Who’s the customer? Who’s the employer?

Within higher education these days, we often come across the idea that students should be seen as customers. This can sometimes become a rather polemic debate, with the best and worst implications of the term becoming centre stage. However, whether we recoil from the idea of our students seeing our modules as just another item on the supermarket shelf or embrace the notion of students taking a more active role in choosing what and how they want to study, in both cases it is the student who remains at the centre of attention. Contrast this with the idea expressed in the CBI report Stepping Higher (supported by UUK and HEFCE) that we should “re-think that traditional university-student relationship to give employers a central role” (p.11). The dangers of an approach that replaces a student focus with an employer focus is highlighted in a recent paper published in Education and Training by Julie Drake, Joanne Blake and Wayne Swallow. Drawing on a case study of a Foundation Degree produced in partnership by the University of Huddersfield and First Direct, they argue convincingly that the higher skills agenda “has to include engagement of employees rather than just engaging employers” (p.40).

Of course, in some cases, it can be difficult to identify who the employer is at all. In a paper that Sarah Hale and I presented to the Higher Education Academy conference in 2008 we considered the result of work that Sarah had undertaken exploring the experiences of local councillors studying higher education courses. The elected councillors are not ‘employees’ in any normal sense and might well be considered the employers themselves, as they have overall charge of the council. Yet, they are often cast in the role of employees and the object of training and development programmes. If all this shows us anything, it is that the identities of all those involved in the higher skills agenda are perhaps more complicated and fluid than simple definitions may suggest. All the more work for us social scientists to try and make some sense out of then – as both researchers and teachers.

Welcome to ‘Social Science and the Higher Skills Agenda’ (SocSciHi)

This is new blog designed to provide an on-going commentary on employer engagement and work-based learning in higher education from the perspective of a social scientist.

The idea for the blog grew out of the C-SAP funded project ‘Politics after Leitch: What can we learn from Foundation Degrees’. The project consisted of a web-based survey of Foundation Degrees based on politics subject content and a series of follow-up interviews to identify examples of good and innovative practice (click here to see the survey results)

In the course of undertaking this project, we generated a range of materials for dissemination relating to FDs based in the area of politics. One option was simply to set-up a website, but this seemed too static an approach for a topic that continues to move forward and which gives rise to such a large amount of discussion and debate. In addition to this, during the project it became clear to me that some of the issues that were being raised would be of interest not just to colleagues teaching politics, government and public management/administration– but also to those in other areas of social science, such as sociology, criminology, social policy and anthropology.

My solution to this - set-up SocSciHi.

On it I will post:

• On-going project outputs, including examples of good and innovative practice relating to the higher skills agenda (HSA) and focusing on courses within the social sciences.
• Commentary on on-going policy development relating to the implementation of HSA. Since I am a politics academic – this interests me because I both work in HE and like to study how governments work.
• Links to and reviews of books, articles and reports that use social science approaches to analyse and critique the HAS.

No doubt, as things unfold, this list will grow and develop.

I welcome your comments, ideas and suggestions and offer the deal that if you follow the blog and join the conversation, I will to post to it at least once a month.

John