You can’t change the design of a plane while it’s in flight

Just under a year ago now, I was doing a keynote on student rights for course reps at a conference organised by a students union.

At the break, I was cornered by one of the delegates who’d been told that her school in the faculty of humanities had been earmarked for merger with another to “improve the student experience”.

This was one of those reps that goes beyond popping up in meetings to raise concerns (that nobody in said meeting can fix) about timetabling or heating in the library – a second year rep that had helped organise events and ensure that new students feel what the old NSS once described as “part of a community of staff and students”.

She, along with everyone else in the school, had been sent numerous emails full of euphemisms and non sequiturs about what would happen to her and her cohort as a result of the “exciting” proposals.

She was worried about the standing of her subject and worried for the staff she’s been working alongside. But chief among her concerns was that nobody seemed to be able to confirm that the modules that her and her cohort had already chosen to study in their third year – many of which had been key in their decision to choose that course – would actually be available by the time they re-enrolled in September.

She got back in touch last month to update me on what had happened. Obtaining information about what was going to happen had continued to be difficult throughout the spring – lecturers leading her chosen modules were either cagey or conspiratorial, suggesting it was somehow up to her to “save their jobs”.

Yet when she’d attempted to press layers of management about whether her modules would actually run – in part to help her her decide whether switching to another university for her third year was something she should look into – she’d been told that her interventions were inappropriate, and that “she should leave trade unionism to UCU” and “trust the process”.

She’d also been warned that optional modules were “not part of the student contract” – but that if there were changes, she’d be told in good time to enable her to make choices that would enable her to work towards her final award.

Deadlines were looming and the stress of the third term was getting the better of her. Then over the summer she watched, one by one, each of the lecturers that led her chosen modules (other than the dissertation) announce on social media that they were leaving the university.

The process not “complete”, emails to the school, the faculty and the central university either went unanswered or contained general reassurances similar to those already issued – the students’ union similarly unable to get official confirmation that module choices would be honoured. It was already too late to consider switching to a different university.

Then three weeks before the autumn term started, the inevitable news came in. As she’d predicted, all but the dissertation – worth a third of her second year – were no longer on offer. What was a catalogue of sixteen 20 credit modules had been trimmed to just six, although there were four new ones – one that would enable her to “enhance her employability”, another that would enable her to write a longer dissertation, and two that had been approved for the English award that had previously been exclusive for students in the history department.

The rep herself was plenty employable given her experience in the department, had no desire to deepen the stress of a longer dissertation when her chosen supervisor had left, and had no interest in the history modules on offer.

On enquiring, she was informed (via a letter with more legalese than usual) that she had signed a set of terms of conditions that had said that “course content may evolve to reflect student feedback and industry and academic changes” and that that “may involve an update to elective modules”. She asked for detail on the student feedback or industry and academic changes that had led to none of her choices being available. She never got a reply – and her third year has been “awful”.

She was also told that she could leave the university without penalty, although as the contract has been honoured, no compensation would be on offer or available.

In the air

Like trying to fix an aeroplane while in flight, it ought to be incredibly difficult to make cuts in expenditure while students are enrolled at a university.

It is of course not the case that departmental, campus or even institutional closures will never occur. Higher education providers are autonomous institutions, and as such are entitled to make their own decisions about any future business model or viability of any particular course or subject.

But students are making a considerable investment when they commit to a programme of study – investing their time, energy and money. It is important that they should be able to complete those studies, and that changes and closures do not adversely affect students and their ability to conclude their studies and obtain a degree.

Those last two paragraphs aren’t mine – they’re from the Department for Education’s (DfE) own consultation on the formation of the Office for Students (OfS) and what would be contained in its regulatory framework.

It noted that for prospective students, there are significant information asymmetries, and prospective students often make decisions with limited reliable information, which is why there was to be support for students to continue their studies if their provider can no longer deliver their course:

The creative destruction witnessed in more traditional markets, though still a powerful and relevant tool, has the potential to carry greater cost.

It promised that whilst OfS was to be a market regulator, it would also recognise the relationship between students and providers is about much more than a “rigid transaction”:

Higher education goes far beyond the exchange of goods and services for money; students collaborate and co-create their experiences, often forming strong, personal relationships with staff and providers themselves.

As a result:

Students need to be protected as they make potentially life changing decisions about higher education… change cannot and will not be at the expense of deep, trust-based higher education experiences.

So as providers went about their business running their “business”, five types of protection were to be on offer for students – which ironically I’d been explaining with a fairly straight bat in my talk to the reps.

The first was financial – if your course doesn’t lead to a large salary you’ll have a decent chunk of your debt written off.

For the rep in my DMs, salary was never a major driver – although since the DfE policy paper and the passage of the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, that protection has been neutered by extending the loan term to 40 years – most graduates will now pay back in full, with richer graduates relieved from funding that cushion via lower interest rates.

The second was that sufficient information – mainly about past performance – would mean students chose the right course and university for them.

Not all students make use of the tables and the data and or what used to be called the “Key Information Set”. For some it’s the weather on the Open Day and the vibes from the staff and ambassadors. But for this student, it very much had been about finding a course with modules on offer that she’d been passionate about when she got into reading as a kid – modules that were cut “to reflect student feedback and industry and academic changes”.

If nothing else, the staff-student ratio that was touted when she’d selected the course back in 2021 was some distance from the ratio she ended up experiencing in her third year.

The third was to make providers have a Student Protection Plan that was supposed to ensure the course and provider didn’t stop operating. That regime has proved to be utterly useless at dealing with both explosions (SPPs obviously won’t work if lots of providers are in trouble all at once) and implosions (where the course still runs but isn’t really the same course).

When the rep in my DMs had asked about the protection plan, she’d been told that because her course wasn’t closing, she had no entitlement to avail herself of what were pretty weak protections anyway.

The fourth was a strengthening of compliance with consumer protection law – summarised as “you’ll get what we promised”. A look at student contracts was promised in 2017, as it has then been repeatedly promised pretty much every year ever since. A look at her contract – especially the clauses giving the provider wide discretion to change or abolish pretty much anything marked up as “optional” – suggests that it is not compliant with consumer protection law. Still nothing gets done.

And even if she had rights, those rights are almost impossible to enforce, promised progress in this area conspicuous by its absence.

The fifth was transfer. It was supposed to become very easy to transfer university – so much so that OfS was required in HERA 2017 to monitor the availability of schemes for student transfers, monitor the extent to which the arrangements are utilised by students generally or students of a particular description, include in its annual report a summary of conclusions drawn by it from that monitoring, and facilitate, encourage, or promote awareness of the provision of arrangements for student transfers.

If literally any of that has been done since this was published in 2021 (largely covering transfers before OfS was set up), then I’ve missed it.

Sustainability priority

A couple of weeks ago now on a call with students and their reps, I’m told that OfS officials explained in some detail the context behind the current financial woes facing the sector – the freeze in fees, the increases in costs, and the work that OfS is doing to monitor the finances of providers.

I’m also told that OfS said that it had commenced a process of attempting to determine the impacts on the student experience of providers making savings, especially since OfS had started to put so much pressure on providers to make their numbers add up.

This isn’t to argue that the staff undertaking that work aren’t doing their level best, or that it is somehow wrong for OfS to have commenced that exercise – but isn’t it all a little late?

Just as during the pandemic, it appears to people like the rep in my DMs that the protections on offer to students don’t work. Even when people take time out to recognise that “giving students what they promised” is less an ideological, neoliberal drive towards consumerism and more about basic decency, it has often seemed that such protections are only really for the good times – and that in times like these, the top priority is to be solvent.

Just compare the emphasis on financial sustainability versus the potential impacts on students in this insight brief from last May. Nestled amongst the acres of material on provider finances, there’s one paragraph that says this:

Where universities and colleges are considering changes to secure their financial sustainability, they should consider their continued compliance with the OfS’s regulatory requirements, including maintaining high quality course delivery and protecting students’ interests. They must also ensure their ongoing compliance with consumer protection law.

Doubtless the provider thinks that in the long-run, it did the right thing to secure its ongoing viability. Hopefully new students will get what it is that they’re promised on the thinner webpages that accompany the rep’s course, and fingers crossed that it all pans out for them.

But for the student rep and those she represents, the introduction of fees and individual debt came with a deal – that while in the past pooled public funding meant courses and services were vulnerable to cuts, individual agreements were supposed to offer protection of the same sort when buying any other service.

They weren’t supposed to have to put up with collective utilitarianism – but in many ways, that’s precisely what has happened. And ironically, the fact that is seemingly so easy to do what has been done to her and her cohort is almost certainly why the government has been so slow at doing anything financially that might have helped avoid having to make the decisions that have been made.

She is no fool. Although she was never a full-time student leader, she understands how tough the country and the university’s finances are right now. But she and her students feel lied to, and badly let down – and no number of links to the OIA from me can convince her otherwise. She’s decided against doing a PGT – “in case it happens again”.