Don't tell him, Pike

A couple of wise souls I follow on Twitter observed last week that there was a lot of activity from HEFCE and on Higher Education generally:

@registrarism: There really are a lot of #HigherEd posts being pushed out today

@SophieBowen1: Are staff at HEFCE about to go on hols? Large number of reports out today ...

And it seems to be true. One recent HEFCE post that caught my eye – but not picked up by the twittersphere that I could tell – was Circular Letter 06/2016 – Supporting Public Accountability: presenting income and expenditure income to current students.

This is the outcome of some work done by HEFCE, BUFDG and the NUS on students’ desire to know more about what universities spend their money on, and a finding that

of 2,400 current students conducted by NUS Research Services ... there was significant interest in this type of information but that:

• Of the students who looked for this information, 40 per cent were unable to find it.

• Once the information was found, 44 per cent of students reported that the format it was presented in was difficult to understand.

Not a surprising finding – I have often wondered at the number of staff in universities who aren’t familiar with financial statements, so why should the students fare better?

The guidance is clear enough:

The research identified several priorities for improving the presentation of financial information for students:

• It needs to provide a useful but not overly complex level of detail.

• It needs to be accessible to students who may not have expertise in interpreting financial information.

• It needs to be up-to-date.

• It needs to be clearly signposted on institutional web-sites (which are where students look for it), with technical language clearly explained.

And the actions also admirably clear:

Institutions are asked to identify their solution by the end of October 2014, ready to publish information from their 2013-14 audited financial accounts by January 2015. 

It’s unquestionably a good thing that universities are encouraged to work with their students’ unions to agree an approach. But I found the examples interesting.

Four approaches were suggested:

• Actual numbers and a narrative
• A pie chart of expenditure, by category (no figures)
• A bar chart of expenditure
• An infographic

These range from minimal data but really clearly presented for accountability (that is, the actual numbers and narrative) through to confusing presentation (the infographic) but with a lot more detail and granularity in there. I’m not clever enough with pdf to export the contents to the blog post, but have a look and see what you think. To me, the guidance presents clarity and content as if there’s a trade-off between these two aims.

Why are students interested? Well, my guess is that it isn’t idle curiosity but all because students want to understand the value that they’re getting. A Sir Humphrey quote from Yes Minister is apposite here:

We should always tell the press freely and frankly anything that they could easily find out some other way

It’s all in the annual accounts anyway. My message to universities would be, work sincerely with your students’ unions, agree a format which makes sense, but don’t try to conceal anything with a fancy chart. Authenticity and transparency with your students will be better in the long run, even if you don’t like it now.

The Customer is Always Right

My Student Power post on Monday gives me a bit of theme for today – the student as consumer. There have been a couple of straws in the wind about changing habits and expectations. And my expectation is that universities will have to adapt.

Firstly, the Office for Fair Trading (OFT), with its recent report into Universities Terms and Conditions. This looks at how some universities use academic sanctions (ie non-progression between years; or withholding exam results) as part of their strategy to deal with debt owed by students for non-academic matters (eg halls fees; library fines). Another day I will post on the report itself, and implications for ‘the student contract’. What is interesting for me, on this occasion, is the focus on student as consumer, and the clarity with which consumer protection legislation applies.

The report identified the following legislation as relevant:

• the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999 ('UTCCRs')
• the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977 ('UCTA')
• the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 ('CPRs').

That’ll be some new acronyms for university administrators to get their heads around. And consumer protection legislation is a long way from academic matters not being justiciable in the courts.

The OFT also commented:

Generally undergraduate students can be considered vulnerable and in a relatively weak position compared to the university. Some are likely to have limited experience of contracts, and contractual obligations are unlikely to be at the forefront of their minds at a time when they are seeking to enrol at university.

Universities often fall back on the line that students are adults and must be responsible for their own decisions: a lot of practice in relation to exam irregularities, for instance, rests on this assumption. The need to take into account the imbalance of power between the university and the student is clear.

The second straw in the wind is the consultation by the Office for the Independent Adjudicator into Higher Education (OIA) about a new framework for managing student complaints and appeals.

This is a really good document, the work of some great collaboration between sector bodies and students. And the draft guidance is clear that in managing student complaints and appeals universities need to raise their game to meet more challenging timescales, to resolve complaints sooner, and to treat students more fairly. It reads much more like a consumer complaints regulation than any previous framework.

How will universities react to this? Seriously, I’m sure: I haven’t yet come across a university which doesn’t take student complaints this way. But might we see, in a few years, student complaints teams being called student care or (eek!) customer care? That is what it is, after all.

Just straws in the wind, but there’s a definite breeze picking up. See Registrarism’s blog post today about the changing role of the NUS too. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that The Student is the Customer Now, and we’d all better get our Corporate Smiles going. Manifestly in the classroom the student isn’t a customer but is a learner. And so it should be. But universities need to get more used to the notion that robustness in working with students needs to be tempered by considerations of power.