Memorandum 63
Submission from Oxford Brookes University
STUDENTS AND
UNIVERSITIES INQUIRY
Summary
— Continued growth in the sector is important
for economic and social reasons, including widening participation.—
Improvement in school performance is central to widening participation,
and universities can play a part in this.— The issue of
admission to the most selective universities has the potential
to be a distraction from the central issues.— On international
benchmarks there is no evidence to suggest that teaching is overfunded
in comparison with research or vice versa.
— Selectivity in research funding is inevitable,
but increasing the gradient of funding would not be helpful.
— Innovative teaching is best supported
by providing adequate funding for teaching, although the subject
centres and CETLs have been useful. There is a need to look for
ways of rewarding universities for excellent teaching.
— Additional capital investment in universities
would provide economic and environmental benefits.
— Teaching at HE level needs to be supported
by CPD. Existing subject networks are working well. Assessing
excellent teaching is not easy.
— HEFCE is a funding body and its role
in monitoring quality is and should be limited. Quality monitoring
undertaken in relation to health and teacher education is onerous.
— The issue of degree classifications needs
to be kept in proportion. The system is probably nearing the end
of its useful life, and a gradualist approach to change is appropriate.
— Plagiarism can be dealt with through
the use of detection software, and through changing assessment
practice, and Oxford Brookes University is taking an important
role in this area.
ADMISSIONS
1. it is very important that the Government
maintains targets for the expansion of higher education for the
following reasons:
It is a necessary condition for widening
participation. If participation rates overall remain stable, it
is unlikely that higher education, or Government, will be able
to broaden access by under-represented groups when that broadening
would have to be at the expense of groups who are already participating
and have clear expectations of their continued ability to participate.
Current participation rates are still below
those of many other developed countries. In a global economy in
which intellectual assets are increasingly the dominant driver
of success, having a highly educated population will be vital
to the future of the UK. The Leitch report suggests that we currently
have a significant skills gap in the working population now, and
that this is so large that it cannot be met simply by recruiting
more 18 year olds into higher education, so that we need to grow
participation by those already in the workforce.
Whether the specific target of 50% is "right"
or not is not very important. The key issue is to continue to
allow the sector to grow. There is plenty of evidence that there
is demand there to support meeting the target. Over recent years,
the limiting factor on the sector has been the availability of
Additional Student Numbers to fund growth, not demand.
2. With regard to widening participation
initiatives, much has been done to break down barriers to participation
through low aspirations, and information barriers, although the
existing efforts made by universities and others must continue.
A major barrier to participation is poor achievement at GCSE and
low staying on rates post-16. A major research programme into
raising school achievement, combined with work which ensures that
evidence of effective practice is transferred to schools, could
make a real and sustained difference to participation by underrepresented
groups.
3. It is unfortunate that the Government
seems to have spent a disproportionate amount of energy on the
issue of students from low participation backgrounds accessing
the most selective universities, as opposed to the key issue of
raising participation in higher education. Admission to HE should,
of course, be "fair". In general, universities and their
staff are strongly motivated to admit the candidates who are best
qualified to do well in their institution. For all their shortcomings,
the fairest criteria in this regard are bound to be the existing
nationally assessed qualifications held by applicants. While it
is reasonable to ask institutions to make efforts to make some
allowances for differences in opportunity, our main attention
ought to be focused on reducing those differences. There is a
real risk that arguments about fairness of admission to elite
institutions can become a diversion from the real issues.
THE BALANCE
BETWEEN TEACHING
AND RESEARCH
4. Teaching and research are both core to
the mission of higher education, and in a zero sum game it would
be dangerous to assume that there is anything to be gained from
shifting the balance. International comparisons suggest that the
UK produces more high quality research per pound of public expenditure
on research than other developed countries. This suggests that
there is no "fat" in research budgets. Reductions in
research spending would lead to less research and/or lesser quality.
Similarly, spending on teaching per head is relatively low.
5. The current selective allocation of research
funding is inevitable given the very high cost of international
research, especially in STEM subjects. Further intensification
of that level of selectivity would be a mistake because:
All universities must employ some staff who conduct
research if the UK sector's brand is to be maintained.
Greater selectivity would worsen the sector's
existing tendency to be static. It cannot be healthy for some
universities to know that they can never progress beyond a certain
point, or for others to be confident that they will never lose
their position.
Less research intensive universities employ staff
who are strongly motivated to undertake research, some of whom
will move on and attain international prominence in other universities.
6. The best way to develop innovative teaching
is to fund universities adequately and enable them to compete
in recruiting the best students. That said, there is a role for
overarching subject organisations, and for the CETL projects.
Oxford Brookes University is proud to host two subject centres
and two CETLs, and we believe that they have brought significant
benefit to the sector.
7. The integration of learning and teaching
and research is an important issue and our joint CETL with the
University of Warwick, the Reinvention Centre, is focused on integrating
research into the undergraduate curriculum.
8. There is a real dilemma in rewarding
excellence in teaching at university level. Excellent research
draws in more competitive funding through the rae and research
councils. Providing an excellent student experience promotes the
reputation of the institution and enhances its ability to select
the best students, but it does not lead to opportunities to grow
and offer that experience to more students, as the growth of the
sector overall is constrained, and the funding model is designed
to allow for the redistribution of funding only in a very slow
and indirect way, in part to avoid destabilising institutions
in difficulty. A free market in home student recruitment, with
funding following students directly, and no cap on the growth
of individual institutions, would reward success, but perhaps
at the price of unacceptable levels of turbulence in the system.
A degree of rebalancing away from block grant for T would provide
greater incentives to offer a high quality student experience
without risking institutional failure at an unacceptable level.
9. As with other parts of the public sector,
universities struggle with an inheritance of poor quality buildings
from the 1960s and 70s. The problem is being tackled, and the
HEFCE EMS statistics show progress in reducing backlog maintenance
and improving condition and functional suitability. Progress is
necessarily limited by availability of funds. Additional capital
funding would enable universities to accelerate investment in
infrastructure which would help to boost the economy and offset
the decline in construction in the private sector. Given that
modern buildings and refurbishments are being designed to meet
much higher standards of environmental performance there is also
a case to be made in terms of reducing long term energy costs
and contributing to sustainability targets.
10. Initial training for academic staff
in learning and teaching is now securely in place across the sector.
The next challenge is to embed CPD for staff as they move through
their careers. As in other areas of professional practice, there
is a need for a sound evidence base on what promotes effective
learning, and mechanisms for ensuring that this is reflected in
practice across the sector. The subject centres have proved to
be effective in this latter role. At Oxford Brookes as at other
universities, we have criteria in place for rewarding excellent
teaching. Gathering objective evidence of excellence is more challenging
than it is in the research arena. Greater incentives to institutions
to achieve excellent teaching might encourage a greater focus
on rewards to staff. There is a role for teaching only staff in
HE, but the proposition that there is a large number of high quality
staff who wish to work in higher education and have no wish to
undertake research is not borne out by experience.
11. HEFCE is a funding council, and its
role in quality and standards is to ensure that its funding methodology
supports their maintenance, and that institutions are properly
accountable for how the money is spent. Higher education is appropriately
regulated in general by the QAA and, where appropriate, by professional
bodies. We do have some concerns about the onerous nature of the
quality regimes in health and teacher training, and their interaction
with contract compliance.
13. We support the gradualist approach to
exploring other approaches which will, in due course, replace
the current classification system. It would be optimistic to think
that employers will, in general, have the capacity to make use
of a very detailed profile in selection, as opposed to using grade
point averages, at least at the initial stage in the selection
process. Recent remarks by the Chief Executive of the QAA were
unhelpful and exaggerated the scale of the problem with the current
system, which employers of our graduates do not raise as an issue.
Nonetheless, classifying degrees is probably an approach which
is nearing the end of its useful life, and we need to prepare
for something new in an orderly fashion.
14. Plagiarism is clearly a matter of concern
but the term covers a wide spectrum of issues from poor referencing
to deliberate cheating, and there is a risk that this is not widely
understood outside HE. The Assessment Standards CETL at Oxford
Brookes has undertaken valuable work on how assessments can be
structured to minimise plagiarism, and alongside clear articulation
of expectations to students, and processes for detecting and dealing
with plagiarism, it is a manageable issue.
STUDENT SUPPORT
AND ENGAGEMENT
15. The key issue in student support is
the continued gulf between the levels of support available to
full- and part-time students. This distorts the existing market
by encouraging students to study full-time rather than part-time.
It also prevents the participation of part-time students who would
study if they could access equivalent levels of support to full-timers.
January 2009
|
