When I agreed to write a blog I was an experienced law tutor. And then I felt the harsh realities of what government policies meant. I’m a gamekeeper turned poacher as I’ve chosen to go back to university as a student. In the new context I’m going to expand my brief a little so there will be more than my area of law and how the tutor sees life but also what the student perspective is on HE.
HE . Facing its biggest shake up in years.
It will be a very different world again when the dust settles. When all the fees are finally published. When the financial structure becomes clear. When David Willets finally makes decisions that can be relied upon by the V-Cs.
Shortly before I left my job I was asked by a couple of students how to get into HE. It was so tempting to say run away – at least over the next couple of years. The job has changed so much and will continue to evolve. In the 1990s it was a lot easier to break into lecturing. As well as the traditional route of taking on teaching to supplement an income while on a Ph.D, part-time teaching was much more generally available to ‘good chaps’ (or chapesses) that had been through the system at the institution in question or had a supportive tutor on the inside to write a favourable reference. Lack of research wasn’t an automatic bar to a full-time post nor was the lack of a master’s degree. But change was upon us. The introduction of the Research Assessment Exercise and the comparative lack of reward for teaching meant that the game changed. Money was tied to research output. This had a peculiar impact on many academics. For those who were research active, the class contact hours dropped to almost negligible. For those who had little research or no research profile, that door was firmly closed by teaching loads rising to a point that meaningful research was impossible. Now, for an entry level post in even a middle rank university an applicant is expected to have a Ph.D or be close to completion. To have published research of four star quality. To have made grant applications. And if the candidate is successful, the mantra is now publish or perish. How effective a teacher the new appointee is seems to be a very subsidiary requirement. Look at the lists of required and desired criteria in current job specifications. Research will top most of them and teaching is unlikely to be listed as essential. However, with the advent of the Coalition Government and its drive to bring down the public debt, higher education will have to change. It’s not all because the Research Exercise Framework and its quest to assess impact has become muddled but something in which the Conservative part of the Coalition will delight. As most universities declared that they will charge £9,000 per year for degree courses, they will be faced by an even greater expectation from students. It has become clear from surveys conducted into HE that students are evolving into consumers. Treble the fees and students will take the view that lectures where there are not enough seats for the whole year group to attend are not acceptable; tutorial groups of eighteen students will be challenged on the ground of you’re getting three times the money, we should have classes reduced proportionately. Failing IT systems and the inability of universities to equip staff with software that can open student’s work will not be acceptable. Throwing the students back into a dark ages of white boards and paper flip charts when they have had schooling with access to computers, ipads and ipods will not be acceptable. Giving them the phD student to take the class when there’s a professor sitting in an office researching on an esoteric subject will be not be acceptable. Six hours of contact time a week with teaching staff will not be acceptable. It’s a question of which will be the first university sued for breach of contract rather than when under the new system. This is when the teacher/lecturer discovers that finally it is their time to shine as institutions strive to provide students with a learning experience in our brave new world.
