The thing about gathering the great and the good together to think radically about the future is that there’s a decent-sized risk that instead of coming up with new bright ideas, you end up rehashing the same issues that have gone around the sector for decades, woefully lacking in any real purchase.
But sometimes it’s less a question of whether something’s been suggested in the past and not worked, and more that the time hasn’t yet come in which there is a sufficient impetus to figure out how that thing could be made to work.
Credit transfer is one of those “old chestnut” ideas where the collective impulse is to explain once again all the reasons why it can’t happen. Yet in a context of the KPMG/Wonkhe Ignition event in July, where the question on the table was about how to bring institutions into closer collaborative relationships in support of wider goals like student mobility, it’s hardly surprising that it emerged quite early in the day as an idea with real potential.
An idea whose time has come?
In theory, credit transfer is a system whereby different higher education institutions within the same sector (say, England) recognise and acknowledge credits earned elsewhere. Each credit is equivalent to a number of learning hours, or perhaps a standardised learning outcome (i.e., a successfully completed module). When Student M has to leave her studies in London to return home to the southwest to care for her ailing mother, she is able to pick up her studies back at home rather than starting again from scratch or giving up entirely because her local university recognises that she earned 100 credits towards her degree and so enrols her at the appropriate level.
But it’s not just a benefit to Student M. Such a system would be a necessary enabler of any Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE) programme which, by definition, is meant to inspire smaller, credit-based modules to be taken individually over time or even stacked together to eventually form a more traditional HE qualification. The idea of “stacking” requires that students can have the confidence that modules or other credit-based chunks of learning will be recognised by their own institution as it changes over the years, or by other institutions.
This type of bite-sized learning is seen more and more as key to unlocking the agility and increased productivity needed to grow the economy and support the global competitiveness of key sectors. A credit transfer system, therefore, looks to be a key part of the puzzle to unlock these possibilities and one which could pave the way for an education passport or be a key building block to other modern, transformative initiatives in the sector dependent upon a single source of truth for both students and their learning outcomes.
In the real world, there are articulation agreements in place, in places, but they are spotty at best. And they’re likely to be based on pre-existing or preferred partnership arrangements. The lack of scale and scope of such agreements mean they provide a useful test bed, but not a path forward.
A national credit framework would require standardising the number of credits against individual modules and courses across both further education and higher education institutions; what is now being more frequently referred to as the tertiary landscape. This exercise alone would require collaborative discussions and agreements across the sector, which could set the foundations for deeper collaborations. This framework would require and support the implementation of a universal student record system as well as smooth student mobility across the nation, whether students are mobile in and around their local areas, or across the country.
What’s stopping us?
Chris Husbands captured the sector’s predicament well in his Four Futures report: after a decade or more in which higher education institutions have thrived, the past few years into 2024 feel very different. The sector’s finances are painted in grim tones, while “underlying questions about the future purpose, shape and organisation of higher education” seem to grow louder by the day.
Complicating this picture is the preceding decade’s fluency in market-driven language that has damaged the collective foundations upon which we all stand in this sector, allowing fault lines to emerge around certain areas and in the service of protecting certain partnerships. There are, I suspect, metaphorical moats around certain collaborations which enable us to point to the positives of partnership seen by some, while ignoring the impenetrable fortress it seems to others.
That is only a gentle criticism of our sector. I see it as a natural outcome of that more hostile positioning, something HEFCE colleagues and I worried about as we sensed the change in government tone in the late 2010s and started to see the bones of the new regulator coming together. But we are well past the point in which we can shrug our shoulders and carry on, safe in the knowledge that each of our institutions will be mostly fine amidst those swirling headwinds and occasional arrow breaching our defences.
There are, of course, truly knotty practical issues that we must confront. Establishing pilot activity to test the merits of a scalable and universal credit framework could require service-level agreements around data sharing and, if so, it could be helpful to design them in a way to enable them to be reused in other contexts across the sector. Will institutions be willing to do that given the many other pressures they’re experiencing?
We would also need to think carefully about the implications of setting out on a task like this with the current definitions of B3 hanging over our heads, as there could be a direct impact on institutional student outcome metrics. We will need to engage with Skills England and those working on LLE policy at DfE to ensure our credit framework thinking will align with their plans for module-based learning, skills pathways, and local devolution to support greater differentiation in education and skills training.
The creation of the Ignition workshop came from the awareness that the sector needs to do a lot of the hard thinking ourselves to answer these questions, to ensure we consider options carefully and to avoid top-down approaches that may provoke resistance more than they inspire support. Conditions such as they are in 2024 require us to pull up our sleeves and start truly testing the merits of ideas like these in order to develop a model that could and should demonstrate how this could work across the sector.
Like many large projects, we’ll have to start small in order to glean as much learning as possible, but we should aim to reproduce the findings and continue to move this forward to protect our sector’s ability to deliver the high-quality education, research and civic engagement we believe in so deeply.
Another credit transfer framework is possible
GuildHE, Universities UK, and other key sector bodies are now considering how to convene our institutions to facilitate discussions about moving this work forward. Where UUK brings the large-scale, multi-faculty universities to the table, GuildHE brings the diversity – those institutions that are smaller, specialist, or distinctive in their non-traditional approaches to delivering vocational and technical higher education into their local communities. This means they, too, are key drivers of the government’s five missions alongside our bigger siblings. Together, our organisations can role-model the collaborative spirit we wish to inspire as we start tackling the work ahead.
That work could be in the form of roundtables to explore existing articulation agreements and then to formulate pilots to test whether those agreements could be implemented in novel partnerships, and what the limitations of doing so would be. It could take the form of drafting business cases outlining the pump-priming or sector-wide investment needed to implement a universal student record system, as some have argued would be necessary to ensure the workability of a sector-wide credit transfer framework.
It could also look like a sandpit exercise where we test for other avenues to enable greater student mobility between our institutions as we seek to demonstrate to government that we are indeed committed to removing barriers to access and success as core to our missions.
We must look at other university systems beyond ours, and we must look at other sectors including commercial ones to glean lessons and examples that can inform the shape of our next steps.
In this effort, across all this work ahead, leadership matters. We need bold thinkers, courageous trailblazers, and constructive challengers. We also need those who can bring others along with them, who understand the slow but powerful work of influencing those around them through active listening and reliable, clear and consistent communication.
It’s time to find new ways of thinking and working together to put our institutions on the best footing to ensure our economy, society and the global community can tackle the challenges and opportunities before us in the 21st century.
This article is published as part of our Radical Efficiency series in association with KPMG.
The issues preventing large scale credit transfer aren’t ones around student data or scale, but those of demand and learning outcomes.
The LLE may create demand, but to date there isn’t much demand within the sector to warrant institutions to focus on credit transfer schemes. There will be some in terms of articulation and top-ups but these are often very specific partnerships. The only real exception to scale is the Open University, where their Open Degree and approach allows students with sub-degree qualifications to ‘top-up’.
Learning outcomes issue is the greater and the current need when transferring credit to match the learning outcomes of the new award from those already met in the previous award. Whilst qualifications may have the same or similar title they are often not the same when it comes to what they require of students in terms of knowledge and skills, and this is the real barrier. If the approach to credit transfer was moved to one of ‘advanced standing’ (students have proven they can study at the level and have the broad knowledge and skills to be successful) rather than one of exact mapping of learning outcomes then we may some increase in students being transferring between institutions.
I 100% agree with this. Having recently completed an exercise involving transferring c70 students to 7 different universities on what would be ostensibly the same course, I can testify that this was an extremely challenging and complex exercise. While an outsider looking in could be forgiven for thinking that moving a student with 240 credits on a course at one university to do Level 6 of (nominally) the same course at another university would be a relatively simple and straightforward process, it is anything but. That said, I totally agree that a better process is necessary in the sector, as I fear such things are likely to become more necessary, if not through individual demand then through external pressures.
This is really interesting – from a technical viewpoint, it’s not a huge challenge (and indeed, seems to be the elusive use-case for Blockchain). What will hold it back will be very much more human factors. For example, if students can self-assembly degrees from across a variety of institutions, who is their Alma Mater? How do ‘elite’ institutions feel about this? How will tutors be upskilled to adopt the negotiated learning approaches that will be necessary to make this work? Will we see more people with US-style Liberal Arts degrees comprised of a broader base of learning drawn from a more disparate palette of arts and humanities subjects? Will that save arts and humanities at HEIs?
The UK already has a scaleable, universal credit framework created by the sector and updated periodically. It’s one of the sector owned standards the QAA provides custodianship for. It scales across all the devolved administrations and the ECTS (European Credit Transfer System) and so provides a transparent way to evaluate students’ prior learning and facilitate student mobility – even internationally.
So the part of quantifying and demonstrating is done. We’re halfway towards solving the important problem of credit transfer you so compellingly articulate a need for. The problem I think we need to solve is that of providers’ recognition of each others’ credit. This is, indeed, a knotty problem. But the QAA also holds other standards – notably the Subject Benchmark Statements – which could help unlock it. Phil correctly identifies that the issue of learning outcomes is a significant sticking point; but Subject Benchmark Statements could also be helpful here. Combined with evidence of credit at the right level (on the Frameworks for Higher Education qualifications – another sector owned standard), institutions could assure themselves of a transferring student’s advanced standing.
Thank you for moving us forward by pointing out the tools we already have that could act as stepping stones we could use in coordinating a plan for forward movement, Vicki. It may be we forget these as we get stuck into thinking about the barriers to bringing the vision to life, so super helpful to have this laid out—and to be reminded you’d be a key voice in any collective efforts.
The key starting point is the one about demand linking to the underlying economic model (https://lefttomyowndevices.blog/2024/07/13/opportunities-lets-make-lots-of-money/ ), and I’m not entirely convinced that the LLE will do this. If we can sort that, fully agree with Phil’s point about learning outcomes (and think there could be potential in looking at ‘advanced standing’ as a way through this; and the mention of a ‘universal student record system’ starts to get us into the territory that DK helpfully explored last year (https://wonkhe.com/wonk-corner/a-national-student-record-system/ ).
In my discipline, the main barrier to credit transfer has always been prerequisite knowledge for modules. We teach highly structured, demanding, incremental degree programmes in which material in each year builds on detailed technical knowledge acquired in the previous year. There is no standardisation of the curriculum between institutions. And even students returning from an industrial year sometimes struggle because the knowledge they need from the previous academic year is rusty after a year away. It is really not feasible for students to attempt our third year modules on the basis of theoretically-comparable second-year modules taken somewhere else at some point in the past: they just won’t have the detailed technical background they need to succeed on them. And I struggle to see how our programmes could be amended to accommodate this without either a degree of national standardisation of curriculum that stifles innovation, or a dumbing down of our degrees so that later years are not significantly more advanced than earlier years.