We know what's best for you: politicians vs. experts

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I regard politicians as a much-maligned group. The job is not, after all, particularly well paid, when you consider the hours that they usually put in, the level of scrutiny they are subjected to, and the high-stakes issues they must grapple with. I therefore start with the assumption that most of them go into politics because they feel strongly about social or economic issues and want to make a difference. Although being a politician gives you some status, it also inevitably means you will be subjected to abuse or worse. The murder of Jo Cox led to a brief lull in the hostilities, but it's resumed with a vengeance as politicians continue to grapple with issues that divide the nation and that people feel strongly about. It seems inevitable, then, that anyone who stays the course must have the hide of a rhinoceros, and so by a process of self-selection, politicians are a relatively tough-minded lot. 

I fear, though, that in recent years, as the divisions between parties have become more extreme, so have the characteristics of politicians. One can admire someone who sticks to their principles in the face of hostile criticism; but what we now have are politicians who are stubborn to the point of pig-headedness, and simply won't listen to evidence or rational argument. So loath are they to appear wavering, that they dismiss the views of experts.

This was most famously demonstrated by the previous justice secretary, Michael Gove, who, when asked if any economists backed Brexit, replied "people in this country have had enough of experts". This position is continued by Theresa May as she goes forth in the quest for a Hard Brexit.

Then we have the case of the Secretary of State for Health, Jeremy Hunt, who has repeatedly ignored expert opinion on the changes he has introduced to produce a 'seven-day NHS'. The evidence he cited for the need for the change was misrepresented, according to the authors of the report, who were unhappy with how their study was being used. The specific plans Hunt proposed were described as 'unfunded, undefined and wholly unrealistic' by the British Medical Association, yet he pressed on.

At a time when the NHS is facing staff shortages, and as Brexit threatens to reduce the number of hospital staff from the EU, he has introduced measures that have led to demoralisation of junior doctors. This week he unveiled a new rota system that has a mix of day and night shifts that had doctors, including experts in sleep, up in arms. It was suggested that this kind of rota would not be allowed in the aviation industry, and is likely to put the health of doctors as well as patients at risk.

A third example comes from academia, where Jo Johnson, Minister of State for Universities, Science, Research and Innovation, steadfastly refuses to listen to any criticisms of his Higher Education and Research Bill, either from academics or from the House of Lords. Just as with Hunt and the NHS, he starts from fallacious premises – the idea that teaching is often poor, and that students and employers are dissatisfied – and then proceeds to introduce measures that are designed to fix the apparent problem, but which are more likely to damage a Higher Education system which, as he notes, is currently the envy of the world. The use of the National Student Survey as a metric for teaching excellence has come under particularly sharp attack – not just because of poor validity, but also because the distribution of scores make it unsuited for creating any kind of league table: a point that has been stressed by the Royal Statistical Society, the Office for National Statistics, and most recently by Lord Lipsey, joint chair of the All Party Statistics Group.

Johnson's unwillingness to engage with the criticism was discussed recently at the Annual General Meeting of the Council for Defence of British Universities (where Martin Wolf gave a dazzling critique of the Higher Education and Research Bill from an expert economics perspective).  Lord Melvyn Bragg said that in years of attending the House of Lords he had never come across such resistance to advice. I asked whether anyone could explain why Johnson was so obdurate. After all, he is presumably a highly intelligent man, educated at one of our top Universities. It's clear that he is ideologically committed to a market in higher education, but presumably he doesn't want to see the UK's international reputation downgraded, so why doesn't he listen to the kind of criticism put forward in the official response to his plans by Cambridge University? I don't know the answer, but there are two possible reasons that seem plausible to me.

First, those who are in politics seldom seem to understand the daily life of people affected by the Bills they introduce. One senior academic told me that Oxford and Cambridge in particular do themselves a disservice when they invite senior politicians to an annual luxurious college feast, in the hope of gaining some influence. The guest may enjoy the exquisite food and wine, but they go away convinced that all academics are living the high life, and give only the occasional lecture between bouts of indulgence. Any complaints, thus, are seen as those coming from idle dilettantes who are out of touch with the real world and alarmed at the idea they may be required to do serious work. Needless to say, this may have been accurate in the days of Brideshead Revisited, but it could not be further from the truth today – in Higher Education Institutions of every stripe, academics work longer hours than the average worker (though fewer, it must be said, than the hard-pressed doctors).

Second, governments always want to push things through because if they don't, they miss a window of opportunity during their period in power. So there can be a sense of, let's get this up and running and worry about the detail later. That was pretty much the case made by David Willetts when the Bill was debated in the House of Lords:

These are not perfect measures. We are on a journey, and I look forward to these metrics being revised and replaced by superior metrics in the future. They are not as bad as we have heard in some of the caricatures of them, and in my experience, if we wait until we have a perfect indicator and then start using it, we will have a very long wait. If we use the indicators that we have, however imperfect, people then work hard to improve them. That is the spirit with which we should approach the TEF today.

However, that is little comfort to those who might see their University go out of business while the problems are fixed. As Baroness Royall said in response:

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, said that we are embarking on a journey, which indeed we are, but I feel that the car in which we will travel does not yet have all the component parts. I therefore wonder if, when we have concluded all our debates, rather than going full speed ahead into a TEF for everybody who wants to participate, we should have some pilots. In that way the metrics could be amended quite properly before everybody else embarks on the journey with us.

Much has been said about the 'post-truth' age in which we now live, where fake news flourishes and anyone's opinion is as good as anyone else's. If ever there was a need for strong universities as a source of reliable, expert evidence, it is now. Unless academics start to speak out to defend what we have, it is at risk of disappearing.

For more detail of the case against the TEF, see here.

Cost-benefit analysis of the Teaching Excellence Framework

©CartoonStock.com

The government’s new Higher Education and Research Bill gets its second reading this week. One complaint is that it has been rushed in without adequate scrutiny of some key components. I was interested, therefore, to discover, that a Detailed Impact Assessment was published in June, specifically to look at the costs and benefits of the various components of the Bill. What I found was quite shocking: we were being told that the financial benefits of the new Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) vastly outweighed its costs – yet look in detail and this is all smoke and mirrors.

In particular, the report shows that while the costs of TEF to the higher education sector (confusingly described as ‘business’) are estimated at £20 million, the direct benefits will come to £1,146 million, giving a net benefit of £1,126 million (Table 1). How could the introduction of a new bureaucratic evaluation exercise be so remarkably beneficial? I read on with bated breath.

Well, sad to relate, it’s voodoo analysis.  This becomes clear if you press on to Table 12, which shows the crucial data from statistical modelling. Quite simply, the TEF generates money for institutions that get a good rating because it allows them to increase fees in line with inflation. Institutions that don’t participate in the TEF, or those that fail to get a good enough rating, will not be able to exceed the current 9K per annum fee, and so in real terms their income will decline over time. As far as I can make out, they are not included in Table 1. Furthermore, the increases for the compliant, successful institutions are measured relative to how they would have done if they had not been allowed to raise fees.

So to sum up:

• You don’t need the TEF to achieve this result. You could get the same outcome by just allowing all institutions to raise fees in line with inflation.
• As noted in the briefing to the Bill by the House of Commons: “the Bill is expected to result in a net financial benefit to higher education providers of around £1.1billion a year. This is in very large part due to the higher fees that providers with successful TEF outcomes will be able to charge students.” (p. 59)
• The system is designed for there to be winners and losers, and the losers will inevitably see their real income falling further and further behind the winners, unless inflation is zero.

The impact assessment does consider other options, including that of allowing fee increases in line with inflation provided the institution has a satisfactory Quality Assurance rating. This is rejected on the grounds that: “whilst QA is a good starting point, reliance on QA alone and in the longer-term will not enable significant differentiation of teaching quality to help inform student decisions and encourage institutions to improve their teaching quality.” (p. 37).  This makes clear that one consequence (and one suspects one purpose) of TEF is to facilitate the division into institutional sheep and goats, followed by starvation of the goats.

Another option, which was strongly recommended by many of those who responded to the consultation exercise on the Green Paper which preceded the bill, is to remove the link between TEF and fees. In other words, have some kind of teaching evaluation, where the motivation for taking part would be reputational rather than financial.  This too is rejected as not sufficiently powerful an incentive: “the Research Excellence Framework allocates £1.5bn a year to institutions. To achieve parity of esteem and focus between teaching and research the TEF will need to have a similar level of financial implications.” However, this is rather disingenuous. There is no pot of money on offer. We live in a country where we are used to government supporting Higher Education; now, however, the only source of income to universities for teaching is via student fees, but raising fees is unpopular.  The funding of universities will collapse unless they can either find alternative sources of income, or continue to raise fees in line with inflation, and TEF provides a cover story for doing that.

So we have a system designed to separate winners and losers, but the outcome will depend crucially on two factors: the rate of inflation and the rate of increase in students. The figures in the document have been modelled assuming that the number of students at English Higher Education Institutions will increase at a rate of around 2 per cent per annum (Table 12), and that annual inflation will be around 3 per cent. If either growth in numbers or inflation is lower, then the difference between those who do and don’t get good TEF ratings (and hence the apparent financial benefits of TEF) will decline.

What about the anticipated costs of the TEF?  We are told: “Institutions collectively will experience average annual costs of £22m as a result of familiarising, signing up and applying to the Teaching Excellence Framework, once the TEF covers discipline level assessments. This is equivalent to an average of £53,000 per institution, significantly less than the Research Excellence Framework (REF) at £230,000 per institution per year.” (p. 8). One can only assume that those writing this report have little experience of how academic institutions operate. For instance, they say that “Year One will not represent any additional administrative cost to institutions, as we will use the existing QA process.” I did a quick internet search and immediately found two universities who were advertising now for administrators to work on preparing for the TEF (on salaries of around £30-40K), as well as a consultancy agency that was touting for custom by noting the importance of being “TEF-ready”.

I have yet to get on to the section on costs and benefits of opening the market to ‘alternative providers’…..

If you are concerned at the threats to Higher Education posed by the Bill, please write to your MP - there is a website here that makes it very easy to do so.

Further background reading 
Shaky foundations of the TEF
A lamentable performance by Jo Johnson
More misrepresentation in the Green Paper
The Green Paper’s level playing field risks becoming a morass
NSS and teaching excellence: wrong measure, wrongly analysed
The Higher Education and Research Bill: What's changing?
CDBU's response to the Green Paper
The Alternative White Paper