Higher Education: (Re)Shaping the Future

Posted on 17th Dec 2024 by Aidan Thompson

Higher Education: (Re)Shaping the Future

The Society for Educational Studies has announced its theme for 2025 Small Grant applications and call for proposals for its 2025 Colloquium. SES is encouraging applications for up to 6 small grant awards (x3 of up to £10,000 and x3 of up to £20,000) under the theme Higher Education: (Re)Shaping the Future with a deadline for submission of1700 on 15 February 2025.

Further, SES invites abstracts for its 2025 annual colloquium to be held at Oriel College, Oxford, September 4th-5th under the same theme. The deadline for submission of abstracts is1200 on Friday 30th May 2025.

Full details of the call for Small Grants applications is available here.

Full details of the Call for Proposals for the Colloquium is available here.

Higher Education in the United Kingdom today, as elsewhere, is facing an existential moment. While the general aims and purposes of higher education have remained relatively consistent over the last 100 hundred years, the relative focus and emphasis of these aims have ebbed and flowed. Participation rates in higher education in the United Kingdom have increased significantly over the last fifty years. So too, the institutions and places within which higher education takes place have altered – not least through the Further and Higher Education Act in 1992. Higher education has become increasingly internationalised and, at the same time, greater attention – in research and practice – is paid to matters of teaching quality, student experience and civic contribution. The Secretary of State has signalled strongly that any future rises in student fees will be linked to expectations to reform.  

At the same time, some have spoke of higher education being in some form of ‘crisis’. University finances are now a common matter of concern, with the financial environment characterised as ‘increasingly challenging’ by the Office for Students with 40% of providers expected to be in deficit in 2024 and many providers operating some form of redundancy scheme for staff.  

In such a context, universities (and indeed other providers of higher education) seek to compete for resources – including income generated from home and overseas student fees and from research. Intertwined with these financial concerns and heightened competitive environment are core questions that bring into sharp focus the purpose and value of higher education for students, for the economy and for civic society. These questions include:

• What constitutes quality in teaching and learning in higher education and how should this be evaluated?
• What civic role do, and can, universities play today and how might that civic contribution be measured?
• What does a positive student experience mean in terms of higher education?
• How successful have widening participation and widening access agendas been, and what future directions might these agendas take?
• How have processes of internationalisation impacted higher education today and how might these processes impact higher education in the future?
• How do the challenges facing higher education today impact those who work in higher education, including their identity, their work and their precarity?

Please read the call particulars and the event information before applying.

Please contact the Society with any queries via [email protected]