left to my own devices – occasional thoughts on higher education

One of the responses on LinkedIn to my last post on OfS delays very fairly pointed out that while there are cultural issues at the OfS that feed into this problem, sometimes it’s down to some of the requirements/restrictions of the legislation under which they’re operating.

That was a particularly helpful reminder over the last couple of weeks when as part of the day job I’ve been looking at the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, and particularly the OfS consultation on its free speech complaints scheme.

the wrong answer

The Act is the wrong answer to a valid, if overstated, issue.  It has made worse rather than better the already challenging task of managing the rights of academic freedom and free speech alongside other rights and duties (e.g. as set out in the Equality Act), creating a minefield whose first notable victim has been the HE Minister who took the bill through parliament.

The OfS free speech complaints process adds to these problems, but of course the blame for this needs to be laid at the door of the government that passed the law not the agency that is now legally required to implement key elements of a flawed Act.

Which brought me back to a couple of issues I’ve blogged about before: the need for sector frustrations with OfS to be channelled via an acknowledgment that changing the legislative framework it works within will not be a government priority for the foreseeable future; and TEF.

the starting point

It probably reflects my past life as a parliamentary historian, but for me legislation has something of a hypnotic quality.  At least that’s my excuse for the fact that looking at the HE (Freedom of Speech) Act led me back to HERA, and I then ended up at the fateful Section 25 that is the current statutory basis for TEF.

And the thing that’s striking (at least for me) is how broad and non-specific this is.  OfS ‘may make arrangements for a scheme … regarding the quality of, and the standards applied to, higher education that they provide where they apply for such a rating’.

Which suggests a huge amount of room for manoeuvre for any new government, should they want to take advantage of this following the election to make fundamental changes to what we now experience as TEF.  So should they?

This begs a further question: has TEF to date been worth it?

the lived experience

Now is a good time to ask this question.  We finally got the final TEF results just before Christmas, and hopefully it won’t be long until OfS invite the sector join in the evaluation of TEF that it has presumably started by now.

In large part this comes back to TEF’s purposes.

One of the three original purposes of TEF is dead and buried: a pathway to unlocking inflation-linked rises in fee levels.

A second isn’t quite at that stage, but should be.  The suggestion that TEF would provide useful information for applicants was never really borne out in Old TEF.  That may change with New TEF, but for the sake everyone lets hope it doesn’t.

New TEF operates at institution level; students apply for a course at an institution.  There’s a tension there, that isn’t just theoretical.  Two providers found through an OfS boots on the ground inspection not to be meeting all of the B conditions on quality and standards, were given TEF Silver awards that indicate that ‘student experience and student outcomes are typically very high quality’.  ‘Typically’ is doing a lot of work there.  Too much work for the TEF judgment to be of any use for an applicant thinking about where to spend their once-in-a-lifetime undergraduate education voucher.

Of course following the Pearce Review, TEF’s primary purpose was meant to be quality enhancement.  And having invested huge amounts of time and resource into TEF itself, the sector is now sending more scarce resource in that direction through TEF analysis and the ever-popular ‘sharing good practice’.

But is that really how we would choose to spend our time and money?  Is TEF really adding sufficient, genuine value over above all the other enhancement activity in the sector?  Almost certainly not.

the outside view

And that’s before we get into how this all looks to those outside the sector.

TEF 2024 covered the pandemic years.  Herculean efforts were made by staff across the sector to provide effective educational opportunities for students in this period, frequently at a personal cost to staff.  And I still don’t think this is recognised sufficiently.

But if we take a step back, do we really think that what we were able to offer constituted an excellent educational experience as many of our students would have seen it?  Or the wider public?

And we risk something similar for the coming TEF period.

A plummeting unit of resource due to inflation and static fees is bound to impact on the education opportunities we can provide for students.  Yes, efficiency gains will be made.  But enough to counter the impact on the quality of education of hugely reduced resources?  We risk making ourselves look daft, trying to argue on the one hand about the need for additional funding for the sector at the same time that we make a case through TEF that despite plummeting resources our undergraduate provision remains excellent.

the opportunity

So, TEF.  Was it worth it?  It really wasn’t.  And it really isn’t.

But this is somewhere where it is possible to make a difference.  The scope is there within HERA for us to do something significantly different to what we do now, which in all honesty is just a tweaked version of what the DfE landed us all with in 2016.

Drop the name.  Ditch the English exceptionalism and spirit of Edward I that seems to stalk the halls of the DfE; learn from the approaches in place in the UK’s other nations to quality enhancement, instead of making desperate efforts to make TEF an enhancement tool.  Learn from the way in which KEF is able to take a proportionate approach that produces interesting and nuanced outcomes.

There is a better path than the one we’re on at the moment, in respect of TEF.  There is the scope to choose that path.  The sector needs to start making the case, and applying the pressure needed, to make that happen.