Student Support in Higher Education: Understandings, Implications and Challenges

Endpiece

Student Support in HigherEducation: Understandings,Implications and ChallengesBrendan Bartram, University of Wolverhampton

Abstract

This paper attempts to offer a critical examination of the notion of studentsupport in higher education in the UK. It compares some of the key ways inwhich student support is understood across the sector and contrasts a human-istic view with understandings driven more by instrumental and therapeuticconcerns. The possible risks and effects that could be associated with thesediffering understandings are also examined. Against this background, consid-eration is additionally afforded to international students studying at UKuniversities. Finally, the paper identifies a number of questions worthy ofinstitutional consideration.

Introduction

Supporting students has arguably always been part of the professionalremit of academics working in higher education, and few would disputethat universities in the UK have, in recent years, come to pay greaterattention to this notion, perhaps as a result of ‘student support andguidance’ now being identified as one of the key ‘auditable’ areas withinthe Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) inspectionframework. Although some claim that a concern to assist students intheir personal and academic development is an integral element incommon understandings of a professional academic identity, othersquestion the extent to which such understandings are in fact shared,particularly in an educational sector that lacks even a unified sense ofpurpose and identity (Evans and Abbott, 1998; Patrick and Smart, 1998)If such matters as these remain elusive, it would certainly appear

Higher Education Quarterly, 0951–5224DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2273.2008.00420.xVolume 63, No. 3, July 2009, pp 308–314

© 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4, 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148,USA.

legitimate to speculate that the notion of ‘student support’ will havedifferent meanings and emphases for different lecturers and studentsand, indeed, different institutions.

Against this background, it is worth subjecting the idea of studentsupport to critical scrutiny and considering the implications of the dif-ferent ways in which it can be understood and interpreted. It is perhapsunsurprising that this area has rarely been problematised in the literatureas efforts in this direction might be interpreted as attempts to legitimiseunacceptable or ‘antiquated’ views of students as intruders distractingacademics from the important business of research and scholarly activity.Although this paper does not, in any way, wish to lend support to suchviews, there is arguably still a case for critically examining the role ofstudent support in higher education. This evaluation involves an exami-nation of two areas: first, some of the ways in which support for studentsis understood in higher education, and second, the possible challengesand effects that could be associated with these particular understandingsof the role of support.

The humanistic interpretation

Some might argue that beliefs in the value of support and guidance arerooted in the classical humanist ideology that underpins English educa-tional traditions and attaches great significance to the pastoral role inschooling. Concerns to build and maintain supportive and individualrelationships with students, driven by convictions that such an approachwill support academic learning and promote personal development,could arguably be seen as long-standing priorities that resonate withHolmes and McLean’s (1989) description of classical humanist values inEnglish education. Such an understanding of support arises thus frompedagogic and social beliefs in the importance of assisting and develop-ing learners in an attempt to help them achieve their potential. Smith(2007, p. 688) sums up a sense of the key values underpinning this viewof support:

Meaningful, holistic support proceeds from a position that education containsconstituent elements of nurturing. In other words, it belongs to the domain ofhuman cultural interactions . . .

These beliefs may be confined to particular individuals working withinparticular institutions; elsewhere, such beliefs may have been signifi-cant in moulding the entire ethos of an institutional support culture.Some commentators (e.g. Mills, 1999) have suggested that this

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© 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

support model has characterised many (although not exclusively) olderinstitutions in the UK, perhaps most notably Oxford and Cambridge,where the small-group tutorial is believed to offer academic guidancein conjunction with the kind of personal support that can be facilitatedby smaller group sizes. This view of support is clearly predicated on theprimacy of students’ academic needs, with expert tutors as the primary‘support agents’, and its success is dependent on the relative intimacythat smaller groups afford. Questions remain, however, about itsadequacy with regard to fulfilling other student needs (e.g. social, emo-tional, integrational, practical) and the extent to which this kind ofsupport experience can be provided in the majority of higher educationinstitutions, where student numbers have significantly swelled in recentyears, thereby increasing staff-to-student ratios and presenting chal-lenges for small-group teaching formats. Results from Wilcox et al.’s(2005) research even suggest that the reliance on academic tutors forsupport may not be as important as often believed. Their study showedthat forms of social support provided by peers were far morevalued than the support first-year students received from tutors, forexample.

The instrumental view

There are, however, different understandings and motivations that liebehind concerns to support students. Smith (2007) argues, for instance,that institutions that are more susceptible to managerialist cultures willbe more inclined to conceive of support as technical solutions, wherebystudents are directed away from academic staff to specialist services andproducts. This more technicist view might, at first sight, appear to castsupport in a particularly prominent role, with great emphasis on publi-cised ‘support mechanisms’ and conspicuously documented procedureson glossy leaflets. Yet a closer inspection might suggest that an instru-mentally inspired understanding reduces the notion to an indicator of‘performance’ and encourages forms of support that may even be coun-terproductive in the higher education environment.The shift towards thehigher education mass market, where students’ evaluation of supportprovided and received has become one of the barometers of QAAsuccess (Pelletier, 2003) is one factor that potentially accounts for aninstrumentalised view of student support. In this sense, it could beargued that the importance of and expectations around support haveincreased in line with the rising number of auditable mechanisms(module evaluation forms, QAA focus groups, staff–student consultative

310 Higher Education Quarterly


meetings and annual monitoring) through which students report on theirlevel of satisfaction. Some, like Furedi (2004, p. 9), have argued that suchprocesses have led to a formalisation of relationships in education, oneeffect of which has been the transformation of issues such as support‘into carefully regulated transactions’, motivated more by the desire toavoid ‘hassle, complaints and litigation’ (Furedi, 2004, p. 10) and aconcern ‘with how they [teachers and lecturers] are seen to be doingtheir job than with what they actually do’. In this view, the notion ofsupport becomes understood as a contractual obligation between con-sumers and service providers, a further effect of which may be a dete-rioration rather than an improvement in trust relations. Smith (2007,p. 688) argues this point very clearly and, in the process, makes asharp contrast with the holistic, humanistic understanding of supportdescribed earlier:

the commodified roles of student-as-consumer and institution-as-product-provider undercut the authenticity of the relationship [between student andtutor].

Although some may challenge this analysis, several commentators(Bathmaker, 2003, p. 183) have suggested that the marketisation ofhigher education has resulted in students adopting increasinglyconsumer-centric orientations.Their support expectations have perhapsincreased as a result of ‘value for money’ concerns and, as Smith (2007)goes on to argue, chiefly in view of institutional desires to maintaincustomer satisfaction in the face of retention and achievement targets. Atthe same time, the widening participation agenda would often appear tobe accompanied by assumptions that the ‘non-traditional learners’recruited to meet the 2010 participation targets are, by their nature, inneed of greater and more extensive support. Recent media reporting ofa likely rise in dropout rates at UK universities, for example, promptedpredictable calls for ‘more support’ for such learners, although the spe-cifics of exactly what this might involve are rarely defined:

The drop-out rate after one year also improved slightly but statisticians’projections are that it will rise. Funding councils and unions say more needsdoing to support new students. (BBC News, 2008, p. 1)

Although this may be true for many individuals, there are certain dangersassociated with this view. Apart from the risk of homogenising ‘non-traditional learners’, one possible danger is that students may increas-ingly be seen within a deficit model, a model which enshrines ‘a vision ofyoung people as being hapless, hopeless and in need of therapy’ (Hayes,2004, p. 184).



The therapeutic angle

This vision of diminished student capacity may relate in part towhat Ecclestone (2004, p. 135) describes as ‘a broader culturalde-moralisation’ in England, which has given rise to what both Eccle-stone (2004) and Hayes (2004) see as a new therapeutic orientation ineducation, whereby ‘new tendencies to see people as victims’ (Eccle-stone, 2004, p. 135) and an over-concern for the development of self-esteem and supporting the vulnerable has oriented educational prioritiestowards forms of therapeutic pedagogy, and whereby lecturers ‘fashiontheir teaching around a range of therapeutic and counselling techniquesand an overriding concern with their own and their pupils’ or students’feelings’ (Hayes, 2004, p. 184).

Leonard and Morley (2003, p. 5) argue that research literature oninternational students in particular sees constructions of them ‘in avictim role – as in need of rescue and “help” ’. Pelletier (2003) comes tosimilar conclusions in her meta-analysis of unpublished research onoverseas students, noting the construction of ‘the international studentas a counselling case’:

One is immediately struck by the emphasis on the problems and need for helpwhich international students are perceived to have . . . This emphasis onstudent problems leads to different constructions in the literature. Firstly, theinternational student as victim; under-informed, mismanaged by supervisors,poorly adjusted socially and culturally, and unable to address these problemswithout help. (p. 15)

Walker (1997, p. 8), observing similar tendencies, ascribes this view ofinternational students to two prevalent camps: those belonging to the‘problem approach’, who view students from a paternalistic angle, andthose she describes as ‘the bleeding hearts welfare lobby’, driven by anoverdeveloped sense of welfare concerns and an awareness of marketexpectations relating to ‘after-sales services’.

This combination of market and therapeutic values may then not onlybe responsible for placing what some might see as an undesirable orinappropriate over-emphasis on student support in some institutions butalso for increasing tendencies to homogenise groups of students andlegitimating views of their diminished capacity. An associated danger isthat some students themselves might also come to accept this ratherimpoverished view; a view clearly antithetical to supporting the devel-opment of the independent and self-directing learner that higher educa-tion arguably aims to promote. Such views may, in fact, already behelping to construct what some have referred to as a growing culture of



dependency among home and international students in highereducation, and writers such as Pelletier (2003, p. 17) acknowledge theresultant challenge faced by the sector in developing such qualities asself-reliance amid increasing pressures to provide ever more support.The growth of support services provided by many universities, alongwith a renewed focus on funded research activities into improvingstudent support in higher education, may then not only further theimpression that student needs should be increasingly prioritised by uni-versities and their staff, perhaps thus helping to sustain some of the aboveconstructions of students, but may also serve to reshape student supportexpectations beyond what some might consider appropriate, reasonableor desirable in higher education.

Conclusion

It would seem, then, that there are a number of ways of understandingthe nature of student support, and this will therefore have implicationsfor defining not only what the concept includes but also the ways inwhich staff, students and institutions interact. This paper has examinedthree broad ways of approaching the concept, contrasting a humanisticview with a more instrumental or therapeutic angle on support. Smith(2007) applies a similar analysis in his consideration of the topic, con-trasting what he describes as a holistic versus technical position onsupport. He acknowledges quite logically that a continuum of under-standings may well exist between these two points, and it is worth addingthat these potentially conflicting understandings will be located in dif-ferent lecturers, students and institutional support cultures. As such, thepotential for tension between these different intersections is increased:a number of issues are thus worthy of individual and institutionalconsideration. First, it is worth examining ways in which staff anduniversities can clarify their understandings of and aspirations forstudent support.Transparency in this regard could contribute to resolv-ing some of the tensions referred to above. Second, it would be useful toidentify potential models of support located between the two polesreferred to here and to examine the driving forces and intentions behindthem, together with the ways in which they define and attempt to addressstudent needs, whether these be chiefly conceived of as academic, pas-toral, personal, social, emotional, informational or practical, etc.

The diversity of student needs in itself raises questions about thenature of student support and the best ways to provide this. Are theseneeds equally important (for all students), or can a hierarchy of student



needs be established? Such scrutiny might no doubt lead to the formali-sation of student support policies, which, given the points made here,would require consideration in light of their potential implicationsand consequences for (financial) resources and, not least of all, staff andstudent behaviour or cultures. Questions regarding appropriateness anddesirability are key in this respect, although this raises further questionsabout the criteria that have been used to define these terms. Suchquestions do not find easy answers, but it is hoped that this paper has atleast gone some way to demonstrating the importance of tackling theseissues in the interests of developing more informed and sustainablepolicies and cultures.

References

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Ecclestone, K. (2004) The Rise of Low Self-Esteem and the Lowering of EducationalExpectations. In D. Hayes (ed.), Key Debates in Education. London: Routledge-Falmer,pp. 133–137.

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Furedi, F. (2004) The Formalisation of Relationships in Education. In D. Hayes (ed.), KeyDebates in Education. London: Routledge-Falmer, pp. 9–11.

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Student Support in Higher Education: Understandings, Implications and Challenges