The "raison d'etre" of all universities is to create and deliver "academic value", which we define as the sum total of the contributions from the 360-degree "angles" of the academic community, including all categories of staff, as well as external stakeholders (e.g. regulatory, commercial, professional and community…

Purpose: Apprenticeships for higher education institutes (HEIs) at degree and postgraduate levels in the UK have been challenging to provide, requiring increasingly complex collaboration and investment. This questions longer-term viability, creating a new perspective investigating evidence of value and impact for UK HEIs. This integrative…

Recent data suggests that of the UK students graduating with a degree in chemistry in 2015, only 18.9% continued to employment as "Science Professionals". While this shows the wide range of employment that is available for chemistry graduates, it also highlights the need for them to have relevant transferable skills, rather than just the…

Through historically oriented critical discourse analysis this article considers how the messages regarding the purpose of higher education, as presented in prospectuses of four case study institutions, have been impacted by massification and marketisation in England between 1977 and 2018. The prospectuses of four higher education institutions of…

Integration of research into undergraduate degree programmes has been shown to have a beneficial effect on student learning, however, integrating activities which help first-year students to feel engage with research activity within their discipline has proved challenging. This study describes the use of Impact Case Studies created for the…

Purpose: The purpose of the current study was to examine university students' knowledge, confidence and experience of popular graduate employer selection tests. Design/methodology/approach: A cross-sectional self-report survey was administered to gather a sufficient number of quantitative responses from undergraduate students. A total of 241…

In environments characterised by complex structures and processes, universities rely on co-operation and goodwill between staff to function effectively, underpinned by good service quality. However, there is a lack of research on relationship quality in internal service settings and on the role support staff play in the development and enhancement…

The educational value of portfolios as assessments has been widely acknowledged across the higher education sector and literature as providing a platform to promote student-centred and reflective learning (Brown, 1997; Snadden & Thomas, 1998; Karlowicz, 2000). While there is plentiful research investigating the benefits of providing portfolios…

Purpose: Black British minority ethnics (BME) students are nationally underachieving in comparison to their Ethnic Chinese and White peers, showing typically a 16 per cent graduate attainment gap in the UK. Previous research has suggested that the attainment gap could be explained by BME student disengagement, as the students typically commute…

This paper explores the perceptions of degree students at two UK universities regarding their work placement and part-time working activities, to assess if the two activities converge. The research comprises three stages: interviews for preliminary exploration of students' perceptions towards work placement and part-time work; interviews to…

Purpose: In line with business goals of customer satisfaction, higher education institutions of learning consider excellent student experience a priority. Teaching and learning are important aspects of satisfaction that are monitored annually by universities using tools such as the National Student Survey (NSS). The NSS results are useful for…

During the last decade, universities have endeavoured to continually improve the level of student satisfaction and learning experience. Student evaluative feedback is therefore critical to measure and track progress, and questionnaires are the principal means of collecting this data. In the UK, although the National Student Survey is used to…

Many approaches to political education take it to involve the construction of particular sections of the curriculum in which political matters are addressed -- named perhaps "civics" or "citizenship education". While these approaches have often been beneficial, they are all also problematic and controversial in some degree.…

The higher education market has prompted universities to justify their value and worth, especially to students. In Australia, New Zealand and the UK, it is increasingly common for universities to advertise their vision to prospective students, through Graduate Attributes, and showcase the sets of skills and competencies their graduates would…

This paper asks whether schools and colleges should be regarded as institutions as well as organizations, and if so what are the implications. Different conceptions of "institution" are examined including an attempt to distinguish "institution" from "organization". It is suggested that institutions are committed to a…