Jeremy Moulton, Senior Lecturer, Department of Politics and International Relations
A few years ago, going through my grandmother’s house, I found an old newspaper clipping. The clipping was from the front page of a local newspaper, proudly sharing the news that my mum, then 22, had graduated from university. Discussing this story with my mum recently, she remembered that it had even made the local news when she had gotten her place at university, to study Modern Languages at Bedford College.
I was fortunate that when I went to university, decades after that article in the Dean Forest Mercury was published, uptake of a university education had increased so much within the UK that it no longer warranted front-page news. For me, it simply seemed like the logical next step after college. For my grandmother, who kept that clipping for all those decades, university was an impossible dream. We always said that she would have excelled at university, she had a natural aptitude for maths her entire life. Instead, without the means to support that education, she had to go work at 16.
The challenge
Family histories like this are concrete evidence of the hopes and realities that underpin how participation in higher education can change lives. Education is a vehicle for great personal and societal change.
However, for the vast majority of the history of higher education, universities have been an exclusive proposition. The world’s first university began teaching students in 1088, 22 years after the Battle of Hastings. In the hundreds of years after that, as the number of universities around the world grew, they largely had a similar focus – teaching the male children of elites and those entering the church. This made universities extremely exclusive places, often teaching a very narrow range of subjects.
Martin Trow, an influential scholar of Higher Education studies, would class this type of higher education as ‘elite’ as less than 15% of the population will have a university education. It wasn’t until after the Second World War that the education in the UK began to develop into what Trow would recognise as ‘mass’ education, wherein up to 50% of the population have a university degree (he classes participation above 50% as ‘universal’).
Today, by the age of 25, 49% of people in the UK have participated in higher education. This is a mammoth increase – in 1950, participation was as low as 3.4%. It is no exaggeration to say that higher education is now a key part of British social and cultural development and no longer an elites-only proposition.
Still, whilst participation has massively increased, there is work to be done. We see big regional divergences in participation rates. London leads with a 62.2% participation rate, more than 13 percentage points above the national average. Less than 29% of students that receive free school meals progress into higher education, a progression rate that has concerningly decreased for the last two years.
Increasing participation is not, of course, the only route to creative positive social change. As Trow himself argued:
It must be emphasised that the movement of a system from elite to mass higher education or from mass to universal higher education does not necessarily mean that the forms and patterns of the prior phase or phases disappear or are transformed.
That is to say, it is not enough that the numbers increase. For institutions that have been teaching male elites for centuries, there needs to be a concerted effort to reflect on and redevelop yesterday’s education so that it is relevant for today’s students.
We can see the challenge very clearly in the data on degree awarding gaps – the difference in ‘top degrees’ (either an upper second or a first-class degree) awarded to different groups of students. The data is particularly stark when analysed by ethnic background, with white students being more likely to be awarded top degrees than their BAME peers. Similar awarding gaps exist between mature and non-mature students, and disabled and able-bodied students. In short, this means that there is work to be done to ensure that all are being served by the increases in higher education participation.
Building solutions
How is it that we can build a higher education that serves all of its students, ensuring that it is providing top-quality education and being a vehicle for social change? This is a key question for universities everywhere, but especially so at the University of York, which has committed to being a university for public good.
As part of the university’s 2030 strategy, York has committed to eradicating awarding gaps, an ambitious target that demands the enactment of bold education innovations. But how is it that we land on those innovations? Is there a ‘best’ way forward when it comes to reflecting on and redeveloping our curriculums to meet the needs of today?
For years, York and other Russell Group institutions have stood out for their commitment to ‘research-led teaching’, teaching that is delivered by those that are out in the field or in the laboratory, doing the research that is published and taught at other institutions. This has meant that students have often had the opportunity to get close to the research process, learning about cutting edge findings in their subject area.
That commitment to research-led teaching is one that is also vital in the design and provision of the education of the future – it is through researching higher education, that we might plot the course away from awarding gaps and towards a higher education for social change. This field of research, widely recognised as the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) is becoming ever-more key to educational innovation.
SoTL goes from the big, higher education-level enquiry to the smaller disciplinary research, allowing for tweaks and improvements to long-established modes of education. It is also something that, importantly, is not necessarily done in a top-down manner, where students are subject to experiments in their education. The staff-student partnership approach, wherein staff work alongside their students in exploring education change, has been highlighted as a particularly fruitful way to develop new approaches to teaching and learning.
It has been a pleasure, over the last few years, to work alongside students in York’s Department of Politics and International Relations on such staff-student partnership research. One project, published last year, explored the potential of instituting ‘assessment optionality’ – giving students choice in the format with which they are assessed in the discipline. The research, in turn, provided the support to trial the initiative in the department, leading to a marked improvement in students’ outcomes.
SoTL work is often small-scale and low cost but comes with the potential for big impact. It is through embracing the culture of critical enquiry, the very culture that shapes the research of universities, that we can ensure that higher education is driving the social change that today’s world needs, working to ensure the best outcomes for today’s students.
I know that if my grandmother were one of today’s 18 year olds considering her next steps, she would almost certainly go to university. I know that with the changes that are being made within higher education, she would thrive within the university environment. And because of that innovative education, she would go on to make positive contributions to the world outside of academia. This is a story that is being told today, for many students who in previous years would not have had the opportunity to go to university. It is the story of the social change that higher education drives, and it’s one we should be very proud of. This is the story that underpins all the work we are committing to, now and in the future.