What about the former-polytechnics?
And what about polytechnicism? Our correspondent, ‘Mudfog’, on a new report for the Million+ Group
Teaching that matters, Modern Universities Changing Lives
A report for the Million+ Group of Universities by Mark Hadfield, Jaswinder Dhillon, Michael Joplin and Russell Goffe of the Centre for Development and Applied Research in Education at the University of Wolverhampton, Feb 2012, 40 pages.
This report was launched at the University of Greenwich on February10th to the approbation of David Willetts who then went into closed session to discuss their ‘employability skills’ with Greenwich Business students. Professor David Maguire, the new Greenwich VC, compared the various charabancs sketched by Boz in Dickens’ description of the road to Greenwich Fair with the F&HE institutions jostling in the market place for ‘students as consumers’, a term he implored the Minister to stop using. In reply, Willetts excused himself for talking about student finance as being ‘one step away from talking about students as consumers’ but claimed – in response to a plea from the Mayor of the Royal Borough of Greenwich on behalf of its debt-averse working-class school leavers – that fees and loans were ‘not really a conventional debt’ but had ‘all the best features of a graduate tax’. This is his usual line that steals Labour’s clothes of a reduced £6,000 grad-tax. So was his assertion that, given the demographic fall in older teens, UCAS figures showed only a 0.2% decline in 2012 applications! Willetts attributed this to the success of Simon Hughes’ ‘student ambassadors’, while he assured other doubters HEFCE had made available an additional £40m. for post-graduates while international students ‘may now stay on at graduate level jobs’ though ‘not in a shop or something’! He reassured others in the audience about disabled access but could only answer a call to stop changing financial arrangements with the promise of ‘a new announcement’ relating to ‘further flexibility’ that would embrace FE colleges as well as ‘external providers’.
However, Willetts’ was hardly discomforted by Pam Tatlow, Chief Executive of Million+, whose report he declared ‘matches the White Paper [in] putting teaching and learning at the heart of the student experience’. The report was introduced with a video of talking heads from Wolverhampton, Derby, East London and Leeds Metropolitan Universities seamlessly discoursing on their student-centred approach as a model to the sector as a whole in prioritising teaching over research to encourage reflective practice upon transferable employability skills. And so the report goes on, following a warning in the introduction that the White Paper’s student number controls ‘have the potential to reduce the unit of resource’ (p.2) after institutions have struggled so long ‘in expanding academic provision while maintaining the quality of teaching and learning’ (p.4). As the report indicates, Modern Universities have expanded proportionately more at all levels than their rival university groupings whose approaches are research- and discipline-centred rather than student-centred. ‘This means that students have to be more than consumers… They must instead be partners in learning’ (p.6).
What this means in practice is exemplified throughout the report in boxed descriptions of ‘students as e-champions’, acquiring ‘action learning sets’ on ‘modules that embed employability skills’ through ‘formative holistic assessment’ alongside approving quotations from learners ‘overcoming challenges’ to ‘confront issues’ that ‘boost confidence’ and ‘communication skills’. Quotation marks here become as redundant as the superfluous use of the word ‘skills’, indiscriminately mixed with ‘attributes’ and – a new one on p.17 – ‘dispositions’. Psychologists who endeavour to distinguish meaningfully between these terms must be turning in their laboratories! And what is anyone to make on p.17 of ‘core attributes (personal and generic graduate attributes) and employability competences’ developed by ‘whole curriculum approaches’ to ‘undergraduate employability skills and attributes’?
All this ‘attribution’ – if not ‘learning’ – is related by the report to ‘the knowledge economy’, a notion that has surely seen its boom and bust! But no, ‘the development of a knowledge economy will be dependent on sustaining… social mobility’ (p.18). And
‘Modern universities with the most socially inclusive profiles made a positive contribution to social mobility with graduates moving into higher socio-occupational groups compared to their family backgrounds. Moreover, the earnings of these graduates were likely to be 15 per cent higher than the earnings of people with lower qualifications, many of whom could have progressed to university but did not do so.’ (p.19).
This is the rub, for, while it is clearly the view of Willetts and Gove that too many working-class kids have gone to university and should be returned to the apprenticeships and to FE whence they have strayed, if masses of young people supported by their parents are prepared to become endebted up to £27k+ in hopes of ‘15 per cent higher than the earnings of people with lower qualifications’, then Willetts welcomes Million+’s report which turns what was HE into FE, if not Youth Training in flexible paraprofessional labour.
The report recognises this will not happen automatically but ‘requires not only institution-wide change but a dramatic shift in organisational cultures’ (p.8 and again pp.15 and 17). This is necessary to change institutions that were once part of a unified culture of higher education and which in many instances made the best of their inception as polytechnics intended to extend higher education on the cheap to pioneer new forms of alternative provision to adult and locally living students. They offered an alternative to, on the one hand, the finishing school model of the campus universities (until recently at least, often experienced as something of a three-year packaged holiday by many students), and, on the other, to academic cramming combined with ruling-class role play for the elite. The polytechnics thus attempted to combine theoretical knowledge with practical skill (in a real and not debased sense of behavioural competence). It is still possible to maintain this polytechnic ideal but it is discarded in this Million+ report. Any of the rival universities groups that are tempted to imitate it – if only to diversify their market base – will face ‘The major challenge’ that the report recognises, which is ‘cultural rather than technical so that more staff recognise the importance of introducing such approaches to teaching and learning into their own courses’ (p.17). Belated resistance to this kulturkampf must be recognised and supported by universities outwith Million+ institutions. The wider academic community should not therefore turn their backs on those institutions most vulnerable to reduction to e-learning hubs, merger, take-over or closure. Like the Dickensian ‘Cabs, hackney-coaches, “shay” carts, coal-waggons, stages, omnibuses, sociables, gigs, donkey-chaises – all crammed with people… the question never is what the horse can draw, but what the vehicle will hold.’
>>Willetts welcomes Million+’s report which turns what was HE into FE, if not Youth Training in flexible paraprofessional labour.
And if I understand this correctly, it will offer primarily post-industrial motivational training.
‘students as e-champions’
‘action learning sets’
‘modules that embed employability skills’
‘formative holistic assessment’
‘overcoming challenges’ to ‘confront issues’
‘boost confidence’
‘communication skills’
It’s the trickle-down theory in action – y’all gotta be ready to paddles when the money sloshes y’way…
>>the finishing school model of the campus universities (until recently at least, often experienced as something of a three-year packaged holiday by many students)
Still going strong I think, although similarly ‘invaded’ by flexibilisation and motivational self-coaching (or CV developement). Booze, however, remains at the heart of the mainstream, mobile student experience. Bar takings may be falling, but pre-drinking is rising.
It’s the perfect antidote. A night out is like getting possessed by neoliberalism!