Simeon Underwood, who retires this summer after ten years as LSE’s Academic Registrar, was invited to give the opening address at this week’s LSE Teaching Symposium. As somebody who has dedicated much of his time at the School to the development and management of services and a culture that support both students and teachers, few are better placed to speak to the symposium’s theme. Here we reprint his address in full.
Colleagues
I have been asked to speak for seven minutes on ‘putting student experience at the heart of an LSE education’. This is a tough assignment. I have chosen to think of it as a very LSE exam question.
Looking back over my life in HE, it seems to me that external factors have conspired to make it difficult to put student experience at the heart of any university education. I have got two in mind in particular.
One is the development of a binary between research and teaching. I have no doubt that the successive RAEs and REFs have done a lot of damage to the student experience of education in research-intensive universities. Last October David Willetts mused “Looking back we will wonder how the higher education system was ever allowed to become so lop-sided away from teaching”. I guess having two brains must make it difficult to see the obvious … Research and education have become antithetical, when, quite simply, they shouldn’t be.
The second is the quality assurance movement – well-intentioned, but poorly conceived with its emphasis on what have turned out to be lowest common denominators such as qualifications frameworks and subject benchmark statements. Besides, for me you can’t bureaucratise something as mystical – and I use the word deliberately – as teaching and learning.
We have a window before the next REF, and all is quiet on the quality assurance front (well, not quite, but I don’t want to spoil this occasion). So this is an ideal time in which to seek to redress the balance. Here are four assertions and questions as a basis for discussion, based on a very simple and conservative typology of teaching, learning and assessment.
One. If you want to put student experience at the heart of an LSE education, you need to ask the students themselves, not a sixty-something bureaucrat in a grey suit on the verge of retirement. And here I leave the LSE with two serious regrets. The first is that we haven’t got the SSLCs and student Fora to function in ways that make a critical contribution to this debate. The second is that the School teaching survey still focuses on generating a score on individual staff members for the purposes of promotion and review, not on generating real information that feeds into our discussions about teaching quality. If these regrets are justified, then who is responsible for doing what about them?
In this context, too, there are some standard arguments against student engagement – higher education is too good for the students who take it, student satisfaction is irrelevant to teaching quality. I am unhappy with these arguments. We have many students who are brilliant and committed. We shouldn’t patronise them.
Two. The problem is not lectures in themselves but how lectures are done. The NSS tells us more about the student experience than our own internal survey: and one of the things it tells us that many of our undergraduates find what we give them, well, rather uninspiring. We do poorly in questions such as “do you find your lectures stimulating?” – poor in ways which offer no excuse when the results are benchmarked against other universities. Is this about student expectation? We recruit very high quality students; they have very high expectations; isn’t that a challenge to us rather than an excuse?
Three. In designing programmes and courses, we need to think more about student learning – about building it in and building in time for it. The change to the structure of the academic year creates the conditions in which this can be done; from my country retreat in Barnes I will be intrigued to hear how this works out. This area seems to me to be more collaborative than, say, lecturing and examining. The Teaching and Learning Centre, LTI and the Estates Division are all key players here, though mention of the Estates Division raises the immediate issue of survival through the disruption of the next five years. So should we teach less in order to allow the space for students to learn more?
Four. For me, as competitive pressures grow on students the School’s emphasis on closed examinations becomes in my view unhealthy, in a literal sense, dangerous, even inhumane. I say this on the basis of the evidence my staff see day in day out at this time of year in the form of mitigating circumstances claims and academic appeals. The Union has put a clear and earnest paper to the Academic and Student Affairs Committee meeting this week, calling for a more mixed economy approach. Personally that seems to me unarguable. But how do we accommodate this within our current academic structures and culture?
As an aside which isn’t an aside, I am conscious that I have not said much about learning technology. For me this should follow where the answers to these questions take us, rather than leading the agenda.
Also as an aside which isn’t an aside, over the past year we have had a huge amount of discussion at the School on issues to do with equality, diversity and inclusivity. So how do we get the discussions on the student experience, an LSE education and equality, diversity and inclusivity to converge?
As a conclusion, it seems to me that, in the face of a potentially rather negative portrayal of the sometimes fraught relationship between student experience and an LSE education, we shouldn’t forget that there is actually a great deal being done by individuals, in departments, to respond to the questions I have asked. The task for managers such as my successor is to support this by creating the conditions in which local initiative can flourish, to share it more widely, to promote debate: which I take to be the point of this event today.
Simeon Underwood, May 2015
