Postgraduates and the New Higher Education Bill - Advice from NUS

Substantial changes are planned for UK universities and students as parliament debates a new higher education bill. The National Union of Students (NUS) is one of many groups scrutinising the new legislation. Sorana Vieru is NUS Vice President Higher Education. Here she explains what the bill might mean for postgraduates.

The new White Paper, Success as a Knowledge Economy, sets out the government’s plans for sweeping reform of higher education in England and many aspects of this are currently going through Parliament in a Higher Education Bill.

While many aspects of the White Paper and the HE Bill do not relate specifically to postgraduates, there are some areas which will directly affect either postgraduate taught or postgraduate research students.

First, the White Paper includes the government’s plans for a Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). This will allow institutions to measure the quality of their teaching against a set of key metrics. The government have stated that they will aim to bring postgraduate taught courses under assessment of the TEF.

Although this will not happen until at least 2019-20, if the TEF applies to PGT courses it will have a number of implications. The TEF relies on a series of metrics to measure different government criteria for what is teaching excellence. But many of these metrics do not yet exist for postgraduate courses. There is no National Student Survey or Destination of Leavers survey specifically for postgraduates.

There are questions over whether there will be pressure to use existing surveys like the Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey as a way to measure teaching quality. Such use could undermine the quality enhancement focus of the survey, as it is used internally by institutions rather than being public information to benchmark and compare them against each other.

More generally, it will be much harder to measure quality at postgraduate level because of the speciality and size of courses. I would certainly be concerned about universities responding by cutting courses where it is hard to show quality quantitatively - or where it is more expensive for them to ensure it.

The TEF includes new provisions to allow institutions to raise their undergraduate fees annually with inflation on the basis of their TEF rating. As masters fees are uncapped, we do know exactly how they will be effected. Good TEF results may give universities the justification they want to raise fees further, but we do not know.

The government are concerned about continuing masters fee inflation because it will undermine the sustainability of their new postgraduate loan scheme. We hope that some measures will be taken to prevent students having to pay even more excessive fees for a masters.

We must also not forget the number of postgraduate research students who will be affected by the TEF because of their teaching responsibilities. The new pressures of TEF could have a major effect on postgraduates who teach and on the academic climate they work in.

NUS will continue its influential work with students’ unions and UCU on ensuring best practice on the terms and conditions for postgraduates who teach using our postgraduate employment charter.

In addition to the TEF, the HE Bill introduces a new body called the Office for Students (OfS). This will see the merging of responsibilities for public funding of teaching in higher education and ensuring fair access for students. It will also administer the TEF and deal with the regulation of providers.

What is worrying, however, is that we do not yet know who will look after our postgraduate research students.

Currently, the responsibility for PGR provision lies with the Higher Education Funding Council for England, while individual scholarships are distributed by the research councils. Government are now creating a new body, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), to oversee research and research funding, but we don’t know whether they will also ensure the quality and funding of postgraduate research provision.

It is really important that PGR is not forgotten about and that either the OfS or UKRI take on responsibility for protecting and enhancing the PGR experience.

The White Paper also sets out the government’s ambitious plans for allowing more new providers of higher education into the sector to offer more choice for students. These providers will be mainly private and for-profit. There is the possibility for some of them to start providing courses at postgraduate level in the future.

On the one hand, this may give people more choice of who to get their postgraduate qualification from, and perhaps a difference in the price you pay. On the other hand, it potentially opens students up to untried and untested providers which have had to go through only basic regulations to offer courses – there are no guarantees that these courses will have the same quality or value as those from other institutions.

We don’t know how employers will respond to qualifications from a new provider, nor do we know whether many of these providers will have the financial stability or quality to remain in the sector for very long, and students will not want to have a degree from a university that happened to shut down a year or so later.

With all the issues in the White Paper it will be important not to let the implications for postgraduates be overlooked. NUS will be keeping up the pressure on government, providing as much evidence as possible to ensure the correct decisions are made for all students. Our campaigning has already started. We want answers on these questions for postgraduate students and we want the right answers.