Graduate School
24 March 2010
Agenda Item 6
Paper GS/10/3
Essex Graduate Strategy, 2010 and beyond
Essex has a large and vibrant postgraduate community. Over 2,000 people, a fifth of our overall student
body, are now registered on over 200 postgraduate programmes at one of the UK’s top ten universities.1
There is much to celebrate here. Recruitment to PGT programmes, in particular, is strong, student
satisfaction with teaching and supervision is generally high and academic staff see their engagement
with postgraduates as an important element of their own research. Our postgraduate management
structures have coped with a significant expansion of student numbers.
Now, however, those structures are showing clear signs of strain. This is a fast-changing area of higher
education and we should be looking to explore innovative ways of securing and enhancing our regional,
national and global reputation in the postgraduate field. This paper is offered as a means of opening a
dialogue about collective ways of improving our postgraduate recruitment, renewing our common
intellectual capital and revitalising our postgraduates’ experiences – from applicants thinking about
joining us through to alumni leaving us.
Postgraduate needs
Postgraduates have different needs to undergraduates and these should be taken into account in the
university’s overall strategy and those of its constituent faculties and professional services. The
postgraduate population is more diverse than the undergraduate. Postgraduates are older: typically
between their mid-20s and mid-40s. They are more likely to have come to Essex from outside Europe.
Many more of them have to balance academic commitments with family responsibilities. Although
substantial proportions have come straight from undergraduate study, many others have established
professional careers as, for example, doctors, lawyers, civil servants, engineers, therapists, writers or
artists.
Success in the REF will depend on our ability to show that our research environment supports ‘a
continuing flow of excellent research’. Postgraduate students are the lifeblood of a research-intensive
university. Their research brings in new ideas, enriching the academic culture of the whole institution;
their teaching helps to transmit new ideas to undergraduates and their contact with outside
organisations, from funding bodies to employers, brings in new resources. In return postgraduates are
entitled to expect high quality facilities and support appropriate to their needs. Too often this is not the
case. Postgraduates report difficulties with research and learning resources, with feedback on their
work, accommodation, pastoral advice, skills training and funding – these have been recurring themes
in recent PRES surveys but also in liaison meetings over recent years. Over a third of our doctoral
students still do not, for a range of reasons, submit their theses within five years. More worryingly,
large numbers say they are disappointed with the university’s intellectual climate. Many are similarly
underwhelmed by their experience of Colchester and surrounding areas.
Resources and positioning
Funding and resources are, of course, central here. Our under-recruitment at PGR level is in part linked
to our inability to offer more scholarships and the inability of many applicants to attract external
funding. From departments’ point of view, high quality postgraduate facilities – from office space to
online journals – are costly. Reduced investment in the postgraduate experience has been perceived as a
relatively ‘soft’ way to save vital resources but too often it has resulted in a degraded research culture.
1
Total number See Calendar 2009-10 p60-67 for full list of all 322 postgraduate programmes (certificates, diplomas, taught
masters and doctoral programmes). Recruitment to these programmes is uneven.
However, a discussion about the postgraduate experience cannot end by blaming a lack of university
resources. As a university and as individual departments we have opportunities to expand those
resources. To begin with we should proactively explore collaborative scholarships with external
organisations, doctoral awards attached to large research grants, employer-supported programmes and
scholarships funded via alumni and charities. We should also consider ways to co-supervise (rather than
reject) good applicants, ways of generating income from doctoral projects leading to patents and
consultancies, ways of charging external users for specialist and CPD short courses or summer schools.
Successful models here include the Essex Summer School in Social Science Data Analysis and short
courses advertised externally by ISER, UKDA and Sociology. We also have opportunities to rationalise
our use of resources. The costs, for example, of continuing to supervise weaker doctoral students
beyond their fifth year of study, of failing to lift our collective doctoral submission rates or of
maintaining PGT courses which consistently under-recruit need to be calculated and then minimised.
At least as important as resources, though, is the ‘positioning’ of postgraduates within the university.
Strategy at Essex (like other UK universities) has been heavily shaped by external drivers firstly around
undergraduate students (recruitment, quality, experience and employability) and secondly around
academic research output (RAE and now REF). The postgraduate experience is not captured by these
metrics or reflected in resulting league tables. This has undeniable benefits: the postgraduate field is
‘exempt’ from many of the pressures imposed by these drivers but it also has its costs. Internal
monitoring and reviews of our postgraduate experience can still fail to remedy real problems with
administration, student performance, and support for those encountering financial and personal
difficulties. Although these issues are sometimes addressed by the Students’ Union (usually through
individual case work), they tend to be marginalised in an institution more focused on undergraduate
needs. Further, our current management structures mean that the Graduate School retains a form of
independence at the price of a certain institutional isolation.
The ‘Graduate School’
There is, in fact, no ‘Graduate School’ in any real sense. Postgraduate management currently resides
within a small Registry team which is primarily responsible for ensuring the quality of PGT
programmes and PGR supervision and monitoring student progression. The Graduate School is
essentially an administrative entity whose work is currently carried out by a non-executive Graduate
Dean (0.75), the Deputy Academic Registrar (0.2), an Academic Officer (0.8) and a small group of
administrators (3.5). The four non-executive Faculty Deans and their Faculty Academic Officers also
have monitoring responsibilities for PGT courses and students but their primary work remains
undergraduate-focused.
This structure has been inherited from the foundation of the Graduate School in the mid-90s. Its aim
then was to promote postgraduate interests in line with our status as a research intensive university. Its
vital starting point, in practical terms, was to generate and embed a strong common framework for our
postgraduate programmes and to allow us to meet standards later set by HEFCE’s Code of Practice for
Postgraduate Research. In the decade and a half since the School’s foundation, the landscape has
changed dramatically. There has been a huge expansion in the range of postgraduate programmes, the
profile of applicants, a growth in collaborative provision in both areas and a new emphasis on
vocational and CPD provision. New challenges have arisen in relation to recruitment, marketing and
branding which need to be met by deploying new multi-media approaches in local and global contexts.
The post-2008 faculty structure has created new lines of accountability, new budgetary and planning
mechanisms and new links between departments, centres and professional services. The Graduate
School operates across faculties and its relationship to them needs to be aligned more imaginatively and
effectively. Ongoing reviews of our academic decision making structures (ADMS) should re-consider
the relationship between the Graduate School Board and the Undergraduate School Board (in order to
rationalise quality assurance mechanisms across our undergraduate and postgraduate taught
programmes) and between the Graduate School Board and our various research committees (in order to
help forge stronger links between doctoral researchers and our wider research community). Finally, the
Graduate School’s work is increasingly connected to university-wide bodies, in particular
Communications and External Relations, International Dean, International Office, International
Academy, Academic Partnerships, Study Abroad Office, Student Support, Research and Enterprise
Office, Learning and Teaching Unit, Careers, Finance and Accommodation. Our present committee
structures remain very department-focused and do not facilitate productive, sustained communication
between the Graduate School and these bodies. The representation of the postgraduate position at many
meetings, usually by the Graduate Dean, should not be a substitute for a properly accountable and
adequately resourced graduate strategy.
A renewed graduate strategy
The Graduate School should be a prominent part of our postgraduates’ experience. Re-configuring it
and its relationships to other parts of the university is essential to championing that experience. A
stronger Graduate School should complement rather than compete with departments by, for example,
circulating the many examples of excellent current practice. It should focus on building advanced
learning and research cultures. It should take a lead, working centrally with CER, IO and IA, on
recruitment issues and be part of a dialogue within faculties about the pressing need to free up more
collective research time by rationalising a good number of our 322 listed postgraduate programmes. The
Graduate School could also encourage more encounters between researchers, facilitate more prominent
national and international postgraduate events and create more opportunities for doctoral researchers to
share their findings – in presentations, in print, through patents and online. We should also do more to
communicate postgraduate achievements to audiences inside and outside Essex. Finally there is a clear
case for creating new, identifiable and attractive spaces for postgraduates, such as study and networking
areas, a common room and family accommodation.
We have existing models which we could adapt to these ends. Our own Global Challenges and Global
Alliances programmes, departmental research conferences, graduate journals and blogs could all be
further developed. We should also take a close look at postgraduate practice in other universities in the
UK and elsewhere. We need to take careful account of broader policy moves (DBIS, UUK, European
University Association and others) if we are to be in a position to respond to – and in some instances to
resist - increasingly powerful calls for an overhaul of the European postgraduate sector as a whole.
Actions like these will help to re-position postgraduate issues and place them closer to the heart of the
university’s overall vision.
This paper is intended as an invitation to re-think our approach to our postgraduate community –
current and future. It asks Senate to recognise that change is needed, to consider the suggestions set out
below and to offer ideas which can create a new postgraduate strategy and refresh our research culture.
Pam Cox
Dean of the Graduate School
11 Jan 2010