left to my own devices – occasional thoughts on higher education

Every now and again it’s good to pause and reflect.  It’s virtually 12 months now since this blog started, so it seems like the right time to think back over the last year’s posts before going on hiatus for (at least) August.

why am i dancing?

One of the things that has surprised me is that there’s a lot more of this blog than I thought there would be.

I thought that I’d post something every four to six weeks, which would have meant about 10 to 14 posts by now. Since my first post in early August last year, I’ve posted 25 times (and this one makes it 26). The ‘occasional thoughts’ of the blog’s strapline have been less ‘occasional’ than I anticipated.

I think that means that when I launched the blog I got it right about the role and importance of writing as a process.  The value of writing lies as much in the thinking it requires, as in the written output itself – process as important as outcome.

I’ve enjoyed the opportunities that the blog has given me to give a little order to my thoughts on some of the aspects of HE to which I’m particularly drawn. That, along with the discussions and comments I’ve had as a result, have been the ‘why’ of the blog.

And I suspect it’s that perspective on the value of the process of writing that underpins my concerns about the stochastic parrot that is AI, which I first worried about in a LinkedIn post published before the launch of this blog …

sad robot world

… concerns to which I subsequently returned a few times in posts on this blog.

Though I’ve posted about my concerns about AI itself, and its role as part of the broader crisis in assessment in higher education, I’ve written about AI much less than I’ve thought about it over the last year, however.  That’s largely because so many people are writing about it so much better than I could (e.g. Helen Beetham, Lawrie Phipps).

And I’m glad that there’s so much insightful analysis being published on this.

There’s a lot of naïve thinking and hype at the moment about the future use and impact of AI, in higher education and public services more generally.  A growing tendency to see AI as the magic money tree that squares the circle of the crisis in public services, and the lack of fiscal space to do much about this.  And that’s as true in universities as anywhere else.  And it’s a worrying trend.

being boring

Predictably (perhaps boringly so) I’ve written a lot about quality assurance.  In part a reflection of my own knowledge and experience, but also as 2023-24 has been an important year as we started to see the working through of the new OfS B Conditions that kicked in in earnest in 2022-23.

A number of the problems that many of us highlighted when OfS ‘consulted’ on the B conditions have been all too evident: the diminishing of the student voice; the inadequacy of an approach too dependent on outcome metrics; the lunacy of the retention of assessed work requirements.

At the same time, it’s not that OfS has trashed a previously perfect QA system.  There were problems with previous approaches to QA, and as much is confirmed by the fact that in the political sphere (though expressed in different ways) we’ve seen concerns about this from both the Tory and Labour parties. An increased emphasis on outcomes as a key element of the QA regulatory framework has the potential to help address some of this – provided it recognises and considers the way that outcomes link to both intent and process/implementation.

While it’s good to see some aspects of this picked up in David Behan’s recently published Independent Review of OfS, I’m still not convinced that this is all being pieced together in such a way that in a few years we’ll think we’re in a better place on the framework for overseeing academic quality and standards than we were in 2024. So I suspect this may be territory I revisit in the future.

this must be the place i’ve waited years to leave

In the second half of the 2010s I spent far too much of my professional life having to engage with TEF.  For my sins, it felt that at the university where I was then working I became the internal face of TEF.  So much so that in order to get through in one piece, fairly early in any discussion of TEF I worked in the phrase ‘institutional TEF is stupid, and subject level TEF is really stupid’.  This had some (limited) success in reducing the number of brickbats I had to dodge.  It also helped that it was what I believed (as the bluntness of TEF medals as an analytical judgment makes about as much sense as one-word OfSTED judgments).

Of course that was Old TEF, and now we’re in the era of New TEF with the results of the first round announced last autumn.  I’ve had less involvement with the New variant, but I’ve still had some and that’s informed my perspective on TEF.  Over the last year my posts have seen my take on New TEF move from questioning, to scepticism to the view that there are few benefits relative to the costs and it should be scrapped.

However, the prospects of pulling back from TEF seem slim, given the apparent enthusiasm for it of others in the sector as set out in the Behan report. I’m still not convinced, for a range of reasons that I might return to in the future.

you only tell me you love me when you’re drunk

It was news, but not much of a surprise, when the House of Lords concluded that something had gone seriously wrong in the relationship between OfS and the HE sector. To describe the relationship as toxic would have been an over-statement. To call it dysfunctional, much less so.

So looking back it’s hardly surprising that I’ve been drawn to aspects of this, such as the always leisurely and at times glacial pace of the regulator; the need to step back and look holistically at OfS’s approach; and the regulator’s approach to the current financial crisis in HE. However, I’ve not just focused on these shortcomings in regulation: I’ve also written about the implications of consumer protection law, and offered a perspective on the emerging ‘tertiary turn’ in thinking about FE, HE and its regulation.

On the broader issue of the sector-regulator relationship, Behan’s Fit for Purpose cites some in the sector as saying that there has been a ‘step change in interactions between the sector and OfS in recent months’ [p.72]. That’s not reflected in anything I’ve heard or witnessed, either directly or in the (admittedly limited) sector circles in which I move.

I think the jury’s very much still out on this one. The reset initiated by the new government last week is the critical juncture for whether the relationship can move on from its troubled past. I suspect though that it’s going to require more self-awareness than was suggested in OfS’s press release in response to the Behan report, and perhaps more personnel changes at OfS than just the replacement of James Wharton as chair by Behan himself.

metamorphosis

There have been a number of posts that go beyond the themes above, branching out into broader issues of organisational character, approaches and behaviours.

Aspects of decision-making; the ways within our universities we’re engaging (or not) with each other in the new environment of hybrid-working; perspectives on values and behavioural frameworks.  Even a post on the rise of how as universities we draw on our internal expertise to think about how and what we do, that amounted to a burst of very uncharacteristic optimism on my part.

I’d link these back to my interest in organisational development and change, but they also help draw out something else that I think I can see across many of the last year’s posts.

hold on

Across all of the areas I’ve sketched out above, I’m struck by two themes that run through all of the areas and many of the posts.

One is the crucial role of purpose.  It’s probably not there in all the posts, but it’s explicit in a lot of them and implicit in others.  The way that so much does, and must, come back to matters of purpose in some way or other.  The importance of thinking about, understanding and linking back to the why of what we do.  Not an original insight, but one that bears repeating.

The other theme is the notion of universities as a communities.  An academic community, and an academic community broadly defined to include students and professional services. This is what we are, and must always underpin how as individual universities and as a sector as a whole we address the opportunities and challenges we face.

The financial pressures that the sector as a whole, and individual universities, are now facing pose potentially significant threats to both of these things.  Threats that can be met and managed, but only if conscious choices are made to hold on to the purpose and sense of community that underpin our universities.