Imagine if we gave everyone a first

But before I head to the “do” we have on, I’m checking my diary.

At the end of last year’s festival, I did that thing you do when you’re involved in organising a big event and can’t see beyond it – I sat in the pub with a pint, staring at my calendar trying to work out the day after’s “Belfast, ENAS” meant.

Five minutes of Gmail archaeology revealed that the day after the festival, I was apparently booked to speak at the European Directors of Sport in Universities conference in Belfast.

So I finished my pint, headed to Stansted as you do when you work at Wonkhe, got on the plane, and delivered some top stuff on belonging. They were all very pleased.

The really interesting bit came after me. John Shiels, who’s CEO at the Manchester United foundation, who’s been partnering with Ulster University over a project in Derry-Londonderry.

It was set up to enhance educational outreach for schools – raising aspirations, improving participation and attainment, that sort of thing.

Shiels talked of the way in which he had to shift some of the focus of the foundation’s work from self-actualisation in Maslow’s hierarchy to the basics of love, blankets and food.

One conference-goer asked if the blankets were Man U branded. Shiels patiently explained that he could buy more if they weren’t – and that would have more of an impact.

I work in and around a sector that, I suspect, thinks its job is self-actualisation – and probably gets a little annoyed when anyone asks it to worry about belonging or food or shelter or whatever.

I retold this story in the session at the festival on quality, where we avoided a panel of the usual suspects to discuss models and mechanisms.

Not because organisations like QAA or OfS or networks like QSN aren’t staffed with fantastic people who do important work, but because we’d ended up in a team meeting asking ourselves a more fundamental question – what even is quality?

The infrastructure and the reality

Most of the sector conversation about quality focuses on methodologies, rating schemes, and the mutant algorithms that produce things like the Teaching Excellence Framework.

But when you actually sit down with students and ask them what quality means, you get answers that bear almost no relation to the infrastructure we’ve built to measure it.

Lily Watson, president of Chester Students’ Union, was pretty direct about this when I asked her what quality means to students.

I think most people would assume it’s around timetabling, course content, what’s going on in the classroom, the standard of teaching. But for most students and the feedback that we’ve received and me as a student, it’s around the other provisions that are centred around it – student services, mental health and wellbeing support, inclusion and disability. Accommodation is something that comes up all the time.

Her reasoning cut to something not talked about enough:

Students are very aware that university to university, most likely there’s going to be crossover with the curriculum. You’re pretty much going to be taught the same thing to near enough the same standard. So it’s about what is the difference of your university in its offer to you.

This matters because much of the sector operates on a set of assumptions about student life that simply don’t reflect reality anymore. When the sector says “full-time student”, I think most still mentally conjure someone who is, well, full-time – dipped in, hanging around, bumping into people, thinking, available for the university to schedule as it sees fit.

Not just in legal frameworks and funding systems, which absolutely assume this, but in mental maps of what a student is.

The statistical realities tell a completely different story. UK HE has doubled the proportion of full-time students working during term time over the last decade – from a third to two-thirds.

It’s a form of austerity that students are experiencing alongside the sector itself. Public First’s Jonathan Simons mentioned in the morning session that every other bit of the public sector had its dose of austerity except higher education, and we’re now experiencing it in one way or another.

But if education is a partnership – and everyone knows deep down that it is – then students are experiencing their own version of that squeeze too.

That took me right back to Belfast. It doesn’t matter what you do in terms of provision if students are cold and hungry. The quality won’t be high. It can’t be.

Lily was clear about this when I pressed her on it:

There’s a responsibility in terms of the sector having to step up to support those students so that they can get the most out of their experience. Without that, they’re never going to be able to engage in everything else that we want them to in the first place. You have to start from the very bottom to build them up to the top.

What should we measure?

So if the traditional quality metrics are measuring the wrong things, or at least not the things that determine whether students can actually engage with their education, what should we be measuring instead?

Lily’s answer focussed on capacity rather than satisfaction:

Quality is about understanding the students that we have, rather than trying to change them into something they’re not. So asking the academics, do they actually understand the needs and the wants of the students that they’re teaching? Instead of when we do module evaluation at the end, just banging at the end ‘how satisfied were you?’ – it doesn’t necessarily relate to the module at all.

And she returned repeatedly to a fundamental problem with our flagship quality metric:

NSS for me, it’s around student satisfaction. There’s no engagement metrics on there. There’s no asking students directly as to why they can or can’t engage because we all know there’s barriers in terms of students being so time-poor at the moment, whether they’re trying to balance their studies, their life, their work. That all feeds back into whether they’re sat in the classroom at the end of the day.

In other words, the system asks students to rate their satisfaction with something they might not have had the capacity to properly engage with in the first place.

Mark Peace, Professor of Innovation in Education at King’s College London, offered up a provocative analysis when he described quality as “like a bag of cats” – multiple competing definitions that we never properly separate out.

There’s quality in the traditional sense of standards and rigour and disciplinary compliance. There’s quality as the government frames it, around economic throughput. There’s quality as we presume students see it, often constructing a consumerist relationship before it’s naturally emerged. And there’s quality as students actually experience it – the contract of expectations, the ability to authentically be part of something that gives you something back.

But it was on assessment where Mark really pushed the boundaries. Lily had described her joy at the few pass/fail modules she’d had:

I went in knowing exactly what I needed to do, I knew it wasn’t the end of the world because I was going to pass, it was going to be fine because I’m being marked on a fundamental skill, not how necessarily well I can do it.

Mark’s response cut to something fundamental about how we signal achievement:

It’s a silly way of signalling talent to take a learning journey over three years, which was entirely individual, was your journey, was Lily engaging with a set of learning experiences and gaining things that are entirely unique to you, and then crushing them into one single number. You can’t give that number to an employer and have it signal anything really meaningful about the student other than a broad brush sense of how well that student can play a game.

And then he went further:

What you do when you crush all of those learning gains into that single number is you squish out things that might be critically important to Lily, that might be the thing you are taking into the world and making a difference with, but it’s not part of the algorithm. But what you also do is you compress privileges in. So some of the reasons you got that first is you were advantaged to be able to play that game really, really well.

A thought experiment ensued:

Imagine if we gave everyone a first. Nothing bad will happen. What will happen is we will have to find a different way of enabling our students to signal their distinctiveness and their talents. It would force us to do that.

Rise and the extracurricular question

The conversation shifted to Manchester Met’s Rise programme. Eight years ago, Manchester Met essentially gave every student 30 extra credits that they could use to wrap up their experiential learning.

They treated it like any other module, with learning outcomes and an external examiner from what Mark described as “a slightly more snobby institution” to ensure it was watertight.

The signal it created had massive impact. Between 18,000 and 20,000 students a year engaged meaningfully in the extracurricular offer, with over-representation from precisely the groups HE is told are hard to reach – students from ethnic minority backgrounds, commuting students, students with mental health issues. When they spoke to students about why, the answer was revealing:

If you put this thing that doesn’t count for anything on the table, or this thing which is work, family commitment, I can’t ask them to make that decision. You’re not actually asking me to make a decision. I cannot make that decision. The minute you add institutional value to those things, all of their priorities changed.

What they didn’t plan for was that students who engaged in Rise saw their average marks go up in nearly every other module, with the effect most pronounced where there were the biggest awarding gaps. Black students in particular saw massive changes in their achievement.

They also found that many students had fallen into what Mark called “a far orbit from the university” – stopped coming to lectures, found it hard to go back, felt disconnected. Rise provided a reset, something that felt different, something students owned, with enough structure to have a reason to be there and enough looseness that authentic connection could happen.

Students became woven back into a community of other learners, which then pushed attendance and achievement up across the board.

The critique of adding extracurricular credit will inevitably be that time-poor students don’t have time for extra anything. But Mark’s point is that creative design of extracurricular offers can actually meet students where they are rather than demanding they come to where we are.

He gave concrete examples – putting programmes in Rochdale for the community students out there rather than making them travel into Manchester, running things at times that aren’t Wednesday afternoon (when students are free on the timetable but guaranteed to be working because they know they’re free), using trapped time on the timetable – that hated gap between morning lecture and afternoon seminar – as a platform for opportunities.

The more fundamental point is about what we’re asking students to do and whether they really need to do it:

Do you really need the student to be in your company for all of that time in the places that you’re putting them in order for them to make those gains? You might need them to be able to invest in learning. Let’s stop counting contact time and instead count learning time, and let that learning time be much more flexible around the student.

When I asked Lily about her own experience as a drama student, she talked passionately about what students actually value. She had lectures where attendance was monitored and she had to hit 80 per cent or she couldn’t sit the exam. She had group work where she didn’t want to let her team down. She went to those. But for anything else?

If I didn’t need to be there, I wouldn’t be there because that’s not where I valued my time. I valued my time around the extracurricular stuff that was going on because that for me was fundamentally where I was going to network myself to get a job after university rather than sitting and staring at a screen with the same slides coming up.

Work as learning

This question of what belongs in the curriculum and what belongs elsewhere reminds me of something that happened at a course rep conference I was at last year. One of the reps told me they were really upset because their lecturer had set an assignment which wasn’t an essay, but was a podcast.

Apparently, when he set the assignment, the academic rolled his eyes and said “don’t blame me, it’s one of these employability things.” The rep then asked, well, how do you make a podcast? We don’t know how to make a podcast. The lecturer’s response? “Well, I don’t know either. Go and see them in the centre.”

I’ve thought about that exchange a lot, because it captures something about what happens when we try to bolt employability skills onto a curriculum without thinking through whether the curriculum is actually the right place for them. Lily was emphatic:

So firstly, I do think students should be exposed to opportunities to develop these skills, but not necessarily within their subject. Why would an academic who’s been teaching history for 30 years all of a sudden be teaching you how to present yourself to a recruiter? And you see that in the NSS comments, in the free comments, you see the anger and the frustration of the academic – it’s coming through to the students and then it comes through into the evaluation.

So where should this learning happen instead?

Well, that for me sits nicely into extracurricular things. It sits alongside their course in terms of transferable skills, they then can run it into assessments, but it’s supported by people who actually know what they’re doing rather than someone who all of a sudden are having to deliver this. It doesn’t work for them, so why would it work for a student? Let academics be academics.

It strikes me that it makes loads of sense potentially to put these skills in the credit system, as Mark’s doing with Rise, but not necessarily always wedged awkwardly into the curriculum where neither students nor academics particularly want them.

That brought us to an interesting opportunity in how we think about quality and student learning. As a student, Lily worked as a supervisor in a family-owned live music bar. When I asked her what she learned, the list was remarkable – acting as a tour manager, setting up venues, sound engineering when they didn’t have a sound engineer, cashing up, rotas, sitting in on HR processes as a witness, stock counts, barrel changes, line cleans.

I had to learn it all on the job and kind of learn some of it myself or just by watching other people on shift pick it up.

And crucially, she was thinking about it educationally:

Definitely around people management, 100 per cent, in terms of how you articulate and navigate a team, even things like team briefings. I eventually want to run my own business, so things like doing a stock count and looking at the cash flow and all of that, I knew I would need that and use it later on in life. Doing the sound engineering stuff, it gave me a head start in terms of my degree.

Two-thirds of full-time students are working during term time. Some of that work is, to be blunt, pretty terrible and probably can’t be meaningfully incorporated into any kind of academic framework. But surely some of it – surely work like Lily’s – should have ways for universities to support it to be recognised, to be wrapped into a student’s learning profile, to count for something beyond the wage packet?

Mark’s answer was a suite of micro-credentials for skill sets. Define them properly, have three competency statements for each one, then let students make their own decisions about what evidence demonstrates those competencies. It could be from an assessment, it could be from extracurricular involvement, it could be from part-time work.

Whatever the gain is becomes formally part of their profile and goes on their transcript – a version students actually control rather than the watered-down thing we have now.

What actually matters

Near the end of the session, I asked Lily what matters to students about the main part of their degree – the bit that isn’t the extra credit or the support services or the extracurricular. Her answer was telling:

It’ll be different student to student definitely, but I think it’s about community, belonging, networking, the transferable skills after university. When you ask students what was your favourite thing at university, what did you enjoy most, what’s your happiest memory? It’s never about sitting in a classroom or anything like that. So I think what matters to them is the people around them, the community and the opportunity you give and provide to them.

Mark picked up on why this matters:

You can see that in a culture that can be about that “lone genius” doing it right. It’s lovely that you’ve had a nice time, but you’re not the lone genius, so you’re not quite as good. I think what matters is that learning gains have happened. And those learning gains aren’t always policed by the culture of academia. Sometimes they are and you’re there to do a discipline and let’s not put that down. But all of those other spaces matter as well.

Finding ways of evening out that terrain, he argued, is not only kinder to students and more inclusive, but speaks to some of the intractable challenges facing the sector – whether declining unit of resource or the need to demonstrate value in ways that actually resonate with students’ lived experiences. It involves the sector letting go – enabling students to let go too.

What struck me most about this conversation is how far removed it is from almost every discussion about quality that dominates sector discourse. The sector argues endlessly about TEF methodologies and NSS response rates and degree algorithms. It implements attendance monitoring and obsesses over contact hours. It defends academic standards and worries about grade inflation.

But it rarely asks whether the entire framing of quality is fit for purpose when the fundamental nature of being a student has changed so dramatically.

The system measures satisfaction with teaching when students are too time-poor and financially stretched to properly engage with that teaching in the first place. It crushes diverse, individual learning journeys into single numbers that mostly signal how well students can play a particular game. It defends immersive educational models when two-thirds of full-time students are working during term time. And it ignores – or at least devalues – the learning that happens in extracurricular spaces and part-time work because it doesn’t fit disciplinary frameworks.

Mark put it well when he suggested that the sector might need to put the “quality cats in the canal” and have a better conversation about what the value of the learning experience actually is and how students surface it.

That’s not about abandoning standards or rigour or the genuine disciplinary learning that universities exist to provide – it’s about recognising that quality can’t be divorced from capacity, that assessment systems designed for a different era of student experience might be doing more harm than good, and that learning happens in spaces we’ve traditionally dismissed as extracurricular.