by Adam Matthews

It’s January 2024 and I am sitting down to write up my reflections on the SRHE Conference 2023. At the time of writing, the UK news agenda is being dominated by what is being described as one of the biggest miscarriages of justice the country has ever seen – 736 post office workers between 1999 and 2015 were prosecuted for false accounting or theft based on information from an IT system called Horizon. The system was not fit for purpose and the reporting of accounting shortfalls have found to be incorrect. The Post Office scandal has captured the public imagination thanks to a dramatisation of the events on mainstream terrestrial TV.

What has this got to do with an academic conference on higher education?

The power of media, narrative story and the broader humanities have the capacity to convey stories through genres such as drama and comedy in compelling and accessible ways. My own work is concerned with discourse and narratives on the idea and purpose of a university and its role in society. I contributed to two presentations at SRHE 2023 which both involved an analysis of narratives – the first being political party manifestoes from 1945 to 2019 and the second an analysis of Knowledge Exchange Framework policy. Both of these presentations and my wider interests look at discourse and narratives as data in higher education policy and practice.

The telling of the compelling Post Office scandal story in an accessible format has reached millions of screens, sparking conversation in workplaces and around dinner tables. This surge in public feeling has kicked off further investigations into the miscarriage of justice which involves a complex network of state and private actors over many years. This shows how narratives can reach many diverse audiences to begin to unravel the personal stories as well as the complexities involved. The SRHE conference theme for 2023 itself looked to unpick connections and complexity between Higher Education Research, Practice, and Policy.

Connected research, policy and practice was a key theme in both keynotes, the first online from Professor Nicola Dandridge and the second kicked off the in person 3 day event in Birmingham at Aston University – a panel discussion and plenary on re-shaping Tertiary Education with Professors Huw Morris, Ellen Hazelkorn, Chris Millward, and Andy Westwood, chaired by Professor Sir Peter Scott.

The complexity in making connections across research, policy and practice was clear as the speakers challenged researchers of higher education to come up with answers to the sector’s issues and challenges as well as re-shaping the sector into one which is tertiary rather than just higher. Browsing the conference programme at the sessions to come showed hugely diverse topics and methods used in higher education research. It certainly is complex to respond to the challenge of research providing the answers or even more challenging the answer.

The growing direction of travel towards tertiary is thankfully not a singular path. Like other potential futures, the panel showed a plurality of potential paths, all bound up with a plurality of perspectives, values and ambitions as well as the key aspect of funding. The panel on tertiary education came up with at least three perspectives on our tertiary futures, from conservative through to radically progressive.

Research findings cannot be put into a large language model artificial intelligence machine to spit out the answer but there is much more scope for researchers, policy-makers and practitioners to collaborate. Geoff Mulgan’s recent book When Science Meets Power analyses in detail how politics, policy, research and findings are muddled and muddied and lays out how scientists, politicians and bureaucrats need to acknowledge their strengths, knowledge (epistemic humility) and democratic values to make expert knowledge and politics work together.

Narrative might be something that can help to make sense of some of this complexity in both analysis but also in making a change at policy and practice levels.

The first of my own two presentations at the conference looked at political discourse of higher education in UK elections from 1945 to 2019. Debbie McVitty and I looked at the political narratives and discourses of Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat party political manifestoes to track how higher education was written about and in what context. Broadly, the Labour Party used ‘higher education’ more than the other two parties but all three had similar frequency when writing about the sector when it came to the word ‘university’. We observed spikes in frequency of ‘higher education’ and ‘university’ in 1966, 1987, 2001 and 2010. The first three elections were incoming second and third term governments which might hold some clues for 2024 in the UK. The context in which manifestoes talk about higher education has changed and broadened over the 74 year period. In 1945 and for the majority of the remainder of the 20^th century, higher education and universities were mentioned in the context of education, health, science and innovation and youth. Progressively following the turn of the millennium in line with growth in student numbers, political parties began broadening the scope and influence of universities. We saw themes linked to universities in the context of lifelong learning, the economy, immigration, the European Union, public services, apprenticeships and equality. In short, as universities have grown in size and number, politics has looked to them do and achieve more for society and adds to the complex role of higher education in society. As we look ahead to 2024 and the biggest election year the world has ever seen it will interesting to see how universities are positioned politically in the UK and all over the world.

Globally, universities are not being depicted in a positive light in a range of contexts. The UK Government has questioned the value of some degrees describing them as ‘rip offs’ to be cracked down on. Politically, polarisation is a key concern for the health of our democracies and those gaining a degree and those that do not has been sighted as a contributing factor in such division, often under the veil of meritocracy. Hostility towards universities has entered into the culture wars with curriculum and pedagogy being attacked by politicians in the US and in Europe. And currently there is controversy on free speech and conflict at prestigious universities in the US as leaders have been forced to stand down over handling of  the Gaza-Israel conflict culminating in allegations of plagiarism in their own research.

More positive narratives could be found in my second presentation with Vanessa Cui from Birmingham City University. We looked at the narratives of the Knowledge Exchange Framework (KEF) – a regulatory policy exercise from UKRI. Universities are required, in a similar way to teaching and research excellence frameworks to submit narrative statements alongside quantitative measures. We looked at these statements to see how universities told the story of knowledge exchange (often described as third mission) outside the more structured activities of teaching and research. We found a wide range of activity carried out by universities which contributed to both the local economy as well as public and community engagement. Characters in these narratives included students and graduates, university staff, local authorities and public services, publics, businesses and other education institutions. Activities ranged from collaborating with local people on research projects and providing learning opportunities to responding to and contributing to large scale events such as the Commonwealth Games and City of Culture organisation. Moreover, universities clearly played an important role during the Covid-19 pandemic, not just in developing vaccines but providing services and support in collaboration with many different organisations and communities.

For both of these projects we are using the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) as a broad methodological framing for policy narratives and responses, assuming:

• A constructing of social reality
• A bounded relativity (beliefs, norms, ideas, strategies, context)
• Narratives have generalizable structural elements
• Policy narratives operate at three levels (macro, meso, micro)
• Narratives play a central role in communicating information

In previous work I have analysed similar regulatory narrative responses using computational text analysis (corpus-assisted discourse analysis) as a method of analysing corpora running into the millions of words. This we combined with the NPF and plan to develop this methodological integration in further work.

Objective and positivist measures are a big part of much of the English regulatory landscape, TEF takes data from the national student survey and continuation, completion and progression indicators to evidence student experience and student outcomes. The REF, KEF and TEF ask for narrative statements alongside the numbers as evidence and to ultimately provide outcomes. Vanessa and I concluded with regard to KEF that universities have a narrative challenge in crafting texts which tell the story of the idea and purpose of their institutions to regulators but also then to students and publics.

Narratives play a key role in human communication. This echoes the importance of narrative and story outlined above and the impact of drama and stories to public consciousness. Narratives and storytelling also play a key role in marketing, from BT selling the gift of family communication to the addictive quality of R Whites Lemonade. The marketisation of a higher education in the neoliberal era has been widely researched and theorised. But in responding to the call from the keynotes and others working with the sector at SRHE 2023, to make the case for higher education and universities, maybe we need to adopt some of the narratives used in the big neoliberal marketised machine. Again, how does the university, tell its story and purpose to a wide range of stakeholders?

Researchers in higher education are analysing and crafting narratives in diverse and creative ways. Charlie Davis presented his work on academics of working-class heritage creating narratives through stories and comics. Social science fiction narratives can allow us to explore ideas and different conceptualisations and visions of the future. These approaches are drawing upon research data, literature and theories but in new and futures-orientated and playful ways. Justyna Bandola-Gill presented her study on narrative CVs – a relatively new approach to research funding whereby researchers craft their own story rather than a list of achievements. And Josh Patel got into the detail of the Robbins report pulling out the ambitious and verging on poetic narrative from the neoliberal economist Lionel Robbins’ vision of expanded public university education – Josh urged us all to go and read a very accessible and hopeful narrative from 1960s higher education policy.

Narratives are not going away. In the latest 2023 publication of TEF statements, institutions could submit up to 25 pages as part of their provider submission (up 10 pages from the previous round) and new to the latest set of statements are panel decision narratives and (optional) student submissions. In December 2023 this provided half a million words each from panels and students and 1.8 million words from providers. A by-product of such an exercise is a unique corpus of texts which provide an insight into how a range of institutions are responding to policy in describing their own practice in diverse ways. This provides a huge amount of learning for the sector.

Narratives play a central role in communicating information and constructing reality. From a research perspective we can analyse these texts as policy stories and wider discourse on what is constructed as a social reality. Narratives involve characters, context, morals of a story and plot lines. Rhetoric is the ancient art of persuasion. Aristotle broke this down into ethos (speaker’s status, character, credibility and authority), pathos (appealing to emotions, values and beliefs of the reader) and logos (logic, reasoning and argument).

As well as using these tools for analysis, universities and higher education researchers can use them to create narratives which surface the purpose and ideals of education to politicians, policy-makers, funders and publics. We may need them, as hostilities towards the university grow.

Many people knew about the Post Office Horizon IT system injustices but they were hidden away in reports and information based news articles – telling the personal stories of those involved on prime time TV captured a public imagination and support. Mr Bates vs the Post Office has been viewed almost 15 million times (at the time of writing) and has led to more than 100 new potential victims coming forward.

Maybe higher education needs to tell its stories and narratives to the wider world in equally accessible and creative ways.

Adam is a Senior Research Fellow in education systems and policy at the University of Birmingham. Adam’s work looks at universities as part of tertiary education systems and the role that they play as key sites of knowledge production and dissemination in wider society. This includes how technologies and media have and are shaping, knowledge production and access.