A sector commentary this week argued that students who appear disengaged are, in most cases, adapting sensibly to a university that has grown thin; one that offers flexibility and efficiency whilst shedding the repeated encounters through which a person comes to see themselves as a learner. Every institution, on this account, teaches a second curriculum that nobody wrote. The timetable teaches students how often the university expects them to attend. The virtual learning environment teaches whether learning is a live practice or an archive or repository of staff learning materials. It is a useful idea, and it stops short of where it might be most useful. Institutions run a curriculum of this kind for the people who work in them too, and it is taught most clearly in a restructure.
Consider what a savings round teaches those who remain after it. The posts that go first tend to be the ones whose output is hardest to see: the continuous improvement role, the educational developer, the administrator who could explain why a process existed and what would happen if it stopped. Training is an easy line to cut because its absence has no immediate cost. A specialist team of six becomes four, and the disciplinary conversation that went on in the corridor stops because there is nobody left to have it with. Nobody sets out to teach any of this. The lesson is received all the same, and it concerns what the institution values when it is obliged to choose, which is the only test of values that staff take seriously.
What is lost, and what recovers
The sector’s word for the result is “morale” or, lately, “change fatigue” and a professor of applied psychology argued this week that both may be the wrong word. What has gone, on his reading, is belonging, in two senses at once. The first is physical: collegial networks built over a decade or more removed in a single reorganisation. The second is harder to see: the loss of a disciplinary community and a professional identity as smaller teams absorb larger workloads and the scholarship that held the group together is cut first. Read this way, the staff member who says they have checked out may be grieving rather than tired, and grief follows a different course. Morale recovers when the pressure lifts. A network that took ten years to grow does not.
Those who bear most of this are the least visible. Professional and support staff make up more than half of the higher education workforce, and a report this week on their position suggested that development spending is treated as easy savings and that capability discarded in one year is often bought back in the next. There is a detail in the sector’s own statistics that bears on this more than any survey. Providers in England are not required to return data on staff who are not on academic contracts, so the national picture of this majority is, by design, partial. An institution that cannot see a group clearly in its own numbers is unlikely to weigh that group accurately when the numbers are what a savings round is built on.
The account nobody keeps
A study of turnover in the civil service some years ago found that whole policy teams in two departments had changed almost entirely within three years, that institutional memory had been damaged in areas where it mattered most, and that the cost had been close to invisible at the point of each decision because it accrued across many. Restructures in higher education appear to have the same shape. Each is defensible in its own paper, with its own savings target and its own consultation. What no paper contains is the aggregate: what the last three rounds together removed in memory, in relationship and in the tacit knowledge of how the place works. A cost that is not counted anywhere is, in practice, a cost treated as zero.
This matters more now than it did, because the same institutions are investing with some seriousness in student belonging. Induction is being redesigned, personal tutoring restored, the first weeks of term treated as formative rather than administrative, all in the belief, which the evidence appears to support, that students stay and succeed where they are known. Those relationships are held by people rather than by the institution, and a student’s sense that the university expects to matter is transmitted by staff who were taught, by the last reorganisation, how much they themselves matter. The two belongings are one design problem, and the second is the condition of the first, though they are rarely held by the same people or discussed in the same meeting.
None of this should be taken as an argument that institutions are shedding roles from carelessness. Contraction is real; some restructures are overdue, and a team preserved intact inside a shrinking institution can be its own kind of thinness, defended by those inside it at the expense of those outside. Nor is kindness, the remedy the sector reaches for most readily, an answer to the problem described here. A compassionate redundancy is still a redundancy, and the network it removes is removed, regardless of how the news is delivered. The loss is structural rather than a matter of tone, which is uncomfortable, because tone is something a leadership team can change by Monday and structure is not.
The claim is narrower than it may first appear. Restructures will not stop, and no institution under present conditions could promise that they would. The argument is that their cost in memory and network is not currently counted anywhere, by anyone, and that a leadership team which wanted to count it would find it had no instrument for doing so. The papers that govern a savings round measure what is saved with some precision and what is lost hardly at all, and this asymmetry, rather than any lack of goodwill, may be why the second curriculum teaches so consistently the same lesson.
Three questions may repay a senior team’s attention most. Whether it could say what its last restructure taught the staff who stayed, and whether that was the lesson intended. Whether anyone in the institution has an account of what the last three years’ savings rounds removed from memory and relationships, as distinct from what they saved. And whether the belonging now being designed for students is being built by people who have themselves been given reason to doubt their own, and whether the two efforts have ever been considered together.