GRADE INFLATION, VESTED INTERESTS AND THE FAILURE OF MARKETISATION

Posted on October 26, 2018 by Norwich Radical in Student and tagged competition, degrees, employment, featured, government, grade inflation, HESA, higher education, marketisation, media, Sam Gyimah, tef, Tories, tuition fees, universities, university vice chancellors, vested interests.

By Robyn Banks

Grade inflation is back in the headlines this week, with universities minister Sam Gyimah announcing that it will be incorporated into how universities are ranked under the Teaching Excellence Framework. There is statistical evidence to back up this policy change – according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency, the number of first class degrees being awarded has grown by 18% between 2012/13 and 2016/17. Whilst it is statistically true that grades are inflating at the university level, there are a number of issues with the current discourse around grade inflation that are not being properly addressed by HE decision makers.

FREEING EDUCATION FOR INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS – BEYOND TUITION FEES #5

Posted on April 25, 2018 by Norwich Radical in Student and tagged academic staff, activism, apathy, Beyond Tuition Fees, borders, Community, consumerism, culture, diversity, economy, elitism, Free Education, government, higher education, individualism, international students, internationalism, jeremy corbyn, Labour, learning, lecturers, maintenance loans, marketisation, migration, politics, privatisation, solidarity, stress, student debt, tef, theresa may, Tories, tuition fees, UCU, UEA, USS strikes.

By Lotty Clare

It is a time of extraordinary potential for change in UK Higher Education. Labour’s promise to end tuition fees has defied the critics and united many behind Corbyn’s political project. But what will the implications for universities be if this comes to pass? And what can we do to leverage this progress? In this series, the Norwich Radical and Bright Green are bringing together perspectives from across the sector to explore these questions.

We face many challenges as students in 2018. Painfully high tuition fees along with eye-watering maintenance loans means that lower income students will leave university with over £50,000 of debt. Bafflingly, Prime Minister Theresa May only recently came to the realisation that poorer students are getting deterred from going into higher education. By contrast, the Labour Party’s promises to scrap tuition fees and bring back maintenance grants are of course a welcome relief for many prospective students – UK national students that is. Labour have seemingly barely considered the possibility of doing the same for international students. At the University of East Anglia, non-EU international students pay about £14,800 annually, on top of having to prove that they have access to thousands of pounds for living costs. If education is a right, why are we privileging wealthier international students in this way? What would Britain look like if we abolished or at least dramatically reduced fees for international students?

THOUGHTS FROM THE FRONTLINE OF MARKETISATION – BEYOND TUITION FEES #3

Posted on April 19, 2018 by Norwich Radical in Student and tagged Beyond Tuition Fees, collective action, consumer law, consumer rights, consumerism, contact hours, corbyn, counselling, course closures, education, Free Education, funding, government, higher education, Labour, market regulators, marketing, marketisation, office for students, picket lines, policy, postgraduate, postgraduate education officer, postgraduate tutors, precarious contracts, profit, public, regulation, research, risk, specialist courses, state-funded education, student protection plans, students, students' unions, Success as a Knowledge Economy, taxation, tef, Tories, tuition fees, UCU, UEA SU, uk, UK Research and Innovation, universities, university collapses, USS strike, utopianism.

By Maddie Colledge, UEA SU Postgraduate Education Officer

CW: Mentions suicide

It’s common for arguments in favour of free education to be dismissed as abstract or utopian, and for students who promote it to be belittled as naïve. I fear that in our attempts to try to portray the significance of free education, we have fallen into a trap where the concept has become so expansive and broad, and the term so overused, that it has lost all meaning. We need to move away from talking about ‘free’ education, and towards articulating a vision more explicitly centred on ‘state-funded’ education or ‘public’ education. For me, the description ‘free’ makes the concept feel distanced from the viable possibility of education funded through public taxation, and does us no favours in making it reality.

UCU STRIKE TO PROTECT PENSIONS

Posted on February 12, 2018 by Norwich Radical in Student and tagged academic staff, academics, direct action, education, featured, investment, KEF, lecturers, NUS, office for students, pensions, REF, solidarity, strike, tef, trade unions, tuition fees, UCU, UEA, UEA SU, university staff, USS.

The much-reported Universities and Colleges Union (UCU) strike in protest of cynical changes to university staff pension arrangements begins next week. The UEA branch of UCU and UEA Students’ Union have produced this statement for The Norwich Radical, to offer an introduction to the issues surrounding the strike. The Radical encourages all students, in Norwich and elsewhere, to stand in solidarity with the strikers by not attending classes on the dates of the strikes, and by sharing their message with your peers.

FEES, FREE SPEECH AND FILIBUSTERING – A BRIEF HISTORY OF SAM GYIMAH MP

Posted on January 19, 2018 by Norwich Radical in Student and tagged cabinet reshuffle, EMA, featured, filibustering, first aid, free speech, government, higher education, homophobia, homosexuality, jo johnson, maintenance grants, nurses' bursaries, NUS, office for students, Parliament, Sam Gyimah, secondary schools, students, tef, theresa may, Toby Young, Tories, tuition fees, Turing Bill, UCL, UCU, universities, Universities minister, voting record.

by Robyn Banks

Here’s a sentence I’ve wanted to write for some time: Jo Johnson is no longer the Universities minister. Last week Theresa May ‘promoted’ him to the transport office and made him the new minister for London. His removal came just days after Toby Young was forced to resign from the Office for Students (OfS) board, in part due to his link to a eugenics conference held at UCL.

WE CAN’T JUST WAIT FOR FREE EDUCATION – NCAFC WINTER CONFERENCE

Posted on December 23, 2017 by Norwich Radical in Student and tagged #FreeEdNOW, bigotry, boycott, conference, Cut the Rent, democratic education, demonstration, direct action, education workers, fascism, Free Education, free speech, GE17, HE policy, higher education, history, jeremy corbyn, KEF, Labour, Labour manifesto, left wing, living grants, local campaigns, marketisation, NCAFC, no platforming, nss, NSS Boycott, NUS, Picturehouse, Picturehouse strike, progressive taxation, protest, REF, Research and HE Bill, solidarity, strike action, student activism, student media, student movement, students, students' unions, tef, terfs, trans liberation, tuition fees, UCL, universities.

by Lewis Jarrad

On the 9th-10th December, the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts (NCAFC) put on its 2017 Winter Conference in Liverpool. Taking place less than a month after their national demonstration, which advocated for free education and universal living grants funded by taxing the rich, the conference was a chance for student activists across the UK to strategise and discuss where we can go next in the fight for a free and democratic education system. Campuses represented included Liverpool, Manchester, UCL, UAL, KCL, Warwick, Sheffield, Abertay, Oxford and Cambridge. As a first year UCL student who was involved in the national demo, I went along to learn more about NCAFC and how I could get more involved in the campaign.

WEEKENDS MATTER – WORK-LIFE BALANCE IN ACADEMIA

Posted on November 9, 2017 by Norwich Radical in Student and tagged academia, academics, email, higher education, KEF, mental health, postgraduate, REF, research, students, tef, weekend, wellbeing, work, work-life balance, working conditions, working life, workload.

by Alex Powell

From the outside, it may appear that students and academics have pretty comfortable lives. We can largely work how and when we want. I frequently lie in past 10am and often come back home after just a 6-hour working day. But despite appearances, this doesn’t mean that we have it super easy. As I am finding more and more, maintaining a good work-life balance can be a real struggle – a struggle that academics and students around the world are all too familiar with.

PUTTING A PRICE ON DISABILITY

Posted on August 19, 2017 by Norwich Radical in Student and tagged Access to Learning Fund, ADHD, diagnosis, disability, Disabled Students Allowance, Dysgraphia, Dyspraxia, eduation, finance, Hardship Fund, higher education, learning, learning difficulties, marketisation, national student survey, nss, profit, specific learning difficulty, spld, student, student satisfaction, teaching excellence framework, tef, UEA, university, University of East Anglia.

by Robyn Banks

Last semester at University I was diagnosed as suffering from learning disabilities (Specific Learning Difficulties (SpLDs)). Whilst the diagnoses of having ADHD, Dyspraxia and Dysgraphia didn’t come to much of a shock to me, the fact that I then had to pay £100 in order to be diagnosed did.Continue Reading

SHAKING UP HIGHER ED – TEF’S SILVER LINING

Posted on July 18, 2017 by Norwich Radical in Student and tagged academia, academic staff, academics, change, Durham University, education policy, HE Act, HE bill, higher education, Higher Education and Research Act, historical privilege, REF, research, research excellence framework, Save the Student, smaller HE institutions, status quo, teaching, teaching excellence framework, teaching staff, tef, TEF metrics, TEF results, tuition fees, universities, university, university finance, university league tables, University of Huddersfield, university staff.

By Alex Powell

Late last month, we saw the release of the first batch of Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) results. The TEF has been the subject of significant student opposition, with a Save the Student survey suggesting that as many as 76% of students oppose the implementation of the TEF. I was an opponent of it myself, particularly of links made between TEF scores and the ability of institutions to raise their tuition fees, though this plan has been postponed until 2020.

WHO DESERVES TEF GOLD? AND DOES IT MATTER?

Posted on June 28, 2017 by Norwich Radical in Student and tagged access, boycotts, elitism, equality, fairness, government, graduate employment, HE Act, HE bill, higher education, league tables, marketisation, national student survey, NSS Boycott, NUA, privatisation, profit, progress, reductionism, russell group, Sauder and Espeland, Sauder and Espeland boycott, student satisfaction, teaching, teaching standards, tef, TEF metrics, Tories, tuition fees, UEA.

by Laura Potts

Last week, the first set of Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) rankings were released for 2017. The TEF is fairly complicated and students are rarely informed of how it works, or the possible implications it holds for the future of education. In short, it is a framework of metrics or measures introduced by the Tory government, ostensibly to assess teaching in higher education institutions in England. These metrics categorise two areas: student satisfaction and graduate earnings / employability. A lot of the data comes from the National Student Survey that final year students are often pressured to take part in. This years’ rankings gave some unexpected results for some of the UK’s most prestigious institutes, with many not doing as well as expected – only 8 of the 21 elite Russell Group universities were awarded ‘Gold’. This suggests that we should be cautious about taking the TEF results as accurate representations of institutions.

tef

GRADE INFLATION, VESTED INTERESTS AND THE FAILURE OF MARKETISATION

FREEING EDUCATION FOR INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS – BEYOND TUITION FEES #5

THOUGHTS FROM THE FRONTLINE OF MARKETISATION – BEYOND TUITION FEES #3

UCU STRIKE TO PROTECT PENSIONS

FEES, FREE SPEECH AND FILIBUSTERING – A BRIEF HISTORY OF SAM GYIMAH MP

WE CAN’T JUST WAIT FOR FREE EDUCATION – NCAFC WINTER CONFERENCE

WEEKENDS MATTER – WORK-LIFE BALANCE IN ACADEMIA

PUTTING A PRICE ON DISABILITY

SHAKING UP HIGHER ED – TEF’S SILVER LINING

WHO DESERVES TEF GOLD? AND DOES IT MATTER?

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