Examination of Witnesses (Questions 64
- 79)
MONDAY 23 MARCH 2009
PROFESSOR BERNARD
LONGDEN, PROFESSOR
LIN NORTON
AND PROFESSOR
MANTZ YORKE
Q64 Chairman: We welcome our second
panel this afternoon: Professor Bernard Longden, of Liverpool
Hope University; Professor Lin Norton from Liverpool Hope University;
and Professor Mantz Yorke from Lancaster University, formerly
from John Moores University. Can we say that we have enjoyed very
much your written submissions to the inquiry and we found those
very, very interesting indeed. I am going to start with you, Professor
Norton. The key recommendations which the Flying Start project
make appear to concern A levels and putting greater emphasis on
analysis, evaluation and argument. Are the main levers to widening
participation in higher education outside the reach of universities?
Should we in fact be looking somewhere totally different if we
are going to have in 10 years' time or 20 years' time a university
population that more adequately represents the society that we
know?
Professor Norton: I think in terms
of levers the question that you are asking is very complex. I
do believe that what is required at A level is very different
from what is required at university level. I believe that students
see assessment as the curriculum. We know that assessment drives
the learning and how students perceive the curriculum. We also
know that there are big differences between what is required at
A level and what is required at university, so I think in terms
of your question about levers, what I would like to put forward
is that there is a need for greater synergy between higher education
lecturers and A level tutors.
Q65 Chairman: There is a totally
different concept at A level, is there not really, in terms of
processing students through those programmes. Students often talk—and
I am sure I speak for all my colleagues—about getting through
the modules, there is not that sort of engagement with the subject
matter, that sort of analysis and that sort of empathy with the
material. I am a philosopher by background so I think about these
things. Do you feel that there is that huge gap? Whose job is
it to fill it? Is it the job of the schools, is it home, or is
it the university?
Professor Norton: I think there
is a huge gap. I think it is the job of both the universities
and the schools working together. I think that transition between
what is required at A level tends to be content-focused. Students
are, for very good reasons, and I understand those reasons because
schools are under pressure, taught to the test and are very much
guided in a step-by-step process, and are given the opportunity
to have many goes and drafts at a piece of assessment, and tend
to be given feedback formatively very, very quickly. They come
to university and they are expected to be independent learners.
Often the assessment is high stakes assessment and often the feedback
is at a single point rather than continuous, so I think this is
a big gap between what our students are experiencing at A level.
Q66 Chairman: So what should we be
doing about it?
Professor Norton: I think what
we need to be doing about it is for there to be greater awareness
and staff development in universities to understand what is going
on in A levels. I do not think that lecturers always understand
what the curriculum is like at A level, for example. I think it
is a two-way thing. School teachers should be persuaded to understand
what goes on in the first year at university. I think there should
be more synergy between the two.
Q67 Chairman: Professor Longden and
Professor Yorke, we found your papers on the link between non-completion
and a student's willingness to adopt good study habits a really
quite fascinating piece of work, but if by the time they arrive
at university students have not acquired that ability to be able
to work and study independently, the likelihood, as you have pointed
out in your research, is that they are going to drop out, and
they have a greater chance of dropping out of the system altogether.
Surely if a university knows that, it ought in fact to be putting
into place various activities or programmes to stop that happening,
should it not?
Professor Longden: You would think
so, yes.
Q68 Chairman: Why are they not?
Professor Longden: I suppose the
business about students who do not complete appears to be a complicated
problem or puzzle, and I suppose it is only in the last 10 or
so years that we have tried to go behind the numbers to try and
make some sort of sense of what are the key factors, what are
the gears that are causing this to happen. Once that insight is
provided, how do you then embed it inside institutions so that
they pick it up and they go with it? Some institutions do and
are very concerned about retention and they are active. Others
look at it and simply say, "That is interesting," but
no further than that, "We are just looking at it and we will
carry on doing what we have been doing in the past." It is
not seen as an institutional problem; it is seen as the students'
problem. It is about saying to both parties that there is an element
contributed by the student there but there is also quite a considerable
element which is the responsibility of the institution to pick
up and to do something about reducing its impact.
Q69 Chairman: Professor Yorke, do
you support that view?
Professor Yorke: Yes, I was once
interviewed for a job, and the first question I got was if you
were going to be Minister of Education what would you like to
do? My reaction, after a nanosecond's thought, was I would like
to streamline the education system right through from primary
to university so in a sense you anticipate the potential problem
and deal with it, and you do not have a whole series of things
that seem to be rather disconnected one from the other. You would
not have this big jump from A level into university in terms of
the expectations on students. I think really we are almost doing
a sticking plaster job here in that universities often have to
come to terms with students who have learned in a particular way,
and have to do something about it. When modular schemes first
came in—and this was late 1980s' thinking, particularly
by the institution I was in then—the argument was that we
need to have flexibility and we will run semesterised programmes
rather than year-long programmes. The problem with that is that
it does not give students much time to acclimatise to what higher
education is about. It is interesting that there has been something
of a shift backwards to year-long full-time modules, so the students
do actually get a degree of formative assessment back in. One
department which learned of the switch back said that it did not
need to do any assessment until the summer, which I did not think
had quite caught the point of the change, but there we are. There
is a big structural and strategic issue which is important, but
I think within the higher education community we are dealing with
a part of that and taking it slightly out of context.
Q70 Chairman: Professor Norton, one
of the Flying Start recommendations is that university academics
should be trained to increase "their awareness of students'
pre-university experiences of learning, teaching and assessment".
What does that mean? When you think of how many students are entering
universities at the moment, 43 per cent of 18 to 25-year-olds,
it is not possible, is it?
Professor Norton: I think it is
possible. What that recommendation is about is raising awareness
of what the student experience is of assessment and being assessed
at A level. If I can give you an example, in psychology there
has been a research project where FE[3]
students and HE[4]
students have very, very different understandings of what is required
in the first year at university, and what this research study
found was that FE students tended to be very confident about what
was expected, but their confidence is aligned around content and
around the surface approach to learning, whereas the HE students
were much more aware of critical argument and structuring your
answer and that it is not about content. What I am saying is that
there is a need for staff at universities to understand that students
are coming from a very different context. That can be done in
a lot of different ways. It can be done through staff development
sessions. It can be done through seminars. It can be done through
bringing together communities of practice. It can be done through
teaching qualifications such as post-graduate certificates in
teaching and learning in higher education, so I think there is
a number of ways in which it can be done. What I see is a clear
disjunction of understanding as to what goes on in the two separate
sectors.
Q71 Mr Marsden: If I could just stick
for a moment with that scenario, Professor Norton. It seems to
us, and certainly seems to me, that most if not all of the recommendations
that Flying Start has made make admirable common sense, but the
issue surely is how you do something about implementing them.
One of the problems, is it not, is that we have a situation where
again, to refer back to the previous session, all the things that
you talk about, incentivising, making staff aware and all the
rest of it, are good things in themselves, but there is no incentive
in the system for lecturers in HE to do it, is there? If I was
John Denham and I was sitting here saying, "You have done
a great report, Professor Norton, now tell me how I actually implement
this in practical terms?" what would you be saying to him?
Professor Norton: I think what
I would be saying—and I do understand the difference between
how teaching is rewarded and seen and perceived and how research
is rewarded and seen and perceived—it is a slow process,
but I think it is happening. For example, in our own university,
Liverpool Hope University, it is clearly written into our promotions
criteria that we would expect that, over and above being a really
good lecturer, to be promoted from lecturer to senior lecturer
to principal lecturer. I can see that rewarding staff for teaching
as well as for research is something that is happening, perhaps
not as quickly as we would want it to happen but it is happening.
I think there is student pressure for it to happen even more,
so I think there are external drivers.
Q72 Mr Marsden: In my own area, I
trained as an historian and I have talked a lot to my colleagues
in the Historical Association and indeed in the North West Historical
Society about this disjunction between HE and A level. One of
the things that used to happen 20 or 30 years ago was that people
in HE used to set exam questions for A level. They very seldom
do these days. Is this issue of teaching to the test and the disjunction
between HE and secondary education a problem?
Professor Norton: I think that
is a problem and I think HE lecturers joining in with exam boards
to set exam papers and assessment criteria would be a very good
move.
Q73 Mr Marsden: Professors Longden
and Yorke, can I come on now to some of your recent research.
Is it the case—because again there are lots of statistics
flying around—that non-completion rates are actually rising,
because the overall data on the HESA website appears to show that
those rates are stable or even improving?
Professor Longden: I think they
are broadly stable.
Q74 Mr Marsden: If they are broadly
stable, is this an area that we should be worried about? Should
we be worried about the implications of widening participation
in terms of completion rates?
Professor Longden: If you go for
a mean for universities then, fine, maybe it is stable, but maybe
you need to dig behind that in order to see what individual institutions
are doing, whether they are increasing or decreasing. There is
quite a wide variation from 30 per cent non-completion rates right
down to virtually zero. You have got a very, very mixed population,
and I suppose you need to go in behind all of that to see what
on earth is happening to individuals and what they are doing.
Q75 Mr Marsden: Drilling down a little
bit further in that area, one implication of what you have said,
and again I am putting it in a slightly loaded way, and it is
a loaded way that has been put in media and policy-makers' comments,
would be that government has asked a certain group of universities
in particular to take up the brunt of widening participation,
but at the end of the day HEFCE have not been quick enough to
respond to the funding implications of that and, in fact, when
these universities—and they are predominantly but not exclusively
post-`92 universities—have taken up the challenge and when
their completion rates have faltered slightly as a result they
have got it in the neck from the Daily Mail and various
other people and therefore that is a discouragement to them to
proceed down that path. Is that a fair analysis?
Professor Longden: It is: it is
not just the image that is being presented in the papers but it
is also the funding implication that sits behind that. If you
take a risk in taking on a student who may not complete, you can
put some sort of value on that. Why would you take that student
on if you know there is a real risk that the student will not
complete the course, and, therefore, as it used to be up until
this year, you received no funding whatsoever for that student
for the whole year? They may progress through near to the exam
date and then withdraw. I know that has been covered now in the
changes to the funding but it was the situation for well over
12 years, certainly to my knowledge and experience, which then
had an adverse effect within institutions, a reluctance, if you
like, to take the risk.
Professor Yorke: Can I add a bit
to that.
Q76 Mr Marsden: Very briefly because
we are running a bit short of time.
Professor Yorke: It is important
to think about the time that it takes for people to complete.
The way the methodology works at the moment is that the HESA stats
have a particularly narrow view of what completion might be. If
you look at the data from the States you find institutions vary
very considerably about the time it takes for a student to complete.
The elite institutions take three or four years, but commuter
institutions, awkward areas, much longer and the rates are much
lower. The issue there is about the capacity of the students to
cope. If we are talking about widening participation we are also
probably mixing that with social class in here as well, and the
ability of people to fund their own studies or be supported by
rich parents. There are a lot of issues mixed up in your question.
Q77 Mr Marsden: Okay, so you are
saying that we are expecting people to complete over too short
a timescale?
Professor Yorke: I have suggested
to the Funding Council a long while ago that we ought to look
at completion per module rather than completion per year block.
It would have the side effect of giving you a better score in
the international statistics as well.
Q78 Mr Marsden: That is always welcome
to civil servants. Can I move on to another part of your memorandum
and that is the issue regarding part-time students. Professor
Longden, perhaps I can start with you and ask you what more do
you think institutions as a whole (because we know certain institutions
are doing it very well) can do to help part-time students?
Professor Longden: If they make
a commitment to offer part-time study, then I suppose they have
got to take on the costs and the implications of providing a programme
of study which is fit for purpose. When you look through the transcripts
of students who wrote in the survey that we completed last year,
it came up so many times that the students were feeling that they
were "invisible" and that they were treated as if they
were "full time". It is about the institutions in a
way, and if they are taking that on as a means of delivery, then
they are taking on the implications that follow behind it.
Q79 Mr Marsden: Related to that,
Professor Yorke, again in your memorandum you point to the difficulties
that part-time students can sometimes have in forming bonds among
themselves. Is that something institutions could help with? Perhaps
the other question, which is an interesting one because we have
already have student panels and sessions on this inquiry and the
previous ones, which is one or two full-time students have remarked
to us, and I am talking about full-time students now, that they
got a great deal out of sitting alongside part-time mature students,
but presumably the opportunity for that in many universities is
somewhat circumscribed?
Professor Yorke: I do not know
about the levels of that but I imagine that must be the case.
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