Update on the MAB inquiry

For one MP on the committee the fact that her daughter supposedly missed out on a place on the Civil Service Fast Stream due to delays in graduation is a key information point. But so far the inquiry has been at its most interesting when considering what mitigations institutions put in place for last summer’s marking boycott, and whether there is a best practice template that should be adopted – or imposed.

Higher education minister Robert Halfon immediately swerved this question in his evidence today, saying that for him there was no “one size fits all” approach to academic regulations.

The evidence from earlier witnesses (Durham vice chancellor Karen O’Brien, King’s College London VP Adam Fagan, and QUB provost Stuart Elborn) highlighted a whole range of things that we already know were put in place in terms of changes to exam boards, replacement markers, provisional assessments based on past performance, no detriment policies, the prioritisation of graduating rather than continuing students, and the like. We are well aware by this point that there was no one consistent approach taken across the sector, and the committee is clearly weighing up whether one should have been taken.

You can sense a likely recommendation to the Office for Students here. Karen O’Brien suggested a “more proactive” approach from the regulator would have been welcomed during the boycott, and thought that the imposing of “emergency regulations” could be a legitimate role for OfS to play during comparable crises in the future. Halfon seemed happy to point to the committee’s eventual recommendations as a good future source of guidance for the regulator and institutions.

Beyond academic regulations, the other thing that was made abundantly clear by the witnesses was the sheer volume of additional work that was created across universities as they sought to mitigate the boycott’s effects. Communicating with parents, employers, other universities that students were looking to progress to, PSRBs. Senior academic staff doing much more assessment themselves than they usually would. Making more counselling sessions available, offering additional study support classes, supplementary careers sessions. Getting in statisticians to crunch students’ expected grades. Goodwill payments. And setting up taskforces and gold teams to monitor and respond to the action all the way through.

There’s a real question here for the sector about just how many staff hours it deployed in all this. Whether institutions would have the resources and energy to act in the same way should the MAB be repeated is a difficult question, and one where there is scope to work out in advance what worked and what didn’t.

Of course, it’s not just universities that put in place mitigations which they should be looking to learn from for possible future rounds. Part of the committee’s inquiry is to assess what the government did beyond higher education to support students graduating late. And it’s not really clear whether much has been learned here.

The Home Office introduced flexibility for international students wanting to move onto the Graduate route – however we learned today that it hasn’t made an assessment of how many students benefited from this or what its impact was. Halfon wasn’t keen on suggesting what OfS could have done differently, largely pointing to the ongoing public body review on questions about the regulator’s performance (which, we learned, is set to report in May).

The minister presented his main role in industrial disputes as bringing “moral pressure” to bear on those involved. He pointed to universities’ autonomy, and on questions about minimum service levels simply referenced the “literally only just finished” (on 30 January) consultation about a consultation that DfE has conducted, stressing the clear differences between schools and universities. For anyone having sleepless nights about potential ONS reclassification it was fairly reassuring.

But for anyone wondering how a possible future marking boycott would play out in institutions, and in the responses of regulators and the government, we’re still pretty much in the dark.