Statuary

The controversy at Oxford over Oriel College’s Cecil Rhodes statue is the gift that keeps on giving. In today’s episode, Oriel alumnus and former Australian PM Tony Abbott has written to the Independent to argue against the campaign to remove the statue. To my mind, there’s (at least!) two different arguments going on here, and it’s important to unpick the issues.

An Oxford statue which is causing offence

The background: Cecil Rhodes, an Oriel alumnus, led activities in southern Africa in the nineteenth century – political, business, colonizing - which played a large part in the development of the British colonies in that area, and out of which grew great personal wealth for him and also a political establishment which morphed into the evils of apartheid. (Note: better and more nuanced historical accounts are no doubt available: I’m not trying to make historical points about Rhodes here.) His wealth supports the prestigious Rhodes scholarships, which fund non-UK students to undertake postgraduate study at Oxford. Tony Abbott was a Rhodes scholar.

An Oxford statue which is not causing as much offence

There is agreement that Rhodes himself did things and caused things to happen which were Bad and Wrong: racist and exploitative, or, in the words of Oriel College’s statement, “…Rhodes was also a 19th-century colonialist whose values and world view stand in absolute contrast to the ethos of the Scholarship programme today, and to the values of a modern University.”

From this two further arguments are derived. Firstly, that the statue should be removed because it symbolises a past which we should abjure. Secondly, that the statue should be removed because it contributes to the oppression of minorities which in turn causes, so the argument goes, the demographics of Oxford’s student population to be skewed against Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) students.

(And on this latter point, the Oriel College statement concedes that there is work to be done to improve the experience and representation of BME students. Amen to that, and please could you have a think about public school bias while you're about it.)

To take the first argument – that we should remove the statue as we no longer wish to commemorate its subject - there are points to be made on both sides. Can history be changed by taking down a statue? Of course not. Further, many British institutions, including more than one or two universities, have pasts which include associations with people and activities which would today be thought of as horrifying, and assets which include the financial gains from these. If we did a thorough historical clear-out, we’d be too busy sorting out yesterday’s wrongs to prevent today’s wrongs from being done. But equally, it’s only a statue, and the logistics of removing it are not insurmountable. And we do have a duty to think about the actions of our forebears, and the part they play in the narratives we shape today about our past. History is not uncontroversial, what we say and do about our history tells others about who we are today.

(Personally, I think the problem is with having public statuary at all. There isn’t the room or resource to make a statue for everyone that someone admires, and history will always cast different lights on actions and consequences. I’d favour portraiture which is actively curated. If a painting is moved every couple of years anyway, then no-one notices if it’s here or there. It’s making the representation a fixed object of note/commemoration which is the problem, and sculptures tend to be bigger and heavier than pictures.)

I suspect the first part of the argument will be dealt with, at some point in the summer when students aren’t around, by a quiet removal of the statue to somewhere less public. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a clause in a trust deed which makes its total removal impossible, given the terms of a bequest or lease, but equally a particular position could be re-thought.

The second argument, though – the one about it contributing to oppression – is harder to make, I believe. And I do find it hard to believe that of and in itself a statue is the real problem. There’s a trend for some in university to argue that there should be safe spaces in which students are free from acts, symbols or words which cause them to feel oppressed. Witness as part of this the hoo-ha at Goldsmiths Students’ Union in relation to the speaker Maryam Namazie, and the disruption by members of one student society of her talk at a meeting of another student society, in part on the grounds that what she said was insulting and oppressive.

If universities are safe spaces – safe in the sense of being free from ideas that challenge a person’s views or understanding of the world – they will become sterile and not worth attending. It’s the process of becoming able to understand and analyse things that are just plain wrong, and provide good and convincing arguments and reasons why they’re wrong, which is part of becoming a graduate. And it’s also learning that a Manichaean view of what is right and wrong is not always very helpful – both in terms of understanding a situation and in terms of working with others. And you’ll find it harder to get these if the intellectual environment you are in does not expose you to contrary thoughts and opinions.

Safe spaces are the bigger challenge to universities than statues. There’s a legal narrative – arising from equalities legislation – with duties to promote better relationships between people, based around protected characteristics. The legislation aims to deal with actual wrongs and I’m not seeking to criticise it. But the argument which goes from a duty to promote equalities to an argument that seeks to prevent all situations in which an individual may be challenged intellectually is not a good one in a university. How to make that argument well enough, and make it stick in the face of activism, is going to be tricky, I suspect.

A new way to cheat the exam system?

I’ve posted before on the issues of cyber security for Universities. Not from the perspective of a tech-expert, of course but in relation to the management challenges that it can pose.

A tried and tested method of cheating

This week saw another example – as JISC was subject to a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack. As I understand it, this is the internet equivalent of getting lots of people to go into a shop at the same time to effectively stop it trading.

The attack on JISC, according to the BBC, prevented some students from accessing internal systems and submitting coursework by the right deadline.

So who’d benefit from such an attack? One obvious answer might be, a student who was facing a deadline that they couldn’t meet, but who would have a much stronger case for an extension if it was the University’s systems which had broken, not their own ability to work to a deadline.

I have no idea whether JISC are able to pinpoint the source of the attack, and if they did they probably wouldn’t share it, so this might be an area where a student with enough resources – either tech savvy or financial – could secure an extension without it looking like their fault.

Am I saying that this is definitely how and why it happened? Of course not – I’ve no direct evidence and there’s plenty of cases of DDoS attacks for other purposes (including just for the sheer devilment of it). But equally I have seen students facing an exam problem do some desperate things, and this wouldn’t be the worst of them. Academic Registrars up and own the land (and probably across the world) would, I am sure, concur.

If you want to use this as the basis for a film script, by the way, please do get in touch …

The national interest(s)

The UK has four separate national higher education policies. It’s a devolved matter, so the governments in Belfast, Cardiff and Edinburgh set the policies in Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland independently of policies determined by BIS in London for England. But it is also the case that there’s a single higher education system in the UK – at least when viewed from the perspectives of staff, students and research funders. Staff move freely between the different nations; there’s plenty of student mobility between nations, and research funders look for the best research, which often spans the UK’s internal borders. So there’s two contrary facts on the go at the same time.

Universities Wales, the local franchise of UUK in Wales, has today published a manifesto which speaks to the tension which arises because of this. The manifesto, which aims to help shape party policies in May 2016’s assembly elections, sets out six ‘fundamental commitments’ for universities in Wales. Let’s take a look.

The first of these fundamental commitments addresses access to maintenance funding for students: “Provide means-tested maintenance grants for Welsh students from foundation through to postgraduate level to ensure that everyone in Wales has access to the life changing opportunities provided through higher education.”

There’s two things going on here. Firstly, a recognition that access to money to live on whilst studying is a major factor in widening access and enabling students to succeed. Future fee repayments are much less of an inhibiting factor than cash for food, rent and clothes. Secondly, the range of the funding – undergraduates are not the only students, and with postgraduate loans available in England, Welsh universities and Welsh students are disadvantaged if similar funding is not available.

The second commitment addresses affordability: “Prioritise university funding towards the policies that both provide opportunities to access an internationally competitive, high quality university education and deliver economic and social benefits for individuals, government and businesses in Wales.”

At the moment the Welsh Government provides a direct fee subsidy for all Welsh-domiciled (ie, living in Wales before they went to university) students, no matter where they attend university. So, Welsh government HE money is being spent to pay fees at universities in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland (although in practical terms the vast majority of Welsh students who study outside Wales do so in England.) And the plain truth is that this commitment places great pressure on other Welsh HE priorities. The Diamond Commission is currently looking at HE funding issues (and is due to report after the election – where have we heard that before?), and Universities Wales is aiming to help change policy. Welsh Labour has previously made a clear anti-fee commitment, so all policy help will be important. And it’s clearly tied in with the maintenance grants point in the first ‘fundamental commitment’: give something good to students before taking something else away.

The third commitment speaks to a very real concern for the larger universities in Wales: “Maintain in real terms the quality-related (QR) research budget that underpins Wales’ world leading research.” The size of the sector in Wales means that government can be far more selective in research funding, and REF 2014 showed that the quality of research in Wales as measured by GPA was high. What is also important that scale factors aren’t used as a reason for the Welsh government to reduce QR funding as a response to financial pressures.

The fourth commitment speaks to the variety of access to higher education: “Continue investment in part-time provision both to widen access to higher education and develop crucial skills within the Welsh workforce, mindful that part-time provision requires distinct support and investment in order to deliver for Wales.” This is an area where the English funding model has hit universities hard, with significant declines in part-time study.

The fifth ‘fundamental commitment’ relates to HEFCW: “Retain a funding and oversight body for higher education in Wales to manage risk and provide stability to the sector, provide assurance to Government and enable universities to continue delivering for Wales.”

The proposed changes in English HE would see the abolition of HEFCE. English universities value the buffer HEFCE provides between government and any individual university, and a removal of that buffer, with the more explicit possibility of government choosing which subjects and universities to fund, causes concerns. In Wales the issues are magnified: in a small country it’s easier for government to interfere.

And finally, Europe: “Actively support Wales remaining a member of the European Union.” Wales gets a great deal out of Europe – in terms of funding for economic regeneration, for instance – and it’s a matter of concern for Welsh universities that access to research funding, as well as staff and student mobility, should continue. In practical terms, Welsh government commitment to membership of the EU will mean little in the event of a referendum ‘out’ vote, but the ‘fundamental commitment’ helps emphasise the significance of the EU to universities.

So of the six commitments, the first five – maintenance grants, access to funding for all levels of study, research funding, part-time funding, and regulation – seek directly to counter, address, or improve upon, the changes which have or will happen in England. Welsh Universities know that if their part of the HE system isn’t finely tuned with respect to that in England, they’ll suffer the consequences.

Research and Development

So the review of the Research Councils by Sir Paul Nurse has been published, and what a report it is. A much better read than many government reports – it felt like the innocent scientific positivity in some of John Wyndham’s novels, or even better, in The Black Cloud by Sir Fred Hoyle.

I studied philosophy at the LSE, and the focus was very much – unsurprisingly for a department built upon Karl Popper’s work on epistemology and scientific method – around the philosophy of science. So it isn’t every day that the reading lists given to us crop up in government policy documents. But here we are: Popper’s Conjectures and Refutations, and TS Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I was hoping for a bit of Imre Lakatos or Paul Feyerabend too, but perhaps that was asking too much.

It’s also got a lovely opening section into the whys and wherefores of research. And a historical gem: the funding of the Medical Research Council from National Insurance contributions at a rate of “a penny per working person per year” in the 1911 National Insurance Act. By my calculations – and using the historical data set available from the Bank of England – that would equate now to 3 shillings and 11 pence  per working person, or just under 18 pence per head in post-decimal coinage. By comparison, the total science budget of £2.6bn in 2014-15 equates to £68.82 per working person per year. So it’s fair to say that government investment in research has grown over time.

So, from my reading, what are the key points of the review?

• Research in all disciplines is really important to a nation, and can be focused on discovery, on applying knowledge to a problem, or translating basic research to applied problems (translational). And a great line: “To rush into translation may result in becoming lost in translation.”
• Research Councils waste a lot of time engaging with bureaucracy, and bringing back control of support in house rather than through the UK Shared Business Services is necessary.
• RCUK should be given more strength as a co-ordinator of the efforts of the seven research councils, acting as the interlocutor with government and enabling the research councils to focus on research funding. It should become a new body – Research UK – with a single Accounting Officer replacing those in the individual research councils.
• Management of the funding process needs to improve, with better arrangements for international peer review, panel discussions, diversity, transparency and speed.
• There needs to be better collaboration with other research funders, and especially business, charities, devolved administrations, and Europe.
• Relationships with government need to be clarified, and a new structure to work with Research UK is identified.

Sir Paul’s report contains a curious mixture of realism and optimism.

On the realist front: “Given the many and varied demands made on the public purse which Government will need to balance, it is probably more likely the funding level will be set too low rather than too high.”. You're telling me.

On the optimist front: “The changes proposed through this report are not complex and could be easily adopted without disrupting on-going research activities”. Up to a point, Lord Copper.

Will it do the trick? It doesn’t actually reduce the number of BIS quangos, although it does create a single infrastructure, so costs should go down. It does reduce complexity, by having a single Accounting Officer. And it certainly makes sense about funding high quality research.

But ... Jo Johnson’s response included an ominous last paragraph:

I encourage everyone with an interest in the future of our research and innovation landscape to consider this review alongside the proposals set out in the Higher Education Green Paper we published recently.

Sounds like a watch this space to me…

Will the green paper lead to EVEL legislation?

There’s lots written already on the HE green paper and no doubt more to come. My first two-penn’orth is on the question of scope.

David Kernohan on Wonkhe points out, rightly, that the impact of the green paper will not be restricted to England. Quite apart from Sir Paul Nurse’s research review, the impact of the green paper proposals, if enacted, would be felt in universities across the UK. For example, differentials of funding, student information, and perceived status could all increase. If the rest of the world routinely understood the nuances of the UK’s nations (and that fact that England does not equate to Britain, and vice versa) this might also impact upon international issues.

A number of the proposals in the green paper would require primary legislation. HEFCE has a statutory basis in the 1992 Further and Higher Education Act, for instance, so abolishing it needs an amendment to that Act. Would any legislation be considered under the English Votes for English Laws (EVEL) procedure?

EVEL was introduced earlier this parliamentary session, and essentially gives English (and Welsh, sometimes) MPs a veto on legislation which affects only England (and Wales too, on some occasions). It was meant to answer the West Lothian question, but of course it doesn’t provide a satisfactory answer – it was hurriedly thought through to deal with politics, not governance.

It means that legislation which affects only England (or England and Wales in variant b) cannot be passed without the assent of English (and Welsh) MPs, but it doesn’t mean that legislation affecting England (and Wales) will necessarily be passed just because it has a majority of English (and Welsh, sometimes) votes. Any bill still needs to be passed by Parliament as a whole, and as the UK government is finding out at the moment in relation to Sunday trading, that isn’t a given.

The green paper has mixed messages here. Firstly, and one would think unambiguously,

46. Higher education is a devolved matter in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland so most of the proposals in this document apply to England only. However, the funding delivered through the Research Councils and some broader elements of research policy are reserved matters, so the proposals in Part D have UK-wide applicability. (pp16-17)

But then consider later on, in relation to TEF:

16. Our intention is that the TEF develops over time to be comprehensive and open to all HE providers in England, including alternative providers and further education colleges delivering HE provision. As part of this consultation, we are also discussing with Devolved Administrations, whether and how they would like to be involved in the TEF. (p21)

Let’s be blunt – they won’t really have a choice. Universities in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are operating in the same environment as those in England – students are making choices between them, research funders are comparing them. It is in their interest to be in an environment which broadly mirrors that in England.

Devolved administrations will know this, and whilst in Scotland there is an attempt to follow a different path, Wales and Northern Ireland have adopted policies which recognise the connection with the English environment. Sometimes the devolved administration has done it better than England. Despite some worries about close scrutiny, for example, Wales has a simpler approach to access than England, with HEFCW signing off fee plans (the equivalent of access agreements) as a condition of funding.  The link between higher fees and the public interest, which is what OfFA was set up to ensure, is (pleasingly) clearer and easier across Offa’s dyke.

More significantly, perhaps, is that even though HE is a devolved matter, it isn’t a fragmented system in the eyes of staff and students. Cross border flows of both are real, ideas and practices are shared. I’d hope that when it comes to primary legislation, the bill isn’t regarded as EVEL.

Which isn’t to say that it won’t be evil – there’s lots to argue about in the green paper - but please, Mr Speaker, let’s make it an inclusive debate.

It's not all about the TEF, you know

There’s been much speculation about the details of the Teaching Excellence Framework, but the forthcoming green paper on Higher Education will contain much more than that. A discussion yesterday at the AUA Partnerships network conference prompts me to take a closer look at one aspect of this.

Jo Johnson’s speech to UUK on 9 September contained the following:

"The green paper will cast a critical eye over the processes for awarding access to student support funding, Degree Awarding Powers and University Title.

We have already made a start by providing a new route for trusted new and smaller providers to grow their student numbers. We are also beginning to link student number controls to the quality of the provider, through a “performance pool” which will operate for 2016 to 2017.

But the green paper will consult on options to go further. Success in higher education should be based on merit, not on incumbency. I want to fulfil our aim of a level playing field for all providers of higher education.

Many of you validate degree courses at alternative providers. Many choose not to do so. I know some validation relationships work well, but the requirement for new providers to seek out a suitable validating body from amongst the pool of incumbents is quite frankly anti-competitive. It’s akin to Byron Burger having to ask permission of McDonald’s to open up a new restaurant.

It stifles competition, innovation and student choice, which is why we will consult on alternative options for new providers if they do not want to go down the current validation route."

The basic point here is that without the power to award degrees, it’s tricky to be a provider of higher education. The practice of validation – a university agreeing that a curriculum and education designed and delivered by another organisation can lead to the award of a degree from the university – is a solution to this. (Note that validation is different from franchising – under franchising, the university owns the curriculum but outsources the teaching.)

There are 75 UK universities which are members of the Council of Validating Universities (CVU), which gives an idea of the scale of the practice. There isn’t (yet) a single definitive register of validated providers, but research conducted for BIS in 2013 counted 674 privately funded HE providers, most of which will have a validation relationship with one of more universities. So the ministers claim that “Many of you [remember, he was talking to Vice-Chancellors] validate degree courses at alternative providers” looks true. And it can be a decent business for universities, helping a faculty to balance its books.

The underlying cause of the minister’s ire – the need to find a way to empower new colleges in times of expanding higher education - isn’t new. The University of London fulfilled this function, via its external degree, in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century: many UK and overseas universities can trace their origins back to colleges offering tuition for the London external degree. The Council for National Academic Awards (CNAA) fulfilled this function for the polytechnic sector until it was wound up in 1993, after the polytechnics had been made into universities.

Can we tell what approach might be in the green paper? If we take the CNAA model, then the establishment of a new body to do this could be possible. But the creation of a new quango at a time when they are set to be culled seems counter to the spirit of the times (O tempora! O mores!). So the University of London model is the other alternative from history: perhaps designating an existing university as having a 'duty to validate', or creating another university which is only a validator?

There’s a moral hazard here, just as the minister perceives an anti-competitive hazard in current arrangements. The key to validation is the maintenance of academic standards, and if you’ve a duty to validate, then an important element of the validation relationship – that of judging the capacity of another institution to meet the right standards – is put at risk. Some of the outcomes of the QAA’s review of alternative providers show the problems here: some alternative providers are good, but there are also some very shoddy ones.

Is the minister’s argument rooted in specific concerns? It would interesting to know which alternative providers have complained, and which university has refused to validate. What were the specifics? Was the refusal justified? Or perhaps the validation fee was simply seen as too high? Unless we can see that it’s a market that is broken and can’t be fixed by regulation, then the creation of a new entity seems premature.

I’ll be interested to see what the green paper has to propose.

Governance in Scotland

Interesting times in Scottish educational governance, with the news that the Education Secretary in the Scottish Government, Angela Constance, has used powers granted to her by the Post-16 Education (Scotland) Act 2013 to dismiss the Chair and Board of Governors at Glasgow Clyde College.

A Scottish chair

The action was taken, according to reports, on the grounds that the College's governing body had failed in a  number of ways - its "relationship with students had broken down" and it had "breached rules on spending public money". There's a back story which includes the suspension of the Principal: the waters look pretty murky to me.

According to the Scottish Government's informal guidance on the 2013 Act,

"The grounds for removal [of a Board] are where it appears to Ministers that a board: 

i) has committed or is committing a serious one-off breach of any term or condition of grant made to it by, in the case of a regional college, the Scottish Further and Higher Education Funding Council (SFC) [or by, in the case of an assigned college which is an incorporated college, its regional strategic body]; 

ii) has committed or is committing repeated breaches of such terms or conditions; 

iii) has failed or is failing to provide or secure the provision of education of such standard as the Ministers consider to be appropriate; 

iv) has failed or is failing to discharge any of their duties properly; or 

v) has mismanaged or is mismanaging its financial or other affairs."

which, given the press reports, seems to imply that maintaining a good relationship with the students is either part of educational standards (ii above) or a duty of a board of governors (iv above). The alleged breaches of financial procedures and proper governance of meetings would have been grounds under (i) for dismissing the board, so it does seem that there's a bigger point being made here.

What's interesting from a higher education perspective is the example of how the Scottish government chooses to use its powers of intervention. Currently under discussion in Scotland is legislation which would change the way in which university governance worked, including provisions for staff and student representation, and the election of chairs. And this is not without controversy.

So Scottish Universities now have an example before them on which they can reflect.

Making the Grade

Rensis Likert, inventor of the Likert scale

I’ve been looking at the National Student Survey (NSS) rankings of Students’ Unions recently (and more of that another time) but one thing which can’t wait is the question of how you actually rank the outcomes.

The NSS includes a question asking respondents to rate their response to the statement “I am satisfied with the Students' Union at my institution”, where a 1 corresponds to Strongly Disagree, a 5 to Strongly Agree, and 2-4 are the points in between, with 3 being neutral. It’s a five-item Likert scale of the sort very commonly used in surveys.

The NSS data is used in the Key Information Set, with the score for a Students’ Union being calculated as the sum of the Agree and Strongly Agree ratings.  For example, a students’ union with the following outcomes in NSS Q24:

	1	2	3	4	5
Poppleton University	3%	15%	10%	45%	27%

would be ranked as 72% on KIS (45% + 27% = 72%).

But there are different combinations of results which would sum to 72% positive: to take a more extreme case:

	1	2	3	4	5
Poppleton Metropolitan University	23%	5%	0%	55%	17%

This also has a KIS rating of 72%, but it doesn’t look like the same sort of response at all: almost a quarter of respondents are really unsatisfied with Poppleton Metropolitan SU, as opposed to the handful at Poppleton SU.

A way round this problem is to use a Grade-Point Average (GPA) measure. The combines in one number the proportion of respondents at each level – so, for instance, Poppleton University SU’s GPA would be 3% of 1 plus 15% of 2 plus 10% of 3 plus 45% of 4 plus 27% of 5, which works out at a GPA of 3.78.  And this GPA of 3.78 means that the average respondent fell between ‘Neither agree nor disagree’ (3) and ‘Agree’ (4), and was nearer to agree than to the neutral position.

Compare this with Poppleton Metropolitan SU, which has a GPA of 3.38. Again, this falls between ‘Neither agree nor disagree’ and ‘Agree’, but is closer to neutral than to a positive endorsement. So both SU’s have a positive GPA, but it’s clearer that there’s also a difference in how students perceive each of them. 

“OK Hugh,” I hear the more polite ones amongst you say, “thanks for the statistics lesson. But so what?” Always a good question. Let’s have a look at the difference it makes in practice.

Here’s the top ten Students’ Unions, in NSS 2015, using the KIS measure and the GPA:

	KIS Measure	GPA Measure
1	The University of Sheffield	The University of Sheffield
2	St Mary's University College	Loughborough University
3	Loughborough University	St Mary's University College
4	The University of Leeds	The University of Leeds
5	University of Dundee	University of Dundee
6	Royal Northern College of Music	Cardiff University
7	Cardiff University	Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama
8	Teesside University	Royal Northern College of Music
9	Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama	The University of Keele
10	The University of Keele	Teesside University

These are the same ten universities, but in a different order, as Eric Morecambe might have said. So perhaps it isn’t the end the world what measure we use. What about the bottom ten?

	KIS Measure	GPA Measure
150	The University of Westminster	University for the Creative Arts
151	Oxford Brookes University	Ravensbourne
152	Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh	Oxford Brookes University
153	Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts	Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh
154	University of the Highlands and Islands	Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts
155	Royal Conservatoire of Scotland	Royal Conservatoire of Scotland
156	University of Durham	University of Durham
157	University of Bristol	University of Oxford
158	University of Oxford	University of Cambridge
159	University of Cambridge	University of Bristol

It isn’t the same ten universities on both sides here: the measure makes a difference for the University of the Highlands and Islands, Ravensbourne, the University of Westminster, and the University of the Creative Arts.

And there are some very stark differences if you look within the rankings. Let’s have a look at the top ten Students’ Unions for differential GPA-versus-KIS-ranking-performance (take a deep breath and say it slowly - it’s only a matter of time before this becomes a standard measure, you know …):

	GPA Rank	KIS Rank	Difference
The University of Law	66	111	45
The Open University	69	112	43
Heythrop College	119	86	33
Hull and York Medical School	38	66	28
Birkbeck College	113	137	24
University of Sussex	71	49	22
Bath Spa University	110	89	21
University of the West of Scotland	98	118	20
Royal Holloway, University of London	111	91	20
The University of Liverpool	115	95	20

In five of these cases the KIS ranking is better, in five the GPA ranking.  Let’s have a look at the numbers in detail:

	1	2	3	4	5	GPA	KIS
The University of Law	4%	4%	29%	20%	42%	3.89	62%
The Open University	2%	2%	35%	32%	30%	3.89	62%
Heythrop College	8%	13%	13%	44%	23%	3.64	67%
Hull and York Medical School	1%	2%	27%	33%	37%	4.03	70%
Birkbeck College	5%	4%	34%	31%	26%	3.69	57%
University of Sussex	4%	6%	16%	41%	32%	3.88	73%
Bath Spa University	6%	9%	18%	42%	25%	3.71	67%
University of the West of Scotland	5%	8%	27%	30%	31%	3.77	61%
Royal Holloway, University of London	6%	9%	20%	43%	23%	3.71	66%
The University of Liverpool	5%	8%	21%	42%	23%	3.67	65%

Broadly speaking, if the GPA rank is higher than the KIS rank (Law, Open, Hull-York, Birkbeck, West of Scotland), it points to a more even distribution of scores across the five categories, if KIS is higher than GPA (Heythrop, Sussex, Bath Spa, Royal Holloway, Liverpool), then it points to more extreme scores in 1 and 2. Broadly speaking.

And that’s the key to it. The KIS ranking answers a simple question: how many like it.  The GPA ranking is more nuanced, but also requires more interpretation. 

That gets to the heart of the ranking and league table problem. Rankings and league tables are a way of simplifying what is complex. There’s often a direct trade-off between simple and realistic. And that’s why it matters what methodology a league table uses, but why it is also inevitable that there’s game playing within the rankings. 

So be careful always to read a ranking or a league table having taken a suitably sized pinch of salt.