ESTRATEGIAS PARA QUE ESTA VIDA SE CUMPLA Y OBSTÁCULOS PARA CONSEGUIRLA

Starting Points

On my train journey to New Ecclesiastical’s City campus, I pass through three stations with ‘International’ after their place name. On my arrival, trilingual street signs and flocks of international students sustain an impression of a liminal, outward-facing zone, quite in contrast to the ancient architectural character of the city. As I walk from the station into the city centre, young people stream towards me, infusing the place with an incongruously chaotic, eclectic energy. Street signs and tourist markers promote the city’s authentic ‘heritage’ identity, but global capitalism is gleefully at play among the relics. The retail is relentless: pound shops jostling with fast food and charity shops near the station; national chains, more upmarket boutiques and restaurants crowding the narrow streets nearer the centre. As I near my destination, I pass a group of homeless men drinking coffee outside McDonald’s in the last of the sunshine.

*

On a bright sunny morning in early spring, I enter the main site of City campus through an ancient stone arch. It’s not yet ten o’clock and the campus is quiet; the city centre feels a world, rather than five minutes, away. Low-rise buildings are arranged in a series of interconnecting courtyards with small green spaces, cloistered and contained. A

contemporary chapel spire dominates the modest campus skyline. I come upon a cafe, buy a coffee and take a seat, looking out towards a grassy rectangle and an ornamental water feature. Two men are chatting at the next table, one a chaplain in dog collar, jeans, earstud, with an iPad. I can’t help but overhear. The chaplain says, ‘For me this is my parish, thousands of students. We worship every day, sometimes it’s just me, but every day we shroud this place in prayer. That is my job’.

Just after ten o’clock, people begin moving across the courtyards and past the water feature, thronging the café. Noise levels rise. It’s difficult to tell which of the older people in the café are now students and which might be staff. I wonder how many of the students in this now busy café are part-time. Young White females with local accents predominate.

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Two young Black men wearing tracksuits walk by outside, deep in conversation, marked out by their gender and ethnicity.

*

Another sunny, sharp day. From my vantage point in the library, I look out across staircases and walkways beneath a soaring atrium to glass-walled staff offices, several stories deep. People are moving about on the stairs; conversations are taking place on the landings between and in the lobby below. I’m suddenly reminded of the seven stairways of Escher’s Relativity (1953), his depiction of an idyllic community … in which the laws of gravity do not apply. Here in the library it’s airy, light and open-plan, with small clusters of PCs, group working spaces, sofas and stools in pink, orange, purple, red. Students move the furniture around to suit their needs, creating bespoke study habitats, taking control of the space. If IKEA designed a library, it would be like this.

The Story of …

The starting point of this story is New Ecclesiastical’s strong performance in retention. The university regularly scores above benchmark, and bucks the national trend in that its retention of part-time students is higher than for full-time. The university also scores highly for student satisfaction in the National Student Survey (NSS). ‘We’re a middle-sized university with a caring community feel – and a vocational focus’, a member of the Senior Executive tells me. ‘On the whole, we feel that our part-time students are doing rather well. We always like to do better but … they seem to be able to stay’. Community is important to New Ecclesiastical. It is an essential element of its Christian identity and distinctiveness; and the university still articulates a collegiate story in its mission and values. The evolution of New Ecclesiastical from a small teacher-training college to a mid- sized, multi-campus, modern university is part of a wider story of massification and widening participation in English HE. New Ecclesiastical occupies the edges of the field, a newcomer to the university club, not just in relation to England’s ancient and red brick institutions, but also in comparison with the first post-1992 universities. With a

professional/vocational programme offered alongside a modular scheme and an average UCAS entry tariff in the lower echelons, the institution currently ranks in the lower quartile of a basket of national league tables.

I interview a senior executive in her spacious office, high in the glass-walled building. Her assistant protects us from casual visitors, on guard in the buffer zone of her own office.

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The university is proud both of its origins and of its journey to university title, she tells me, and of its public service ethos, underpinned by Church Foundation status. I recall the chaplain’s words, the view of the chapel spire from my seat in the café, and the students who had flooded in. A modern, accessible university with a distinct female gender bias in a traditional, patriarchal space. Distinct trajectories; a co-existing heterogeneity. In a later interview, a senior faculty staff member says of City campus’s main site, ‘It’s a lovely feel. This is very cosy. When people come for open days they immediately feel it would be easy to belong here. It doesn’t get much nicer than this’. Is that the reason for the trend- busting statistics for part-time retention at New Ecclesiastical?

‘It’s in the lifeblood of this institution to recruit mature and part-time [students], and therefore it has become second nature to us to make sure that we’re set up for them’, says the senior executive. ‘In 2000 over 50 per cent of our students were part-time’. But partnerships with the education and health sectors, among others, have made New Ecclesiastical vulnerable in a climate of higher fees and declining employer sponsorship. In 2014, part-time students account for less than 30 per cent of its substantially increased student population. ‘Yes, our part-time population has gone down in numbers, even though we are much bigger as an institution. … We’re not out of line with the sector, in fact we’re slightly better than the sector, but it’s extremely hard in the part-time market’.

As New Ecclesiastical’s institutional identity has evolved, its student cohorts have

diversified and its campus network has grown. It currently operates on four campus sites: City, Urban, Coastal and Country, City being the largest of the four and acknowledged as the ‘main’ campus. City campus is definitively of the city; it has a dispersed estate located around the edges of the historic central precinct. The functions – of teaching and learning, administration, the library, and student services and student social life – are located on three separate sites, a ten- to fifteen-minute walk apart, meaning that New Ecclesiastical’s students and staff constantly cross the city’s spaces to learn, work, eat, drink, play and sleep. In contrast, its nearest pre-1992 neighbour, on which it used to depend for degree awarding powers, sits self-contained, outside the city boundary.

The activity space of New Ecclesiastical is intimately bound to its host city. It plays the role of friendly occupier, energetically publicising the financial benefits and opportunities it

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brings both to city and region, not least to disadvantaged communities, as well as to its graduates, whose employment rates six months after graduation are over 90 per cent. It is networked to its locality through social and economic relationships operating across spatial scales; it is an extroverted place. As student numbers continue to grow, the university is incrementally and opportunistically extending its reach within the limited space, acquiring land and property in the city centre and building new student residences and facilities in order to meet the demands not only of a growing student population, but also those students’ expectations of ‘the traditional, expected, undergraduate experience’. Indicating her office in the glassy new build, the senior executive says, ‘We wanted an iconic space here in the city. This building gives us that presence; it’s got the wow factor’.

The Vice-Chancellor’s office is located on the main site of City campus, not far from the water feature and the chapel. But over the course of my visits, I come to think of the building with the wow factor as the real centre of power: New Ecclesiastical’s command and control centre. Although multi-functional and used by students, the higher floors of the building are closed off to them, and it is here that the policies, regulations, targets and monitoring performed by external bodies, including the government and its proxies, are absorbed and interpreted, implemented and devolved. An intricate geometry of power lines, pulses and currents reach from the outside in, and drive internal priorities, strategy and practice, including those in relation to retention.

What happens next? In theory, strategy is disseminated from the centre through a

hierarchical network extending across the City campus and to the three satellite campuses, from the executive into faculties and services, from faculty and service executives to departments, and from departments to programmes. Senior staff are keen to stress the consultative nature of strategy development at New Ecclesiastical. ‘We make sure that when we agree a strategy, it’s agreed with the faculties, [which are] able to bring a bottom up perspective as well as a top down perspective’, one says. I follow the trail deeper into the institution, interviewing a faculty executive whose role it is to mediate between the university’s administrative centre and the faculties. We sit in her office in one of the modest low-rise buildings near the back of the main City campus site. ‘Whatever the university does at university level, at the moment there’s no way of it filtering down into all the faculties’. It appears that horizontal communication across faculties, departments and services is equally problematic. ‘In this institution, we’re not good at shouting loud about

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good practice. It goes on in little pockets; it doesn’t necessarily come out. Not just our own practice: there’s lots of other things going on’. A member of the academic staff in a different faculty articulates the challenge of implementing wider departmental

responsibilities beyond his programme role: ‘It’s partly my job to disseminate these things, but it’s difficult to disseminate stuff and get strategies going if everyone’s so busy’.

What works?

New Ecclesiastical’s retention strategy is closely aligned with a raft of other university initiatives, and, in placing ‘student-centred learning and teaching at the heart of retention and success’ (ibid), it conforms with generic student experience, engagement and

satisfaction agendas dominating the HE sector. It also adopts, wholesale, the discourse of belonging articulated in What Works (2012), to the extent of prefacing its strategy

objectives and action plan with direct quotes from the report: ‘a sense of belonging in HE significantly informs a student’s subsequent decisions to stay and then to succeed. The first year of a programme needs to be designed to promote this’. The strategy document sets objectives and a timeframe within which measurements can be taken and reported on internally and externally. A detailed action plan underpins an ambitious approach, but the changing external environment can work against it. Massey’s space-time, always in flux. The senior executive tells me, ‘We’ve set ourselves an incredibly stretching target figure … most of the students you lose, you lose in the first year, so if you grow your first year, as happened for us in 11-12, you’re not going to hit that target’.

I interview the institutional lead for retention. He says, ‘We should be having a consistent performance. … We do have groups that we know we have to do better with’. The strategy document identifies a number of ‘target groups’ at whom specific activities should be targeted. When I ask who these target groups are, he lists students of BME origin (lower rates of retention) and male students in Education (under-represented). Mature part-time undergraduates are not a target group. New Ecclesiastical’s retention rate for mature part- time undergraduates is good. The senior executive nods: ‘There’s not a lot specifically targeted on that group at a central level. … We haven’t had particular issues around mature students or … part-time students with retention’. In fact, their presence in the strategy document is negligible: the phrase ‘part-time’ occurs once, the word ‘mature’ not at all.

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Of the retention strategy, he says, ‘There was a broad consultation that went through delivery groups, working groups, committees, boards … it had the full range’. But then he tells a story of disrupted power lines. ‘Once you’ve got a strategy, then the question you’re really asking is, how does it find its way out? If it isn’t put in front of people in some forum where it’s given some gravitas or incentive, then nobody chooses to go browsing around our strategies’. In the past, New Ecclesiastical has used Faculty Widening Participation and Retention committees to facilitate strategy dissemination and implementation. ‘Those have fallen away and the emphasis on a formal response has been lost’. My visits coincide with a corporate rethink, including the prospect of re-operationalising those committees and putting resources into a role which will ‘take retention and success agendas backwards and forwards between the centre and the faculty. Because that’s always the divide’.

I ask a faculty senior executive: ‘If I were to ask a lecturer in this department about the retention strategy, what would they say?’ She smiles. ‘They’d probably be aware there was one, but they wouldn’t know where to find it and they wouldn’t know how what they do relates into it. They’d just think the top line figures: how many students have they lost?’ ‘Are you aware of an institutional retention strategy?’ I ask a programme tutor. He makes a face. ‘I probably should be. If I’m brutally honest, no. We do talk a lot about recruitment though, because we have to get bums on seats’. So, in his opinion, does the retention strategy as it stands address the issues of retention? ‘No, I don’t think so. I think that’s top level’. Institutional strategy is predicated on retention as a shared responsibility; its

implementation is devolved to faculties and services, but the paper document all but disappears once it drops below the executive parapet to programme level. Its contents transmute into fuzzy corporate imperatives, an intangible management tool demanding top-line figures.

The retention strategy proposes a university-wide implementation of a personal tutoring system intended to support induction, progression and success. The institutional lead for retention explains: ‘What we want is the personal academic tutors to be picking up on those agendas, aware of the tutor group that they’ve got in front of them. Understanding their situation … if we can get the personal tutoring system in place with that sense of belonging paramount in their minds and the attendant interventions that we’ve put in place … it would go a long way towards meeting a broad set of needs. I think it would tick a lot of the boxes for target groups, including part-time’.

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However, the system presents significant logistical challenges. I interview two programme directors in different faculties. One tells me, ‘I’ve got a list of personal tutees – I haven’t seen any of them. I’m just too busy. The first year was maybe twenty-five students, now it’s more than doubled, so you’ve got a large student body. And in the past, when it was smaller, I did set up things, and half of them didn’t turn up anyway’. The other says, ‘For my programme, I looked at this and thought, now how are we going to manage this? Do we give a group of students’ names to a member of staff who they might not actually ever meet? Are there hours attached to it in workload planning? No’. Both interviewees express dissatisfaction with the imposition of a universal policy in a context where local arrangements had already evolved to meet particular programme needs. One says, ‘I think we’ve always dealt with issues, and students have always felt that they could talk to the people who were in front of them. It seems that the policy is pushing this notion of support of academic work. Which, ok, that’s fine, but it tends to be, for our students, personal issues that need the support. … What I would say, certainly the evaluations I get back, the one thing that keeps coming up is that they are very happy with the level of support that they get, they feel that there is support there’.

The other says, ‘I have to kind of nod and agree to it [the personal tutoring system], but I don’t think it works. And really, effectively, if a student has a problem, they’ll come and see me’. He’s also concerned that his skills don’t match the requirements of the role: ‘Most of the time, the reason students come to see me or contact me, is for academic reasons. The problem with personal tutorials is that it’s forcing on us a counselling role and we’re not counsellors. When the programme was smaller and I would try and see students, you’d say, is everything ok with your home life, are you getting on with your friends? And I’d think – this is not my job! I’m not trained to do this. I’ve had students come in and say, “I miss my boyfriend”. What am I supposed to say?’

In his story, the cascading of strategy via a neat, hierarchical network has become instead a