivise it.

But how?

Well, not through more exhortations by governments (or would be governments) and funders, vague ideas about linking teaching quality to resource allocation, and a scary desire for more state control.[1]

We can do it more effectively if we forget about party politics and ideology. Let’s make funding follow students and reduce universities’ reliance on public funding as a major income source. This dependence feeds the arrogant, clique-ridden, controlling and inward-looking qualities that are the worst features of academic culture. Universities as a whole still do a poor job of convincing the public of their usefulness. Struggling with rationed resources makes them ill-fitted to see beyond themselves. The endemic misunderstandings among the public and politicians of standards and quality that surface in the media from time to time are a symptom of this quaint attitude. No wonder governments want to keep control.

This is the time for a fresh declaration of university independence. They have lived on short commons and been led on a tight leash for too long. This implies student-driven funding, meaning a proportionate payment from graduates to their education in the form of a higher deferred loan, the freedom for universities to enrol as many students as they wish, and some serious input from business to student support. The opportunity for all students to choose to pay their fee up front is essential if we are to have a fair system and is not a new idea. It a very well established practice in Australia, the country from which we borrowed the idea of the deferred loan as a solution to the student contribution problem in the first place.

There will be tradeoffs; as Isaiah Berlin cogently remarked, “The notion of the perfect whole, the ultimate solution, in which all the good things co-exist seems to me.. to be conceptually incoherent… We are doomed to choose, and every choice may entail an irreparable loss”. We’ve already seen from the pained and exaggerated reaction to recent government actions concerning university finance that it will not be simple for them to relinquish the comfort blanket of assured public funding.

Independence is not a recipe for anarchy and self-referential preening. It will not be easy for universities: they will have to accept the negative externalities of this more market-based approach. This will require controls to mitigate the inefficiency of competition for students based on imbalanced positional power (‘top’ universities may or may not offer the best student experience, for example) and more importantly, to guarantee quality and standards.

There no room in my vision for the naïve view that the market alone will assure a high quality student experience. The present government has been wedded to this idea of the student as consumer for a long time, showing a remarkable capacity to tolerate the incompatible concepts of more centralised state control and intense belief in the cleansing power of free markets. The belief that we can improve quality by providing students with more information about what they can expect is part of the government’s plans in Higher Ambitions and indeed was the original reasoning behind the National Student Survey in 2001.

It would seem that the Conservatives share the same brash confidence in market forces. Fees are a good thing, not because they provide a basis for supporting a high quality system, but because they turn students into savvy buyers: “The arrival of the student consumer has the power to force universities to think much harder about what they are offering, and thus to drive up quality” says the recent Policy Exchange report.

My aspiration is different. Despite the constraints needed to handle externalities, the net effect of a student demand driven policy, plus the increased resources realised by a non-discriminatory approach to fees, will be that the system will grow. This will enable more fairness in provision, because expanding higher education systems create opportunities for more students to benefit. And higher education, in my view, is a good that deserves the widest possible distribution.

This is the infrastructure that will enable us to realise the goal of higher education as a collaborative effort between academic teachers and students. This is my vision: a student experience based on sustainable funding will lead to the imaginative and resourceful graduates we will need to take us into tomorrow.

[1] “The Government must compel universities to collect data or assist in the collection of data on employability, salary outcomes, contact hours, class sizes and teacher numbers, as part of a deal for introducing fees. In return for higher fees universities should guarantee a significant investment of time and resource in maintaining and improving the quality of experience students will receive”. More Fees Please? Policy Exchange, February 2010. My emphasis.