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Inequality in students' degree outcomes has been a concern for the higher education sector and the UK government for more than a decade. Since its inception in 2018, the Office for Students in England has prioritised the need for evidence of causality through requiring institutions to evaluate the effectiveness of their initiatives as set out in Access and Participation Plans. This policy development responds to several reports which identify a dearth of evidence-based interventions and scant knowledge of 'what works'. This paper traces the interplay between policy and research, focusing on the assumptions they make about causality. It concludes that unwarranted positions are taken in both spheres of practice, making progress unlikely. A conception of causality situated in extant formal theory on evidential pluralism and that draws on current practices would help us address inequality more effectively. Alternative framings of the problem of inequality in students' degree outcomes is offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Speaking about ‘the student experience’ has become common-place in higher education and the phrase has acquired the aura of a sacred utterance in UK higher education policy over the last decade. A critical discourse analysis of selected higher education policy texts reveals what ‘the student experience’ has come to signify, and how it structures relations between students and academics, institutions and academics, and higher education institutions and government. ‘The student experience’ homogenises students and deprives them of agency at the same time as apparently giving them ‘voice’. This paper examines the dominance and sacralisation of the discourse of ‘the student experience’ and questions its positioning as a means of discriminating between the value of different experiences of education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues that the individual academic is all but absent from the assumptive worlds of policymakers in UK higher education. It is taken for granted in research on academic identity that those who work in higher education as teachers and researchers refer to themselves as, and indeed are referred to by others as, 'academics'. Evidence is drawn from a study of policymakers in the UK to demonstrate that the word 'academic' is not a part of the lexicon of higher education policymaking. Moreover, the concept of the academic is cast into shade by an overwhelming emphasis on 'the student experience', and, from another direction, by a location of professional academic accountability at the level of the higher education institution rather than the individual. The article concludes with an exploration of what work this absence of the academic in policy does in disrupting the possibilities for engagement between the worlds of academia and policymaking and in perpetuating the discourses of marketisation and new management in higher education. It also suggests understanding the assumptive worlds of policymakers is a crucial counterbalance to a growing body of literature on academic responses to change, some of which has tended towards the self-referential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the interaction between religious faith and academic study. It presents findings from a small-scale qualitative study of how first year theology undergraduates at Oxford experienced the relationship between academic study and their faith stance. The findings suggest varied developments in the extent to which students adapted to the learning environment, the strategies they formed in dealing with the interface between faith and academic study, and the expectations they discerned as implicit in the curriculum itself. The paper considers the findings in relation to Perry's nine stages of students' intellectual and ethical development, and proposes that, following Perry, the discussion of religious faith as one of the contexts within which undergraduate students make sense of their experience be restored to educational discourse. The article concludes by proposing that provision of curriculum space to explore the interaction between the existential and the academic is a key factor for subjects such as theology and religious studies, which contain a significant self-involving element. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews the findings from a UK nationwide project on the causes of differences in student outcomes in higher education. The project was commissioned by the Higher Education Funding Council for England and reported in July 2015. We found that universities with an embedded, institution-wide approach that engaged senior managers, academic staff, professional service staff and students as stakeholders and agents in the differential outcomes agenda were most promising in decreasing progression gaps. Universities use targeted and universal interventions to affect change. Initiatives that tackle assessment and the content and meaning of curricula are a promising stream of interventions. Overall, more evaluations on what works and sharing of practice will further enable the sector to support all higher education students in reaching their academic potential. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]