The Coalition’s higher education reforms in England

Abstract

The Coalition Government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats in office from 2010 until 2015 sharply increased the maximum tuition fees for UK and EU undergraduates at English universities to £9,000. Although this is often portrayed as a radical change, it is argued that the reform was an evolution rather than a revolution. Common pessimistic predictions, such as the claim there would be a big fall in the number of full-time students, were wrong. However, the policymaking behind the increase in the fee cap was rushed, and this contributed to shortcomings such as a decline in part-time students. The article considers a series of political mistakes made by the Liberal Democrats, including making the abolition of tuition fees a key part of their election strategy in 2010 when the party’s leaders lacked faith in the policy. The article also notes that critics of the Coalition’s higher education reforms were largely ineffectual because they lacked a strong intellectual case or a clear alternative and fixated on fees to the exclusion of other important issues. The piece ends by asserting that the Coalition’s plan to remove student number controls was a change of overlooked importance.     

The moral in Paulo Freire’s educational work: What moral education can learn from Paulo Freire

The Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire had a great influence on theory and practice of education across the world. Freire presented his theory and work as educational and political, not as moral. In this article, the legacy of Paulo Freire will be analysed from a moral education perspective. Nine pedagogical principles will be presented and the changes he contributed in different academic disciplines will be analysed. We conclude that in particular, his focus on social justice, empowerment and transformation can make moral education more linked to society, and more part of a process of humanisation.     

The roots of Paulo Freire’s Praxis

This paper examines how local knowledge is employed in environmental adult education in a community‐based ecotourism project in an island community in southern Thailand. The study is based on field research and analysis of project websites, media reports and documents. Situated at the intersection of global tourism and a local Thai–Malay Muslim fishing community, the ecotourism project functions as an alternative tourism development model challenging dominant practices of mass tourism. In the project, tourists stay as guests in local homes, and learn firsthand from family and community ecotourism guides. The informal ecotourism ‘curriculum’ for tourists centres on local knowledge of tidal and marine ecosystems, environmental conservation efforts, local culture, and traditional livelihood activities. Tourists learn experientially to understand and appreciate this local knowledge, and in the process, contribute to the sustenance of the community, to the preservation of culture, and to the conservation of the marine resources upon which the community depends. Members of the ecotourism project, for their part, have engaged in a wide range of adult learning over the project’s lifespan. This learning includes skills and knowledge in ecotourism management, environmental conservation, cross‐cultural exchange and political activism. Although the advent of mass tourism on the island now threatens to overwhelm the local community, the capacity for environmental adult education, adult learning and political activism built up over many years by members of the ecotourism project will likely help to moderate, if not control, the deleterious effects of future commercial development.     

China’s move to mass higher education in a comparative perspective

This paper analyzes how China has managed to embrace mass higher education in a short timeline, and examines how far this move has followed the existing or established patterns elsewhere through comparing its core aspects with those of four identifiable models of mass higher education: the American model, the Western European model, the Latin American model and the East Asian model. While acknowledging that the current structure of the Chinese higher education system appears to resemble the American in many ways, this paper concludes that it is fundamentally different from the American model, as well as from the Western European and the Latin American models. Largely mirroring the East Asian model, the Chinese approach features a strong sense of ‘state instrumentism’ and is also characterized by integral tensions among its various sectors, which could turn into either positive dynamics for vibrant growth or negative forces leading to serious social justice and equity issues. After enjoying an unprecedented expansion between 1999 and 2006, Chinese higher education has come to a historical juncture to reconsider its success in the light of more collaborative and normative ideologies, such as those grounded in social justice and human potential.     

Paulo Freire and ‘the need for a kind of education in hope’

This paper explores Paulo Freire’s philosophy of hope. This is significant because, for Freire, it was human hope that rendered education possible, necessary and necessarily political. Like other areas of his thought, however, his reading of hope contained ambiguities and contradictions, and the paper explores these by locating Freire’s thought in the wider context of the philosophy of hope. It focuses in particular on the divergent interpretations Freire provides regarding the objective and the experience of hope. It argues that many of the conflicting demands placed on the radical educator stem from the tensions and vagaries one finds within his philosophy. The paper concludes by discussing the wider significance of Freire in light of the discourse of ‘complex hope’ that is developing within educational studies.     

Teacher’s use of iPads in higher education

Mobile devices (e.g. iPads or galaxy tab) are increasingly being used in educational contexts. There has been growing investment in higher education institutions in Hong Kong by the HKSAR Education Bureau in relation to educational uses of mobile technology. However, current research into educational applications of this technology is limited. This article reports results of a qualitative study that investigated how higher education teachers use iPads to facilitate their practice. The study results provide insight into both the educational affordances of iPad technology and the ways in which teachers’ personal or private theories mediate these affordances. The study outcomes contribute to theoretical understanding of higher education teacher changes through adoption of mobile technology. Furthermore, the outcomes provide a set of recommendations for applications of iPads and similar technologies in higher education and ways to support teachers to effectively adopt such technology in their practices.     

Stakeholders’ perceptions of IELTS as an entry requirement for higher education in the UK

This project explores stakeholders’ perceptions of the role of the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) in the admissions processes of UK higher education (HE) institutions. The term ‘stakeholders’ here refers to HE academic and administrative staff responsible for the acceptance of students whose first language is not English onto academic programmes in UK HE institutions. It draws on two pieces of empirical study: a large-scale questionnaire survey of those responsible for admissions decisions in a range of HE institutions in the pre- and post-1992 sectors, and a smaller scale interview-based qualitative study of a subset of these participants. The empirical data gathered offers insights into the processes of standard-setting in various contexts, highlights tensions between standard-setting and a growing economic imperative to recruit, and identifies a niche for development opportunities in raising stakeholders’ awareness of the content and process of IELTS to enhance the quality of decision-making in this area. The study offers a number of recommendations for the designers/producers of IELTS and for HE institutions, and also highlights a number of directions for further complementary research.     

The moral dimension in Chilean higher education’s expansion

Chilean higher education has expanded greatly in recent decades, primarily through drawing on the private contributions of students and families, and an increased number and variety of institutions. In the context of attempts to address criticism that the sector is not free, public or high-quality enough, this article examines the association between education and its moral and ethical dimensions, and their separate yet complementary consideration alongside economic development, through the two centuries of the Chilean state’s existence. Since the beginning of the current decade, discontent with the framing and performance of higher education as a whole has grown. The overview traces this process not as fresh crisis, but part of a social question pondered repeatedly in the past and supported with varying success through educational and political initiatives. This historical (and historiographic) approach illuminates the limits of conceiving of higher education as either an economic good or as a human right, and an overlooked need to support its benefits through policy. Not simply an interpenetration with economic thinking, but also a lack of sufficient appreciation of Chile’s fundamental and singular character, present as challenges in understanding expanded access’s function and its prospective contribution to growing debates around ethics and inequality.     

China’s international student recruitment as ‘outward-oriented’ higher education internationalisation: an exploratory empirical inquiry

This study investigates China’s international student recruitment strategy and policies as a dimension of its present approach of using higher education internationalisation for soft power and image enhancement. An exploratory survey of international graduate students in English instruction programmes in education-related majors in three Chinese universities has been conducted to analyse their attitudes towards China’s approach. Quantitative analysis has been conducted on the survey data based on Holmes’s four-pattern taxonomy for analysing contextual features, which includes normative patterns, sociological laws, national conditions, and deep cultural roots. Qualitative data have been collected and analysed as a supplement. This study attempts to reveal the relations between international students’ source-country contextual features, identified based on Holmes’s taxonomy, and their attitudes towards China’s approach in international student recruitment. Policy suggestions are provided based on these findings.     

Roles of women’s higher education institutions in international contexts

Women??s colleges and universities persist around the world, even as the vast majority of tertiary institutions are open to men and women. In nearly every nation, women can attend even the most elite formerly all-male universities, and in several nations women are the majority of all college students. Questions therefore arise about the continued need for a single-sex sector in the 21st century. In this study I examined the contribution of these institutions to their national systems of education and society. I used a qualitative, comparative, multiple case study approach to understand 14 diverse women??s colleges and universities in nine nations on five continents. Five key roles emerged: access, campus climate, gender empowerment, leadership development, and cultural paradox. I make recommendations for research and practice.     

Developing new “Professionals”: Service learning in marketing as an opportunity to innovate in higher education

The European Higher Education Area (EHEA) promotes the use of student-centered participatory methodologies and the design of curricula focused on the acquisition of competences. The objective of this paper is to identify the categories of competence that contribute the most to achieving learning outcomes through the practice of Service Learning (SL) in the teaching of marketing. Using the categories described in the Tuning model, we design a model to analyze the relationships between perceived learning outcomes and competences. The main findings are: 1) there is no evidence of any relationship between perceived interpersonal and systemic competences and perceived learning outcomes, 2) there is a relationship between perceived instrumental competences and perceived learning outcomes and, 3) students do not perceive that achievement of learning outcomes is the cause of the grades they obtain. These findings have important theoretical and practical implications.     

Parental expectations of children’s higher education participation in Australia

The role of parental expectations in determining children's higher education participation is important in understanding both participation and potential policy responses. Using a nationally representative longitudinal survey of Australian households, providing repeat observations on expectations for individual children, this study extends the literature in several respects. First, it examines the adaptation of parental expectations over a 4-year time frame. Second, it looks at how parental expectations for school children are associated with actual higher education outcomes in the future. Third, the longitudinal aspect of the dataset permits more robust analyses of factors that shape parental expectations. The findings indicate that parental expectations of their children's attendance at university are generally stable across time. Perceptions of children's academic achievement at school are shown to be the key influence in shaping parents' expectations, and behavioural issues at school adversely affect expectations. Australian parents from non-English-speaking backgrounds were more likely to form positive expectations of university participation by their children, consistent with studies from other countries. A more nuanced picture of the formation of expectations for sole-parent mothers is also presented. Positive effects of parental education and children's enrolment in a private school on parents' expectations, over and above any effect on school achievement, highlight these socioeconomic factors as potential causal channels for the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic outcomes.     

The new student loan system in Chile’s higher education

Chile’s higher education system stands out as being one of the most privatized and open to the market in the world. Recently, the Chilean Congress passed Law # 20.027 of 2005, which provides the legal framework for the creation of a student loan system guaranteed both by the State and by higher education institutions (HEIs), financed by the private capital market through the securitization of the loans. The system operated for the first time in 2006, where approximately 21,000 students were able to access financing of their higher education for the remainder of their careers. It is expected that as the system matures, more and better information will be available, which will benefit the students and the HEIs; and it is highly likely that the current number of financed students could grow significantly in the next few years. The purpose of this article is to describe the outstanding characteristics of this system, explain its conceptual basis and analyze the public policy choices available in its design.

Student’s local top-up higher education choices

Making decisions about education choices is challenging and difficult for students. Utilising the theory of reasoned action, we specify and estimate a conceptual framework that captures the cognitive process of decision making of students in choosing top-up higher degrees in Hong Kong. Top-up higher or bachelor’s degrees are top-up undergraduate programmes forming a progression route for sub-degree graduates to earn bachelor’s degrees. We argue that attitudes, subjective norms and perceived value influence a student’s top-up higher education choices. Our results show that family members, educators, job availability and security, social image and difficulty of curriculum play critical roles in influencing students’ decision. We also find differences between females and males, between business and non-business students and between Year 1 and Year 2 students in higher education choices. These findings underscore the importance of educational institutions developing effective policies for promoting top-up higher degree programmes by taking cognisance of gender, the field of study and year of study differences and for policy makers to understand the dynamics of higher education.     

Unwilling brides: ‘phallic attack’ as a barrier to gender balance in higher education in Nigeria

Gender balance in access to quality education is a crucial item on the agenda of the Millennium Development Goals. But this ideal appears beset by a number of barriers, especially at higher education level. This study investigated the problem of sexual harassment in the Nigerian university system as a barrier to the educational advancement of women. Specifically, the research focused on the practice of coercing female students to engage in sexual relations with male lecturers (‘phallic attack’) as a condition for scoring good grades. The research drew its sample from female students selected from 14 faculties in two Nigerian universities. The study finds that there is a relatively high prevalence of sexual harassment in these universities and this affects female students adversely. The ripple effect is that women are not given a learning atmosphere conducive to enjoying academic freedom and optimizing their potential in educational development. This contributes to widening the gaps between men and women in Nigeria. The study also finds that lack of adequate high‐quality sex education in Nigeria increases the vulnerability of younger female students to sexual harassment. It recommends the establishment of an advocacy programme as well as enlightenment campaigns to educate students, staff, authorities and parents about sexuality and sexual harassment; strengthening the penal system in the universities with powers and resources to fight the menace; and the formation of a network by women staff in various universities to work with potential and actual victims in order to expose the culprits, obtain justice and curb the trend.