Are universities supporting students too much?

Plenty of new VCs arrive promising “conversations” and “listening exercises” that turn out to be painful breakfasts with students more interested in a selfie than strategy, or meetings with the staff trade unions that rehearse issues from scratch that really should have been in the handover note.

But Keele’s new VC has spent much of his first year staging a series of public debates explicitly designed to generate open disagreement, and then had the nerve to chair them himself alongside a students’ union officer.

The fourth in the series, co-chaired with Keele SU wellbeing officer Zoe Garnett, asked whether universities are supporting students enough or too much. A lovely way to spend a Thursday evening.

Shakesheff opened with a provocation drawn from his own late-1980s undergraduate days – a final-year project supervised by a professor who found the entire concept of students irritating, dispensed useless advice when he could be pinned down at all, and left it thoroughly unclear what a good outcome might look like.

It was, the VC reckoned, the most valuable learning experience he had, precisely because the world of work turned out to be full of irritated people, useless advice and unclear expectations.

Were we, he wondered, making university too comfortable?

Barber back (to teaching)

Sir Michael Barber – former OfS chair, and as it turns out a former Keele professor who ran the school of education in the early 1990s – used his slot to pull the debate back to what he thinks the student experience conversation usually ignores, which is teaching and learning itself.

His distinction between fun and joy was interesting – education needn’t always be fun, he argued, because the genuine joy comes from finally cracking something genuinely difficult, and difficult things aren’t fun while you’re doing them.

He argued for well-planned lectures that scaffold and build a narrative arc, properly tailored commentary on submitted work – he’s currently a fee-paying part-time master’s student in medieval history, and clearly relishes being marked hard – and defended the TEF as a force that got people focusing on teaching in a way they previously didn’t.

He also let slip that ahead of the last general election he’d tried to persuade both the Conservatives and Labour of the need for a review of university funding, and got nowhere with either.

Coming from a former OfS chair who now advises the Prime Minister on delivery, it’s a tidy reminder of how studiously both main parties have managed to avoid going anywhere near the funding question.

Shaw’s non-negotiables

Jenny Shaw, who spent years at Unite Students before going independent, reframed the question. The choice isn’t support versus challenge – appropriate support, she argued, is what lets students take intellectual risks and persist when things get hard.

Her non-negotiables were unglamorous – communication that’s clear, coordinated and well-timed, services that are genuinely inclusive rather than assumed to be, staff who can respond to distress without either panicking or infantilising, and reporting processes students actually trust.

Having watched three decades of harm caused by the absence of support, she was clear that too much support is the lesser of two evils. First do no harm, then worry about the rest.

Paul Greatrix, eighteen years a registrar at Nottingham, came armed to demolish the “coddling” narrative imported from American higher education – the safetyism line about wellbeing provision producing fragile graduates unable to navigate the bumpy road of life.

His answer was a flat no – the range of support on offer in UK universities exists because the student body grew larger and more diverse, and what it actually does is level the playing field rather than mollycoddle.

He had a useful corrective for anyone romanticising the personal tutor of old – that supposed golden age depended on every academic doing the right thing, and when they didn’t, the student was simply on their own, which is more or less what the VC had described.

And, he noted drily, there aren’t any lazy rivers in UK higher education. Exeter’s outdoor pool is about as close as we get.

Groundwork

For Sophie Borman, Keele SU’s development and democracy officer, support isn’t the opposite of independence and it isn’t the removal of challenge – it’s the removal of unnecessary barriers.

Reasonable adjustments under the Equality Act exist precisely because systems aren’t naturally accessible to everyone, and the disadvantage flows not from a student’s impairment but from environments never designed to include them.

She drew the distinction that matters most – between challenge, which develops people, and preventable hardship, which simply forces talented students out – and warned against romanticising struggle.

Financial insecurity, untreated mental health difficulties and inaccessible systems don’t produce stronger graduates. They produce withdrawals – a university doesn’t set up a food voucher scheme, as she pointed out, unless food insecurity already exists.

Her formulation was that where students aren’t given a fair shot at meeting high standards, universities aren’t measuring talent or potential at all – they’re measuring who can survive unnecessary barriers.

A frisson

One overt disagreement came over the NSS. A question from the floor asked how academics can feel comfortable challenging students when survey scores carry such weight over whether a course survives.

Paul’s answer was that chasing ratings is a mugs game, and staff who do the best preparation they can and provide the best experience they can will find students are satisfied without anyone gaming the numbers.

Shakesheff pushed back honestly, and from the inside – at Keele, a poor NSS performance really can hit recruitment, and a borderline-viable course might end up closed on the back of it, so “just teach well and don’t worry about the metric” is easier to say from outside the room where viability decisions get made.

Paul’s retort – that you step back with your academic developers, your SU education team and your course reps and actually work out why students are unhappy, because it might be something as basic as the heating being off all year, rather than shutting a course on a handful of poor scores – made sense, but it didn’t quite dissolve the tension.

Sophie argued for challenge to students, because challenge means growth – but don’t lob an impossible question out to weed out the weak ones and leave them struggling in the deep end. Put the support structures around the stretch.

Combine, don’t balance

If there was an idea the panel converged on, it was Barber’s reframing in the Q and A – that “strike the balance” is the wrong metaphor. Balance is Newtonian physics, one thing traded off against another. What universities need, he argued, is chemistry – combine support and independence so you get something different out the other end. I refrained from pointing out the numerous kafa-esque see-saws his regularity baby has been pumping out since it formed.

My own starting point was with Kevin’s provocation. Most of us can think of a time we were thrown in at the deep end that turned into something useful – but being thrown in at the deep end is not a curriculum, and the grumpy, uncontactable academic who becomes a fond anecdote for one student produces a lost mark, a missed deadline or a withdrawal for another.

Something never did me any harm doesn’t mean it didn’t harm others, and you should never base policy on survivors. There’s a strange idea of the real world buried in the provocation too, as if it consists only of unclear expectations and unfair assessment – yet most decent workplaces run on induction, management, supervision, escalation routes and reasonable adjustments. We’d never argue a bad manager is useful because they prepare you for other bad managers.

For my own part, I tried to argue that the real problem isn’t the quantity of support but its shape. “Student support” has become a container for almost everything – reasonable adjustments, counselling, hardship funding, personal tutoring, careers, safeguarding, complaints, conduct, accommodation, cost of living, the lot.

When everything is support, universities stop asking what kind of problem they’re actually dealing with – and a demand-led, first-come-first-served model looks fair while reproducing inequality, because the students who draw it down aren’t always the ones in greatest need. They’re often the ones with the most confidence, the best vocabulary and parents who went to university themselves.

Lateral, not just vertical

The other point I wanted to land was about lateral support rather than vertical. Universities tend to picture support as a vertical process – student has a problem, student approaches a service, service triages and intervenes.

But students also lean on peers, course communities, reps, societies, faith and cultural groups, and that lateral infrastructure is usually earlier, less stigmatising and more accessible than turning up at a formal service.

During the pandemic our polling found the demand spike on formal services was driven partly by students losing access to each other. There’s a Wonkhe SUs report out on Friday on exactly this, drawing on several waves of survey data – students with friends in their subject area demand less formal support and are more satisfied with getting less of it. Lateral support isn’t a nice-to-have.

It’s how students work out whether a problem is normal and whether to ask for help at all – and, as both Barber and Greatrix noted, it’s something other countries and well-run residential settings build deliberately while we tend to leave it to chance, our students’ unions being far better at identity and hobbies than at academic, subject-level community.

Credit where it’s due

The other thing I chucked in was graduateness. Students aren’t stupid – they know the things formally credited under our system are often too narrow, that they artificially divide the vocational from the academic, and that elite universities in particular prize theoretical mastery over application.

The way students used to round themselves out was in their free time, except that just as we’ve stripped the slack out of university budgets we’ve stripped it out of student life too, so the time to pick all that up has gone.

The fix isn’t asking history lecturers to bolt skills into their teaching, nor issuing yet more transcripts and awards for non-academic activity – it’s letting the credit system apply credit where it’s actually due, to learning through volunteering, service and part-time work.

Barber ran with it, pointing to Exeter students who are trained, paid a stipend and credited for mentoring disadvantaged pupils in local schools, and Paul chipped in it with the co-curricular programmes he’s set up, where the learning arising from work experience or volunteering is assessed and attracts credit in its own right.

That isn’t coddling. It’s what students need for belonging, and it’s what the economy and society need too.

Who pays

Which is where the evening’s most honest exchange sat. Greatrix warned against the lazy move of declaring there’s no money and lobbing the whole thing over to the students’ union with a cheery “you organise some peer support, that’d be tickety-boo” – community doesn’t materialise because a stretched institution wills it into being on someone else’s budget.

Barber’s answer to the funding question was that the same money goes a great deal further once you accept that support only works through the active participation of the person it’s meant to help, and through the peer and social networks around them.

There wasn’t a lot of disagreement over what’s to be done, but for me “debate” has never necessarily meant two sides and someone announcing “this house believes”. Whether Keele – or anyone else – is willing to act on it all, is as Sophie put it, the question that really matters.