Trust is fundamental to all of our relationships, and it is vital for meaningful relationships.
It can be an anchor in uncertain times, as explored in this special edition of the International Journal of Academic Development. Within higher education, trust underpins our diverse institutional relationships with students, and their families, friends and supporters; colleagues, regulatory bodies, employers, trade unions, students’ unions, prospective students and schools, international partners as well as local communities and many other groups. These individual interactions combine to build a complex matrix of relationships in which trust originates, takes form or develops.
Or sometimes, it doesn’t. Uncertainty and complexity can stifle relationships, suppressing trust as partners hold back or withdraw, leading to a crisis in confidence. A lack of trust can derail any relationship, well intended institutional narrative or strategy.
Having trust often means believing that you matter in some way to a person, or to the people working in an organisation, or system, enough for them to care about your experiences and feelings. It’s possible to trust without being highly engaged, but it’s difficult to get engaged without having trust.
Trust matters in higher education because universities are there to support individuals to achieve their goals, whether these are in teaching or research. Those individuals need to feel that people and systems are designed to include and support them. Trust has to be earned and it can easily be lost. Reflecting on the many challenges for the UK higher education sector and the multifaceted priorities and constraints it will be impossible to meet the expectations and aspirations of our students, colleagues and partners unless there is trust at every level.
When we encounter media articles like this one from the Guardian, we are asked to consider the possibility that trust in the whole system of higher education is beginning to fail – perhaps a consequence of massification and a loss of faith in education for its own sake, rather than as a passport to a shrinking pool of traditional jobs. We need to talk about why higher education remains worthwhile, and how we can work together to maintain trust in it and to ensure that students feel their own value as part of its systems.
Nurturing relationships
When we build trust we are also building partnerships. When we recognise an institution as trustworthy, we are frequently noting that it delivers on what it has promised and that it values relationships with its stakeholders; it holds itself accountable. And it is not just about the large-scale sector wide challenges, it is also about considering how we build trust through the average everyday experiences of our diverse student and colleague communities.
Creating trustful spaces in the classroom is one element of this. Teachers’ perception of trust-building has shown that trust is based on teachers’ care and concern for students as much as on their subject knowledge and teaching ability. Research on how students in engineering perceive trust-building efforts also shows that they value attention to them as individuals most highly. They also use their trust in the institution to mitigate perceived problems with individual colleagues or services, believing that the university, or their department, makes student-centred decisions with respect to recruiting and training lecturers and professional services staff, and accepting that occasionally, they may not find an individual teacher trustworthy.
Trust and accountability also underpin meaningful cultural change in uncomfortable spaces and sensitive areas. When we trust each other we can have difficult conversations and begin to accept the existence of hidden barriers across our diverse colleague and student groups. Inside the university, teams must trust each other, empathising with each other’s views and values – 2024’s report from AdvanceHE and Wonkhe showed that trust is paramount when leading strategic change in challenging times. Because of this, trust underpins institutional sustainability; particularly within a sector that is currently responding to rising costs and income constraints.
Nurturing relationships through difficult choices about resources and provision requires a fine balance, transparency, and accountability if trust is to be maintained and difficult decisions explained. Few people would continue a relationship in which trust has broken down or with someone or something that they would describe as untrustworthy, but many of use will recognise the situation where this has happened and all parties feel powerless to rebuild the trust.
What can individuals and leaders do?
Trust can be expressed in many forms: You can trust me, I trust you, you can trust yourself, you can trust each other. Within a complex array of opportunities and challenges which call for attention, HE institutions will benefit from finding the most appropriate strategies, performance indicators and (regulatory) endorsements which will create trust and accountability in their provision to build their reputation. As leaders, how do we show colleagues that we trust them? How do we encourage others to show that they trust us? What do we do to ensure that we are trustworthy?
At a larger scale, a trustworthy research partner shares ideas, makes it easy to distribute funding between institutions, invites contributions from stakeholders, colleagues working in the field, and students. A trustworthy community partner supports students and employees from the local area, ensuring that they feel welcome and valued, and uses local services. A trustworthy internationalised university supports cultural diversity and makes both moving to and working with research and teaching easier by explaining practical and organisational differences. By considering how long-term relationships are built and maintained, we can develop a track record of ‘quality’ provision and demonstrate that they are ‘worth it’ to students, colleagues, funders, regulatory bodies, employers and other partners.
When trust in leaders or institutions is lost, the response is often rapid and drastic, with changes in staff and policies having the potential to create further turbulence. As the research with students showed, trust in institutions and systems can survive individual lapses. Maybe a first step should always be to try to rebuild relationships, making oneself, the university, or the system slightly vulnerable in the short term as we work to show that higher education is a human activity which may sometimes not work out as planned, but which we believe in enough to repair.
We can work at all kinds of levels to build and foster trust in our activities. Public engagement has the power to counter hostile narratives and build trust and so does effective partnership work with our local communities, students and Students’ Unions. Working together, listening to and valuing our partners’ perspectives enables us to identify and mitigate the impacts of challenges and take a constructive and nuanced approach to build both trust and inclusive learning communities. If we are to tackle our current pressing sector challenges and wicked problems such as awarding gaps when trust in public institutions is low, it has never been more important to collaborate with our partners, be visibly accountable and focus on equity.
So how can we work together to offer a holistic view of the benefits and value that focusing on trust building can bring? We are keen to build a community of practice to systematically strengthen trust across the HE sector. Join us to develop a trust framework which will explore environments that increase or decrease trust across stakeholder groups and consider how to encourage key trust behaviours such as sharing, listening, and being accountable in a range of professional contexts.
If you are interested, get in touch and let us know what trust in higher education means to you: Claire Hamshire Rachel Forsyth. Claire and Rachel will be speaking on this theme at the Festival of Higher Education on 11-12 November – find out more and book your ticket here
