Podcast: Student group claim, PRES, high streets

This week on the podcast UCL has settled with the Student Group Claim over pandemic-era teaching disruptions.

But with 36 more universities now facing legal action from over 170,000 potential claimants, what does this mean for the sector?

Plus the Postgraduate Research Experience Survey (PRES) results are out, and we discuss the potential role of universities in arresting the decline of the high street.

With Rachel Brooks, Professor of Higher Education at University of Oxford, James Dunphy, Chief Executive at Committee of University Chairs, James Coe, Associate Editor at Wonkhe, and presented by Jim Dickinson, Associate Editor at Wonkhe.

On the site:

Who calls the shots when resolving students’ complaints?

The student group claim settles out of court

Postgraduate Research Experience Survey, 2025

Universities have a responsibility for the high street too

You can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Spotify, Acast, Amazon Music, Deezer, RadioPublic, Podchaser, Castbox, Player FM, Stitcher, TuneIn, Luminary or via your favourite app with the RSS feed.

Transcript (auto-generated)

Jim Dickinson: It’s The Wonkhe Show. UCL settles, and the lawyers are coming for 36 more universities. We’ll think through the upshots. Home PGRs don’t feel they belong, but international students do – what’s going on there? And should your Vice-Chancellor be moonlighting as a town planner? It’s all coming up.

“It’s banks calling in their loans, or institutions breaking their covenants. What is the risk appetite of institutions? Well, it’s what the insurance market will support. And whether we like it or not, that is the underpinning regulatory imperative. It is fine if the OFS wants to tell you off. If you go bankrupt due to these massive financial institutions not supporting your level of risk, then it’s all for naught anyway. It doesn’t matter.”
Welcome back to The Wonkhe Show, your week-by-week guide to this week’s higher education news, policy and analysis. I’m your host Jim Dickinson and I’m here to help us get on top, across and underneath this week’s HE news. As usual, three excellent guests. In Guildford, Rachel Brooks, professor of higher education at the University of Oxford. Rachel, your highlight of the week, please.

Rachel Brooks: It’s probably what we were just having an informal chat about. I live, as you were saying, in Guildford, and the University of Surrey is converting their staff club into a Wetherspoon’s pub. And there’s also one in Guildford town centre, so young people will be spoilt for choice, I think.

Jim Dickinson: How exciting, a Spoons on campus. In Edinburgh this week, James Dunphy is Chief Executive at the Committee of University Chairs. James, your highlight of the week, please.

James Dunphy: Good morning, colleagues. I met yesterday with the team who are authoring our new Code of HE Governance. They’re in the thick of taking all the evidence they’ve received and I know they’re working hard to deliver not just for CUC but for our sector. No pressure, team – more power to your elbow.

Jim Dickinson: And in Darlington this week, James Coe is Associate Editor at Wonkhe. James, your highlight of the week, please.

James Coe: Hello, listeners. My highlight of the week on a professional level – we have launched the Commission on Research for Better Economic Growth, which you can see on the site, and write in to tell us all the ways research can grow the economy. On a personal level, Eddie Howe’s beautiful Newcastle United won 6-1 in the Champions League.

Jim Dickinson: This means nothing to me.

Item 1: Student compensation
Jim Dickinson: So, yes, we start this week with student compensation. UCL has settled its bit of the Student Group Claim and, James, it’s not really a bit, is it?

James Coe: No. Well, I suppose that depends how much you think £21.25 million is, Jim. So – should universities give students the things they believe they are getting when they sign up to a contract? Yes, we can all agree on that. To what extent should you be allowed to vary that when there are things like a global pandemic or industrial action? Well, that is the heart of the debate that’s going on with the so-called Student Group Claim, which, as you may be aware, is the legal claim brought by two law firms on behalf of former students affected by pandemic-era teaching restrictions.

Now, the challenge has been to UCL this week – not because UCL are particularly bad or particularly unusual, but as a test case. There has been an out-of-court settlement where there is no acknowledgement of fault, but to effectively expedite the process. I think it brings up a few interesting things. Is this going to be the start of a snowball where we’ll see these claims go more and more? Is it reasonable for universities to have done significant variations in a once-in-a-lifetime event? Or ultimately, is this going to be the start of reframing student power? But I suppose, worst of all, we might never know. The nature of out-of-court settlements is the details are pretty sketchy. So that’s where we are, and I think there’s a lot to go on.

Jim Dickinson: Well, fascinating. This has been all over the news this week. Let’s hear a clip.

[News clip]

“The basis for the claims is very simple. Pandemic students had paid for in-person teaching and access to university facilities and were not given that. They were given online teaching, and libraries and other facilities were very often closed. When you pay for one thing and you receive something else, which is less valuable, then under English law you’re entitled to compensation.”

Georgia Johnson is among the claimants. She was on a teacher training course at the University of Manchester:

“The lectures, the seminars – that was all over Zoom. So, you know, when you go into a breakout room and no one talks, that’s what it was. So I was adding as much as I could during learning time, but really, I wasn’t getting that practical practice, I guess, and also wasn’t getting that discussion time with my peers because it’s very easy to just mute yourself and say, I’m not going to do it.”
Jim Dickinson: Well, this is fascinating. Rachel, the FT reports that the total settlement at UCL is £21.25 million for about just over 5,000 claimants, 35 per cent going to the lawyers. Is this students getting a fair deal or is it a big payday for the legal profession?

Rachel Brooks: Well, it sounds quite like the latter, and I’ve been interested to read more about it, about what is actually the relationship between the students and the law firm. And I was reading this morning that since the settlement and the lawyers have said that they’re going to be going after other universities, many more students have joined the bandwagon. So I think that relationship is quite interesting.

I suppose for me it kind of raises broader questions about how students do actually see higher education. Is it now eroding further any sense of higher education as a public good? Do they see it in very strict contractual terms, just being a consumer buying a product? Or is this just a mechanism to get a bit more money in a situation where students don’t have much and the cost of living is incredibly high? So I think it does raise broader questions for the sector and for how we think about higher education. And the role of law firms in this seems a bit problematic to me.

Jim Dickinson: Yes, interesting – has this fundamentally changed, or is this a signal that the relationship has fundamentally changed? James, I guess UCL’s statement talks about resolving things amicably without further expense, but from a governance perspective, what on earth will the other 36 universities be thinking right now?

James Dunphy: I mean, clearly, it’s a case which will continue in the media and there’s no interest in the legal firm presumably in doing anything other than being able to pursue those other institutions. I mean, moving away a bit from the case – I was a director of learning and teaching at a university when Covid hit and I can really say at that point in time, we were taking really urgent decisions to try to protect the quality of the student experience. I remember, for example, sending the digital team home before anybody else went off the campus to help them get ready for the massive upsurge in the use of the digital estate.

When I was at the funding council in Scotland, one of our key concerns was to make sure students could graduate. And I think the fact that the vast majority of students through the Covid pandemic did have the ability to continue to have access to learning, had the ability to continue to be assessed, and as a result of that were able to graduate on time – it’s a testament not just to the commitment and creativity of staff working in the system, but also to the really hard work that happened in government and regulatory partners too. But for sure, Jim, it will rumble on.

Jim Dickinson: Yes, fascinating. I mean, part of it, Jimbo, is that obviously in the early bit of the pandemic, even the government itself was saying that universities can probably rely on these force majeure clauses. This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing that’s happened. No one could have predicted it. It’s an act of God. But actually, by the time we got to September, you’d got the OIA, OFS, all sorts of people saying, no, you can’t rely on those clauses. You’ve got to tell students what’s changed and get their consent. And it starts to look, I think, like lots of the sector didn’t do that.

James Coe: I was, when Covid was kicking off, Jim – I was working at a university at the time. And my overriding memory is just the sheer volume of things to deal with, the entire lack of clarity and the chaos that was kicking around it. And there was always a risk that we look back onto the past with the information we have today and think about, well, what should we have done knowing that?

I think the real fundamental problem here is the way in which it’s a regulation problem, right? So what we have is a very complex debate about a regulation of terms against a once-in-a-lifetime event and with students not being given what they were promised, basically. The problem is that there is a regulator that exists in order to enforce that that happens in England. What we have now is students effectively seeking contractual redress against what is a regulatory challenge.

So I think the worst outcome of all of this is we end up learning absolutely nothing about how we might regulate for when there are massive unforeseen events that impact students’ contractual terms and their rights. Universities learn nothing about what they may do differently, how they may be supported, what the expectations are from a morass of regulators who had their own challenges during this period. And worst of all, effectively the students that end up with compensation are the ones who can access some legal advice for whatever reason. So my concern for all of this is basically we learn nothing. The people who could get compensation don’t. And the regulated sector gets no better. So this will simply happen again. I can’t really see this being a good outcome for anybody in the long term.

Jim Dickinson: Yes. Rachel, where are you on this? Part of it, I think, is if I look back – and I did do a little bit of looking back the other day – it looks like the various regulators, particularly OFS, were effectively covering their backside by saying, you’ve got to offer absolute clarity to students about what they can expect in the new year. And of course then actually the national guidelines only came out for higher education in mid-September. But the regulators were covering their backside and saying, look, contractually, you’re going to have to tell people exactly what they can expect. Then, of course, that was fairly impossible. Where does blame lie here, do you think?

Rachel Brooks: I mean, I think just sort of echoing what others have already said – I do think my experience of working in a university at that time was that universities were trying to do their best in really difficult circumstances. And it seems to me a little bit unfair that they’re being blamed for that. As has just been said, there were strong requirements from the government at the start about not having people on campus. And both students and staff had quite a lot of difficult personal issues in their different circumstances that universities had to deal with. So to me, it does feel wrong to blame universities because I think there were lots of challenges for them and they tried very hard in difficult circumstances.

And I think one of the ironies is perhaps also that since the pandemic, and even now, I think many universities do have problems getting students onto campus. And in many ways there’s a real liking of online learning and some apparent resistance to being on campus. So I do think that gives us nuance to the debate too. But basically, yeah, I suppose in summary, it feels to me wrong to blame universities when they were trying hard in very difficult circumstances.

James Coe: I mean, just to Rachel’s point, Jim – the thing that I think I find most maddening about this debate is, if you read some of the coverage, you would almost think the debate was: were students taught online or not? Yes, of course they were. There is no debate over whether students who thought they’d get taught in person were taught online. The thing that I’d like to see is students who have entitlement to compensation because there is a genuine breach of their terms obviously should be entitled to it. Universities who had an enormous amount of responsibilities should be supported to learn from that.

But we’re going to end up in this absolutely absurd situation where universities aren’t supported to think about what is the best version of terms and conditions in order to get the balance right between regulatory and legal responsibilities and students’ rights, and students will nonetheless still feel shortchanged. There is no grand good outcome for the sector as a whole in this.

Jim Dickinson: The thing is though, James – if it was the case that this is overall pretty unfair on universities, universities were doing their best and so on, presumably UCL wouldn’t have settled.

James Coe: So that’s a question for UCL, Jim, not for me. But what I would say, to add to Rachel’s point – because I do think this is critical – it wasn’t the case that during the remainder of that academic year and then into the new one that universities only delivered what they were going to deliver but did it online. They also pivoted in a whole range of other ways. So for example, they stood up new student support services, they stood up new engagement with students. They worked really hard to pivot not just from physical to digital, but also to change the service provision to make sure that students who were having really acutely difficult times – often not getting the experience they thought they would get, that’s just the fact of it, that’s the fact for many students in the system at that time – but making sure they were getting support that was contextualised to their needs. That includes support for students who were in distress, through to different types of support to help students to study well while studying at home. So I think it’d be a mistake to accept the premise that because physical in-person teaching wasn’t there, that there was no commitment from institutions to protect student wellbeing and protect student interests and indeed to protect quality.

Jim Dickinson: But this is the kernel of it, I think, isn’t it, Rachel? I was actually looking back at some of the stuff I was writing at the time. And one of the things I said at one point was – and this really wound a lot of people up, I guess for obvious reasons – sometimes when everyone has done their absolute level best, contractually, it’s still not enough. And when it’s not enough, should they have still paid the same amount?

Rachel Brooks: I mean, I think that relates to the broader financing of our higher education system. And it’s not that universities have any excess money to pay this kind of amount. So I think, thinking about it from a university’s perspective, as James was just saying, they did the best in difficult circumstances. And I think perhaps there’s just a lack of clarity that, if universities have to respond to events they have absolutely no control over, and they’re being asked to do something specific by the government, to what extent do they have to pick up financial responsibility for that?

And I guess there’s also a broader question – if they are settling large amounts of money, who is actually paying for that with tight university budgets? Presumably, ultimately, it’s either insurance companies, which will have implications with higher premiums in the future, or it’s future students themselves who are paying for the amounts going out now. So for me, it seems an unfair situation for universities to be placed in. Nobody would disagree that students themselves had a really tough time in that period. But I think it wasn’t that universities exploited that situation for their own advantage at all. I think there was a genuine commitment to try to make things better for students and also the staff in very difficult circumstances.

James Coe: I mean, I remember reading – I was working at a university when you were writing some of the stuff, Jim, and I’d open it and I’d think, but this is just really hard. Like, regardless of what Jim’s saying, you’re simply going to drive me mad at the end of going through it, right?

But I think the problem is the frame of the debate feels entirely wrong to me. There’s a debate about did students get what they were told they would. There’s a debate about are experiences comparable. Well, no, of course they’re not. One year’s experience to another is never comparable, regardless of global pandemics or not. The real crux of the debate is the extent to which universities are able to deviate on their terms and the extent to which the way their terms are constructed allow them to do so. That is a massive and interesting and important regulatory debate about the entire sector that I feel we’re just simply never going to have. So all that means is that we’ll have a version of this basically forever, on a larger scale or smaller scale from time to time.

Jim Dickinson: Well, you say that, James, but one of the really interesting things I think – if I look through the terms that were in play, and we kind of know that from some of the documents that went to previous hearings when they were trying to work out whether you can do it as a big group or not – if you look at some of those terms, the Competition and Markets Authority have been really clear about some of those. The classic, if we’re not looking at the pandemic, is: can you say in your terms that you can’t be held responsible for industrial action of your own staff? Now, you’ve got a regulator on the one hand who’s been saying that since 2015. Lots of universities still say, actually, we can’t be held responsible for that – you can’t tell Jo Grady what to do nationally. And you’ve got this kind of weird standoff. So presumably at some point, the CMA and/or OFS or someone is going to turn around and say, we do have to clear this up.

James Dunphy: No doubt there are lessons for regulators as much as there are for government in the handling of the pandemic. I mean, I moved from an institution into a regulator midway through the pandemic, having just delivered the online welcome for students who were joining the university I was exiting. I think I would go back to the points made by Jim and by Rachel. Everyone working in the system at that point was committed to trying to deliver the level best they could. Actually, that often meant making personal sacrifice. And as Rachel mentioned, in situations which were far from ideal for those staff members.

I think drawing the learning from it is really important. Also celebrating where there are positives. I mean, in many institutions, there were real step changes in the use of digital learning systems – sometimes digital learning systems that had been there for a long time but hadn’t really come into mainstream use. But as James says, really reflecting on some of that learning and thinking about how we can use it positively into the future feels like the right judgment to me.

Jim Dickinson: But just on that, James – JD – let’s imagine that it’s the case that students for all sorts of complex legal reasons weren’t really due to pay the amount that perhaps their predecessors had paid. And it was the case that universities were pulling miracles to put on what they were putting on. That’s an argument for government stepping in, isn’t it, rather than just maintaining the high fee that students were charged?

James Dunphy: So there was government support in different parts of the system, and indeed regulators introduced flexibilities throughout the pandemic to help providers manage what they were managing. That would be different in different UK nations, but certainly in Scotland the Scottish Government applied additional resources into the budget of SFC, and we did everything that we could in that time to make sure that we supported institutions, both through flexibilities in our funding and regulatory expectations and in terms of direct application of cash into the system. I think that comes to that point – we are in a system. We do have responsibilities at institutional level, but of course we also in that complex system have responsibilities at government and regulatory level too.

Jim Dickinson: I mean, that year was interesting financially, Rachel, because at the start of that year, there was panic that students weren’t going to come in September. The sector was going to collapse. And then actually, if you look at the accounts for that year, because people weren’t turning the lights on or the heating on and furlough money was coming in, universities had a bumper year.

Rachel Brooks: Well, I haven’t read those accounts, but I think that kind of financial bumper that you just mentioned certainly hasn’t continued now. Certainly at the university I was working at at the time, it definitely didn’t feel like that, and it wasn’t the case, because I think they’d lost a lot of money on student accommodation that students weren’t using. And I think many universities – that was actually one of the drivers to get students back onto campus, the financial losses that they had sustained through accommodation not being used and therefore not being paid for. So I think there’s complexity around that. I don’t think that bumper was probably the case for all universities by any stretch of the imagination.

And I guess there’s the point about the regulatory issues that we were just talking about. To me, there are broader moral issues here – that universities were struggling to provide the best service they could to students in a very difficult situation. And I think beyond the time commitment of staff – and actually it’s probably worth saying in terms of cost to universities – I think staff were putting in many more hours than they would have done with face-to-face teaching because of the adaptation to new technology and the preparation for teaching in a very different way through online learning. So the staff costs went up, research was often neglected for that reason. But the financial challenges that have followed quite closely on that do seem to me to put universities in a situation where to financially penalise them now for doing their very best, morally, in a very difficult situation, seems pretty problematic.

James Coe: But I also, just to bluntly agree with Rachel – government isn’t going to step in under any circumstance in order to provide compensation. Because in doing so you would effectively go back on everybody who has a risk of their contractual rights being broken through Covid, and it would become enormously expensive basically forever.

I think one of the risks that Rachel’s point highlights is effectively you could end up with the wealthiest institutions who have the headroom to settle in some of these instances, and those who don’t not doing so, and they end up having the public debate effectively on behalf of the sector. This is why it’s a fundamental sector-wide problem that’s only going to lead to partial redress through this kind of action.

Jim Dickinson: Yes, although at the time, people who’d booked a holiday, people who’d got a contract with their local nursery, people who’d booked a wedding – they were all routinely getting compensation or discounts and so on. The fact that this wasn’t handled at the time might make it more unique than it feels, I guess. But I mean, on that, Jimbo, right – it’s only on the assumption that some proportion or other of either the UCL case or any of the other cases are going to be covered by insurers. I guess the question that comes up is, if you’re a student that makes a complaint and you’re expecting that complaint to be handled without bias, according to the OIA, if your insurer is really calling the shots, trying to limit the liability – that’s not really being handled in a non-biased way, is it?

James Coe: Well, I think there’s two things there. I think the challenge with your example, Jim, is that it would again depend on the contractual terms. So if I think of my daughter’s nursery where I would say I pay almost all my wages to send her – fine, not that I’m extremely bitter about this – the thing that I am regularly told I pay for is to guarantee her place, not for whether she’s available to go to nursery or not. So if she was to get a flu and be sick for two weeks, I can’t get my money back. A holiday is a guaranteed period of time.

The problem with all of this is that higher education is more intangible in lots of ways. It’s really, really hard to define. On the insurers’ point, right – is this not a really interesting debate over who has actually called the shots in higher education? If you look at the title of my blog this week –

Jim Dickinson: Well, yes. And Jim may I say, what a blog. Go and read it, everyone. But if you look at the financial debate, right – what is the actual risk to financial stability of the sector? It’s banks calling in their loans, or institutions breaking their covenants. What is the risk appetite of institutions? Well, it’s what the insurance market will support. And whether we like it or not, that is the underpinning regulatory imperative. It is fine if the OFS wants to tell you off. If you go bankrupt due to these massive financial institutions not supporting your level of risk, then it’s all for naught anyway. It doesn’t matter.

James Coe: But I mean, JD, doesn’t that then create this bizarre scenario where the official message to students is, a complaint that you make about the university will be handled without bias and on its merits – but really what’s happening is it’ll be handled in accordance with the risk profile of your insurer?

James Dunphy: So, Jim, before I go on to that, I want to just go back to that point around weddings and holidays and things like that. So clearly there was loads of disruption in people’s lives, including to things like holidays and weddings. Fundamentally, it is my understanding that most institutions continued to award credit and therefore continued to award degrees and qualifications during that period. So I think what we’re talking here about is a disruption to the type of experience that students expected to get or were promised to get, in the context of the engagement they had.

But certainly in most of the institutions that I am aware of through the pandemic, they continued – through the work that we’ve talked about, including the pivot off-campus, the change to student support services – to help students to learn and therefore to enable students to be assessed. And that means they were able to secure credit and also then graduate. That’s not to look away from the different experiences, but it is quite different, I think, from something like a wedding being cancelled.

Jim Dickinson: If I booked a wedding and then the company goes, “Oh well, the venue is not available anymore, you’re not getting any food, all our chairs are broken, but I’m still going to make sure that by the end of it, you’re married” – that doesn’t count. Obviously, you’re paying for the experiences that facilitate the outcome. You’re not only buying the outcome at a university, are you?

James Dunphy: Yeah, for sure. And that’s not the point I was making. My point was simply to point to that very transactional nature of a commercial arrangement and the difference that exists between the compact that a university and a student form together. And actually, it’s for the reason of that compact, I think, that institutions and those who work in them worked really hard to try to provide the best possible experience to students throughout the pandemic.

Anyway, on the insurance issue – universities are just more complicated than weddings as well, Jim.

Jim Dickinson: Not shooting the underlying principle. I mean, my own wedding – I’m not sure. I mean, if you think about the LLE, I’ve got a feeling that someone buying a 30-credit module is going to be less complicated than the average wedding.

James Coe: Well, it’s miles more complicated. I mean, look – my own wedding venue went bust during Covid and I got paid out by my insurers, and basically their argument was this isn’t our fault, we can’t control it, therefore X, Y or Z. So I think there’s a different question of what is the product you are actually entitled to in higher education – that is the purpose of this debate. And that’s massively complicated to define, as opposed to a wedding, which is, you know, go there early on, get married, have some drinks, have some food, go home. Solved.

Jim Dickinson: Look, here’s my hypothesis, Rachel. All of this has been actually in place for a very long time. That guidance from the Competition and Markets Authority came out in 2015. I guess one of the senses I’ve got is that people are just starting to understand the implications.

Rachel Brooks: I think it does, as this discussion has highlighted, raise really important issues for the sector. If it has the effect of forcing regulatory bodies or government to clarify what expectations are on what the situation is, that is probably a good thing.

But I do think it is more complicated than that, because I do think, in a positive way, the pandemic did also give both staff and students exposure to new forms of learning. And so we’ve been very critical, I suppose, in this discussion about online learning. But I think there were quite positive messages from that experience that actually students have wanted continued. So I mentioned earlier attendance issues – and I think students have found lots of positives in recorded lectures, more things being done online than previously.

It goes back to James’s point and Jim’s about the complexity of this and not comparing it to other consumer goods. Yes, learning undoubtedly did take place over that period. Even more so, I think it did allow experimentation with perhaps new forms of pedagogy which weren’t entirely negative and which students themselves, I think, have shown through their attendance patterns that they do value online learning in some ways and in some contexts. So I think it is a more complex picture than the coverage of this particular case probably indicates. As ever.

Jim Dickinson: Well, great stuff. Plenty more on the site on all of this.

[Blog spot]

Farheen Akhtar: Hi, I’m Farheen Akhtar and this week on Wonkhe, I’ve been blogging about why improved data is essential to tackling current and future technical skills shortages. The way HESA data is reporting on technical staff is changing. In case you didn’t know, from 2028, HESA is improving how technical professional data is captured and understood within the sector. These changes would enable earlier identification of emerging technical skills needs – this includes technical skills needed to deliver the UK’s research and innovation ambitions. It would also enable effective policy responses across technical education, training, recruitment and skills development. The sector is definitely moving in the right direction to enhance visibility and recognition for technical professionals.

Item 2: Postgraduate Research Experience Survey
Jim Dickinson: Now, next up – the PRES is out. Rachel, what’s going on?

Rachel Brooks: OK, so PRES – I’ve always called it PRES – this is the Postgraduate Research Experience Survey that Advance HE have just published. This used to be conducted every two years; now they do it every year, but because universities don’t take part themselves every year, it’s a little bit difficult to make comparisons from year to year. But overall, it’s a good news story, I think – high levels of overall satisfaction from those who completed it, the PhD students. So the overall level of satisfaction: 83 per cent, and this is the highest since 2011.

And also, rates of satisfaction are now quite similar between home students and international students. And there has been a gap previously, but that’s been closing. Less positively, disabled students seem less satisfied than other students – there’s an 11-point gap there, which seems quite significant. And although the overall levels of satisfaction between home and international students have closed, there are also some interesting differences there. Really surprisingly to me, international students feel a much stronger sense of belonging than home students. I think that raises some interesting questions. So that’s one of the findings that was particularly interesting to me and I think probably highlights some challenges for the sector in terms of how to increase home students’ sense of community and belonging too.

Jim Dickinson: Well, fascinating. Now, James JD – generally this looks like really good news by the looks of it, but we do have the similar problem that we have with the NSS, haven’t we, which is there’s a danger that the headline number reflects the percentage of your students that are international rather than actual satisfaction.

James Dunphy: Well, can I start by giving a shout out to Jonathan Neves at Advance HE. He has for a number of years worked really hard to deliver this survey and other surveys that Advance HE puts out. And I think it’s really important, particularly at a time of transformation in the system when we know higher education is going through a whole range of changes, that we get really good evidence of the student experience.

I think the thing that came out for me here was that link between belonging and student satisfaction. And that for me reminds us that in a world that is rich in technology, creating strong engagement between educators and students – and among students – is really important in creating really good student experiences. I think we should be really alert to the experience of disabled students. There is much more work for us to do to make our brilliant higher education more accessible and more relatable for different students. This survey helps us to remember that, but so too does the work that we need to do to close the attainment gap for Black students. It is possible, I would suggest, for us to be really proud of the progress that we are making, but also still to want to go further to make higher education more accessible for all.

Jim Dickinson: Jimbo – this thing about teaching. What I think I’ve picked up over the last couple of years with all the cuts and so on is that actually in some universities, PGRs that teach – it’s on the increase, because core members of academic staff have been lost. And in some places the diametrically opposite has happened in order to save money. But it’s not just about the opportunity to teach, is it? I mean, last week I was reading a policy that said – I’m not making this up, this is an actual policy from a UK university – you’ll only be offered training on how to deliver teaching when you’ve done 20 hours of teaching. Which did strike me as being a bit like only offering people a driving lesson if they’ve had a go at the wheel.

James Coe: I’m going to teach you manual handling after you’ve picked up all the heavy boxes. Next.

So, Jim, I’m the wrong person to ask about satisfaction – I can’t get any satisfaction in any sense. But what I think your point illustrates is we also struggle to know what to do with this group of students. I did some work a couple of years ago about the non-economic impacts of international PGR students to the UK’s higher education and knowledge base. And a few things really stuck out for me. They are a single best knowledge asset in lots of cases. We don’t really think very carefully about how could we cultivate that. How do we support things like the contribution to getting the most out of their work? How does working between international students and home students increase our overall knowledge? I think that seems a shame.

We get stuck in these ever more internecine debates about whether these are students, are they workers, what does that mean for satisfaction? In reality, people just want to be treated decently and feel like they’re getting a fair shout regardless of where they’re at.

I suppose in a bit – I’ve been doing some work with the University of York, University of Sheffield and others through the Research Supervisory Project, RSVP. And it really strikes me, to your point, the fact that there is not enough recognition of what does good supervision look like? What does good support look like? What could be a model that we do elsewhere? Does it have to be this weird one-to-one or two-to-one thing that we’ve had forever? Seems like an absolute missed opportunity.

So the reason why I like the PRES – for all sorts of debate about it – it’s one of the very few times where the fact we don’t really think very hard about that experience actually gets a fair airing in any kind of way.

Jim Dickinson: Yes. I mean, there’s an aspect of that, I guess, Rachel, with this disabled students thing that really fascinates me. So I was at the launch of the Disabled Students UK thing the other week. The big thing that was coming out there was this idea that students agree their reasonable adjustments with the disability function in the university and then are struggling to get academics to deliver those. But in this case, it looks like it’s worse than that – the disability function doesn’t understand PGR to start with.

Rachel Brooks: Yeah, I found that quite striking too, because it said that less than half of disabled PGRs agreed that their institution provides the reasonable adjustments that they need. And I think that does raise questions about what is going on there.

I think that probably needs digging into. And I don’t know if the report actually says any more about that. But I think that’s also surprising given that we’re not talking about people who are probably not new to the higher education system. So they’ll have precedents from their undergraduate experience. And I don’t know also whether that number can be disaggregated in terms of home and international – whether actually you’ve got people who are new to the UK and therefore it’s taking more time to sort out that kind of provision. So I think it does raise some questions, which I actually don’t know the answer to at this point, but I think it’s something that institutions should reflect on and think about how their own practice feeds into those statistics.

Jim Dickinson: James, this other thing on belonging – one of my reflections over the past few years, because lots of people have done work on belonging, we’ve done work on belonging, lots of people have done work on belonging – my sense is that lots of people are in danger of over-complicating it. In so far as, if I really boil down lots of the stuff that we’ve done with all sorts of different sorts of students, including PGRs, a lot of it is just they want some opportunities to spend some time with other students.

James Dunphy: Yeah, absolutely. I think there’s a real human dimension to this work. One of my favourite references – and I’m sorry to drop this in – is Chickering and Gamson’s Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education. I really would suggest listeners check it out. It was published in 1987. It’s like one page, really easy to read. And it underlines, Jim, your point about getting this right matters to students. It also matters to educators and those who support learning. It is not rocket science to do, but it does take a bit of design work.

And of course then, going back to the conversation we had around the experience through Covid, when you’re trying to do it for 40,000 students around the institution, it takes a lot of work, it takes a lot of planning, and it takes a bit of design work to really make sure you can deliver it at scale. And that includes, for example, the link between academic teams and those working in central support roles and disability roles or on library services. It definitely includes developing that reciprocity amongst the student community as well. But at its heart, it’s fairly straightforward, right?

Jim Dickinson: Jimbo, how much of this do you reckon is – “when I was a student, when I was a PGR student, I had it rough” – and this is survival of the fittest, this kind of Darwinian “this is how the system produces the best people, it surfaces the best people.” How much of it is “never did me any harm” – is this the tyranny of nostalgia, proper bin men, things were better in my day, sort of era of PGR experience?

James Coe: So having done work in this area, I think it is almost the exact opposite – which is, I can’t believe how terrible this was for me and things continue to be very hard. There is clearly something structurally wrong.

I think there’s two problems there – three, actually. The regulatory sort of grasp around the PGR experience, in order to think about what does this mean for provision, what does it mean for services, is clearly much more slight than we see about undergraduates. There is simply less attention paid to it at institutional levels because it is fewer students, much higher circumstantial variation.

And I suppose the other way is, when I think back to my students’ union sabbatical days all those years ago, I ran on small practical changes, because I recognise the things that address some of the belonging and loneliness – PGR, PGT, UG – are things like, do I have somewhere nice to sit? Is it warm? Are there microwaves? Can I get a coffee before nine o’clock? All of that, right? But it’s quite hard to affect that on an institutional level, weirdly. The sort of accumulation of things that overfill the dustbin of a bad student experience are much harder to address than doing a brand new PGR student experience strategy.

So for anyone listening to this, that would be what I’d think about. Stop worrying about a PGR strategy as much. Think about what are the basic needs that help to build a sense of community.

James Dunphy: Jim, you’re giving me flashbacks to once doing a series of student focus groups and going to a campus to ask about the experience of catering facilities, only to find after I’d done the focus group that there weren’t any catering facilities on that campus. So I think you’re spot on, right?

Those tangible things really matter. And of course, for the PGR student experience, it’s a much more personal experience to the individuals. So having those links between your PGR community and decision-makers, including decision-makers in the estates teams, in student finance teams, really matters.

The other point I was just going to draw from the report is the stuff around cost of living and the impact that is having on the student experience. Again, these are really tangible things that even if we can’t resolve them, we can engage in conversation with our students. And through that conversation, we can understand the kind of tangible actions we can take to help make their experience more positive.

Jim Dickinson: I’ll tell you what, I have got a question for you, Rachel. I guess, of all the people that I might expect to have an interesting view on this – this isn’t just a transactional relationship, this is about relationships, this is about a community of staff and students and scholars and so on – if academic staff are having a fairly choppy or rough time, we might expect that to rub off on PGRs more than we might undergrads, maybe.

Rachel Brooks: Yes, I think we might do. And I think that’s why the overall high-level satisfaction is great and good, and probably shows that staff who’ve been in difficult circumstances have continued to do a great job with their students and not passed on any unhappiness that they might have to that group. So I think that does reflect well on how staff have operated under, in many institutions, quite difficult circumstances.

But I guess I just wanted to go back to the point about belonging as well and the differences between international and home students. I think perhaps, going back to the point about PGRs being around in a small community – I guess a lot of work in many institutions has gone into improving services for international students and thinking about what their specific needs are as a group, and devoting quite a lot of time and attention to that. So I guess maybe some of the difference might be explained by the results of that kind of work, which has probably encompassed PhD students as well as masters and undergraduate students.

And I do think that perhaps home PGR students have perhaps not benefited from quite the same attention, so maybe that’s one of the reasons for the differences there. But I think it is really nice to see about international students feeling they belong, because obviously there have been some perhaps less positive messages coming in terms of our broader migration policy in this country. And I would say also the academic literature gives lots of examples of how international students can feel very isolated and not feel a great sense of belonging to their institution. So I think that is good progress for the UK sector.

[Ad break – The Secret Life of Students]

Item 3: Universities and the high street
Jim Dickinson: Right, now finally this week – universities and the high street. James, Jess Lister has been on the site this week arguing that universities have a responsibility for the high street, and specifically noting the proliferation of vape shops.

James Dunphy: So I thought it was a really interesting blog and thanks to Jess at Public First for penning it for Wonkhe. The standout message was: when people are asked about issues in their local area, high street shop closures rank as the second most significant issue, second only to potholes. So, Jim, I’m glad we’ve decided to focus the conversation on the impact of universities on high streets rather than on potholes. Let’s not get universities dragged into solving that wicked problem.

But more seriously, I took this as an invite into the broader question of the responsibility we have to demonstrate the real value of higher education to individuals, to families and communities. And how we continue to make the case that brilliant higher education doesn’t just empower and transform people’s opportunities, but it also gives them the ability to give back.

And if it’s OK, I’ll just give an example, because I looked this up for us. So 3,500 students were accepted into nursing degrees in Scotland in 2024. Within 12 weeks of joining, most of those students will be out on placement, learning in the workplace as well as contributing in all sorts of different health and social care settings. Three years in higher education for most of them will lead to a multi-decade career delivering truly transformative health and social care services for some of the most disadvantaged individuals in our societies.

So, yes, absolutely, universities need to play a part in regional regeneration. We need to recognise that matters to people in our communities. But we should also tell the story of the really big impacts that we’re really proud to bring to the table as higher education institutions.

Jim Dickinson: You say that about potholes, James, right – I swear to God, this is true. 18 months ago, there was a case competition in Schagen in the Netherlands where it was being run by 20 universities. And there were four student teams that were working out how to fix the wicked problem of potholes.

James Dunphy: Yeah. I mean, really, no doubt somewhere in our brilliant university system, someone is looking at the question of how we get more resilience in our road infrastructure. I mean, I do recall at one point in my time at Robert Gordon University, we had a connectivity issue in one of our buildings. And the reason for that was because we had a pothole on the road and that was causing some issue with the JANET network. So they matter, right?

But I think the key is that we don’t just limit ourselves to some of the kind of hot-topic partnerships, but we also tell the story of the really big impacts – like all of those thousands of people who are going out into our health and social care workforce – and we should be proud as much of them as we are of the staff who play really critical roles in getting them ready for their future careers.

Jim Dickinson: Right, so I often tell this story – a couple of summers ago, staying in Plymouth over the summer, and I’m above retail, right, in some space that clearly used to be a stockroom but is now student accommodation. And I ventured outside in the early evening and there was nowhere to go other than McDonald’s or I think the German Döner Kebab company. And I ended up going back to my room and reading the Plymouth City Plan – and students were positioned as economic contributors but not as citizens. That’s part of the problem, isn’t it?

Rachel Brooks: I mean, I think we’re seeing increasing numbers of students choosing to stay at home or commute to their local university, so I think these dynamics are changing quite a lot. And there are many students who have lived in the place where they’re studying for a very long time and have important roots and close feelings to that. So I think again there’s complexity there.

I would say that when students are studying, even if they haven’t moved away from home, you can have citizen feelings, you can feel close allegiances to places, even if you’re not there all the time. I think many students do that. I think universities have also taken quite important steps to blur the boundaries between campus and community. And I do think that’s work that’s been going on for quite a long time. As well as the kind of things that James was talking about, there are much more localised initiatives to get local communities onto campus and to ensure that students behave well when they’re venturing from the campus into town – there are lots of signs around the university encouraging students to be quiet if they’re moving around late at night.

So yeah, I do think students can often feel a lot of attachment to the places where they’re studying, even if they’re not there all the year round. And I think that’s been helped by lots of activities that have been taken over the past decade to improve community-campus relationships, by getting communities onto campus to use university facilities, as well as movement the other way around too.

Jim Dickinson: Look, final thing, Jimbo – Pride in Place was a big thing at Labour Party conference, right? This new Pride in Place strategy. There’s a huge amount of money going into Pride in Place. And when I was reading the prospectus, almost every kind of voluntary, community and government and quasi-government and public and quasi-public organisation other than universities were mentioned as players in that strategy. What is going wrong such that Jess is having to write this blog?

James Coe: Jim, have you ever heard of a little place called Darlington?

Jim Dickinson: Are you eager for money or what? No idea. Tell me, please do tell me more.

James Coe: Seventh fastest-growing economy in the entire country. Access to seven government departments, two hours from London, two hours from Edinburgh, on the doorstep of York, Durham, Newcastle – the greatest town that has ever existed, home of the steam locomotive.

The single biggest conversation, if I go home, is about the local House of Fraser closing down and gutting the high street. There is not a single bigger thing that any university could do – to improve their access, to have access to outstanding schools and outstanding colleges in many parts of the HE pipeline and postcodes in Darlington, to improve their civic impact, to improve their image and to strengthen their overall position – than somebody moving into that House of Fraser and running a shop, a university site, out of it.

So if Teesside, University of York, Newcastle, Northumbria, Durham, York St John or Leeds are listening, then if you want to improve your civic impact, please take over the House of Fraser. Do a Gloucester – take over.

Jim Dickinson: Well, fascinating stuff. That’s about it for this week. Remember, to go in deep on anything we’ve discussed today, you’ll find links in the show notes on wonkhe.com. Don’t forget to subscribe – just search for The Wonkhe Show wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want to get ahead of everything going on in UK HE, just click Subscriptions on the site to find out more. So huge thanks to Rachel, James, James, Michael, Sam, and everyone for making it all happen. We’ll be back next week. Mark will be here. Until then – stay wonky.

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