Out of the Brexit frying pan and into the Pandemic fire – Tough times in UK higher education
- Jason Arday, Durham University
- Danny Dorling, University of Oxford
- Andy Westwood, University of Manchester
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2020-21 is the most challenging year for UK higher education since World War II. The government has asked universities to open while passing downwards the responsibility for the problems this creates. Despite great work in developing testing systems in many institutions, there are dramatic public health problems, with the Covid-19 pandemic flaring up in more than 120 individual universities and with more to come. Intensive student accommodation, swollen by a 7 per cent increase in numbers, incubates the pandemic with the danger that this will spill over into local communities. For institutions there are fundamental uncertainties about retention, revenues and financial sustainability. For students face to face learning, the boundaries of legitimate activity and freedom of movement can transform or disappear overnight. Teaching provision is unstable as universities work their way through mixed and hybrid modes subject to sudden changes; teaching and welfare loads have ballooned; while at the same time staffing has been cut back in some locations. Particular groups of students face major issues, including local students from non-university and non-white families who face challenges in any year, newly arrived international students without friends in unfamiliar environments and confined to their rooms, immunocompromised students and disabled students. It is likely that the incidence of mental health problems is increasing though monitoring is patchy. We need to know more.
The compact between students and their institutions is also in question. Universities that promised a near normal experience prior to enrolment, knowing that this could not be guaranteed, must now deal with the frustrated expectations. Yet arguably, universities were forced into this zone of bad faith by a government that both insisted on opening the campuses (against the advice of its own SAGE), and refused to provide financial support for institutions that fall short of enrolment maintenance. The government set the risk parameters but it is the universities, their staff and the students that must handle the outcomes. This is not a good time to be a student in UK higher education, though one positive outcome of the pandemic is the upsurge of student agency in many parts of the country. A spirit of optimism and mutual support is carrying many through the crisis but not all of the problems are yet apparent, such as the accumulating effects of inequalities in access and participation.
Join CGHE’s discussion of these crucial issues with Jason Arday, Danny Dorling and Andy Westwood.
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Dr Jason Arday is an Associate Professor in Sociology at Durham University in the Department of Sociology. He is a Visiting Research Fellow at The Ohio State University in the Office of Diversity and Inclusion, an Adjunct Professor at Nelson Mandela University in the Centre for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation and a Trustee of the Runnymede Trust, the UK’s leading Race Equality Thinktank. Jason is also a Trustee of the British Sociological Association (BSA) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA). He sits on the Centre for Labour and Social Studies (CLASS) National Advisory Panel and is a School Governor at Shaftesbury Park Primary School in London.
Danny Dorling is a Professor who works in the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford. He works on issues of equality, employment, education, housing, and health. In 2020 with Yale University Press he published Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration—and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives; and jointly with Annika Koljonen (and Agenda Press): Finntopia: what we can learn from the world’s happiest country. He is a patron of the road crash charity RoadPeace, and of Heeley City Farm in Sheffield. In his spare time he makes sandcastles.
Andy Westwood is Professor of Government Practice and Vice Dean in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Manchester. He is a Visiting Professor of Further and Higher Education at the University of Wolverhampton and a Governor at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. He has also acted as an expert adviser to the EU, the OECD and the IMF.
He is a specialist adviser to the House of Lords Committee on Economic Affairs and has also advised the Digital Skills Committee. He has also been a special adviser to ministers on education, skills and science policy at the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, and a senior adviser at HM Treasury and in the Departments for Education and Communities and Local Government.