Getting the most out of HE:
supporting learner autonomy
A DfEE Briefing Paper
November 1997
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Preface
As the higher education system expands, and lifelong learning patterns become more complex, the services which help people to manage their own learning become more important. How will students make sense of the relationship between their personal development and their learning or work? How will they develop the individual autonomy which
they need to succeed in a rapidly changing world? What support will they need, and what
can they reasonably expect, from the higher education institution and its staff?
The services which aim to help with this have many names. They may be called advice,
tutoring (personal or academic), guidance, counselling, or mentoring. They are carried out
by staff (and sometimes students and employers) with a range of titles and functions. Traditionally the services have been seen as distinct, often without any structured links between them. However, they share a common concern to help individuals to relate their
learning to their lives, and as higher education copes with increasing, and increasingly diverse demands, it becomes more important to review their place in higher education, and
their relationship to each other.
Over more than a decade, research and development work has been exploring how such
services operate, and how they can be developed in a rapidly changing higher education
system. Individual institutions have conducted reviews, development projects have been
sponsored by the Department for Education and Employment, and change has been encouraged by HEQC and HEFCE. However, the common lessons of this work have not
been drawn together.
The present briefing paper attempts to do this. It is written for all those in Higher Education responsible for the quality of the learning experience of students, whether they are academics, institutional managers, support staff or guidance specialists. In the context set by
the Dearing and Kennedy reports, it aims to be a concise guide to the findings of the previous work, to assist those engaged in management and strategic planning, or the development of individual services, to understand the issues, and the implications for their own
organisations.
This paper has been prepared for the Higher Education and Employment Division of the
DfEE by one of its Advisors, Stephen McNair. The Department would like to thank the
many people who have contributed, as staff of projects, by attending the initial consultative seminar which shaped the paper, or by commenting on parts of the draft paper itself.
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1 Contents
1 Contents
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2 Summary - Key Messages
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3 The context
3.1 Changing priorities
3.2 Converging functions
3.3 Who benefits?
3.4 Naming the service
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4 An historical outline
4.1 Before 1992
4.2 The new HE sector
4.3 The National Committee of Inquiry
4.4 Developments outside HE
4.5 The current situation
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5 The Policy Framework
5.1 Matching the Institutional Mission
5.2 Entitlement: the contract with the learner
5.3 Creating policy
5.4 Linking policies
5.5 Defining terms
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6 Organisation
6.1 Organising services - four models
6.2 Mapping the service
6.3 Curriculum
Changing modes of teaching
Compulsion
Assessing guidance
Group processes
6.4 Resourcing guidance
6.5 Assuring quality
6.6 The role of careers services
6.7 The potential of new technologies
6.8 Supporting development
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7 Staff Issues
7.1 Staff roles and responsibilities
Concentration or devolution?
Competing priorities
7.2 Guidance for staff
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8 Student Issues
8.1 Responding to student diversity
8.2 Addressing lifelong learning
8.3 The student contribution
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9 External Links
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10 Guidance processes
10.1 Preparing to enter HE
10.2 Induction
10.3 Tutoring
10.4 Recording achievement
10.5 Exit and careers guidance
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11 The future
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12 References
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13 Participants in Development Work 1990-1998
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2 Summary - Key Messages
This report is about the range of services which help learners in higher education to relate
their learning to their lives. These services include advice, tutoring, careers guidance and
counselling. They are becoming of more central importance to HE as the complexity and
unpredictability of higher education and the world of work increase. They are also converging, and increasingly overlapping with each other.
For convenience this report refers to the combination of these services as “guidance” although there is no commonly accepted term for the group, and there is an ongoing debate
about which services should be included, and what terms should be used.
For the last ten years there has been much development work in this field, designed to
help individual institutions and staff and the policymaking community to understand how
to improve the consistency and quality of this aspect of higher education. This report
seeks to distil the findings of this work. Its target audience is institutional managers, specialist and academic staff, and national policymakers.
The key messages from this work can be summarised as follows:
 Many changes currently in progress, to both institutional structures and in curriculum
make guidance more important in HE
 Guidance is as much a learning as a helping process
 Currently, guidance provision across higher education and within individual institutions is very variable in quality and quantity, and often unevenly distributed.
 A key issue in improving this situation is the development of institutional policies
which define the entitlements and responsibilities of staff and students, in the context
of the particular mission and structures of the institution.
 Because this is a function which involves most staff in an HE institution, collective
ownership of the policy is important, and a combination of top down and bottom up
development is important.
 Institutions, staff and students need adequate “maps” of the services available to
learners, and who is responsible for delivering them.
 A number of curricular issues arise in the development of guidance, especially where
“guidance modules” (including induction and career management programmes) are
involved. They include problems in the development of group learning processes, and
issues about the assessment of career management skills.
 In developing quality assurance systems, institutions need both to look both at the
quality of guidance, and at how they can best use the intelligence gathered through
guidance processes about the institution’s general provision.
 The use of new technologies may increase the need for guidance, but also offer new
ways in which support can be provided.
 Institutions need systems for the ongoing development of guidance provision and the
staff who provide it. Staff have guidance needs like other learners in HE, and addressing these needs can improve the quality of service available to other learners.
 Institutional policies need to be clear about the roles and responsibilities of staff, including academic, specialist, and support staff, and referral mechanisms for specific
needs.
 Students can play an important part in providing support and guidance to each other,
given appropriate training and support.
 Because guidance is a function which involves learners as they move between institutions and sectors, it is important that development is carried out in consultation with
external guidance agencies, especially in relation to guidance at entry and exit.
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3 The context
3.1 Changing priorities
This paper is about those parts of higher education which help learners to relate their
learning to their lives and their developing understanding of themselves, and to apply that
learning to the world around. They have traditionally been seen as a set of distinct services, including “guidance”, “tutoring”, “learner support”, “careers education”, and “student support”, ancillary to the main purposes of the system. However, many current pressures are moving such services closer to the centre of the higher education system, reshaping the individual parts, and leading to a convergence between them. .
Why is this an issue now? Firstly, in the world of work, traditional patterns of employment are breaking down. Individuals are facing more frequent changes of role and direction, and more frequently need to update skills and knowledge and review their personal
ambitions. For most people, the “job for life” has gone, as has the tidily planned career
route. For most graduates, the traditional lifelong psychological contract between graduate
employer and employee is being replaced by something much less predictable, whose coherence is defined by a sense of personal identity, rather than an occupation or employer.
In this context, learning how to cope with repeated change, to maintain a personal sense of
direction and control, and to make well informed decisions are critical skills.
A similar process is at work within higher education itself. Expansion in numbers, and the
parallel development of modular and credit based curricula have weakened many of the
traditional pastoral and tutorial links between learners and staff, while the growth of parttime and work based learning means that many students will be engaging with the institution for shorter periods of time. The traditional “undergraduate”, enrolled for three years
in residence on a pre-planned single Honours degree course, with few options, is now in a
minority. The typical experience of HE is increasingly fragmented, with its coherence defined by the individual and his or her choices, rather than by a predetermined programme.
Again, a strong sense of personal direction, and skills in decision making are critical.
To thrive in this emerging world, individuals need a high degree of personal autonomy.
They need to “know themselves”, to know their strengths and weaknesses and to be good
at managing their own learning and work. They also need specific skills: of defining priorities, planning and making choices, presenting themselves to unfamiliar audiences and
knowing how to use their skills and knowledge in different contexts. Last, but not least,
they need, from time to time, help in making specific decisions - about what and how to
study next, about employment and lifestyle options.
3.2 Converging functions
The development of individual autonomy has always been one of the core purposes of
higher education. However, it is often not made explicit, and can be overlooked as a consequence. Furthermore, individuals enter higher education with very diverse levels of personal autonomy, and many of the educational processes which they have experienced in
the past have not encouraged it. If ways of learning adopted in earlier stages (especially,
often, by those entering through traditional A level routes) are carried forward unchallenged into HE, there is a danger that individuals will become less, rather than more, autonomous, and less able to cope creatively with the pressures of a changing world.
Higher education traditionally has addressed these concerns in three distinct ways:
 through the processes of the mainstream curriculum - what is taught, and how
learning is supported, mainly by academic staff
 through academic tutoring - guiding individuals’ learning, usually by academic staff
 through specialist services - careers, counselling, advice etc., delivered mainly by
specialist, non-academic staff
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These three are often seen as distinct functions, delivered by different people, at different
locations and times, and with different degrees of priority and status. From this perspective, the mainstream curriculum is concerned with long term development of knowledge,
skill and understanding, delivered by staff whose specialism is in the subject field and in
teaching and learning. The specialist services, on the other hand, are concerned with helping people to make immediate choices, and delivered by staff whose special expertise is in
understanding personal development and decision making. Tutoring sits between the other
two, but has been in fairly general decline under resource pressures in recent years. As a
result, the links between the three functions are not always recognised, and they are often
not seen as complementary.
For the learner, the distinction between the three functions is far less clear. Although a career choice (or a choice of module, or a decision to leave home) will involve particular decision points (as the traditional careers service model implies), it is also part of a long term
learning process, and can be helped by the expertise of academics who understand learning and how to support it. On the other hand, learning physics is a process which involves
one’s developing identity and autonomy, as well as the “subject content”, and the perspectives of those who specialise in understanding personal development and decision making
can also contribute.
It is a growing recognition of these issues, and their implications for the changing shape of
higher education, which has led to the body of work which this paper considers. A particular feature of it is the growing convergence of the three strands, which has fundamental
implications for who does what in higher education, and indeed for how we conceive of
the process of higher education itself.
3.3 Who benefits?
All the “stakeholders” in higher education, learners, staff, institutions and employers, benefit from good guidance.
Where individuals, both students and staff, have made considered and well informed decisions about their learning or employment they will be better motivated and more creative, better at their work and more efficient learners. Being a member of the higher education community will be a more rewarding experience.
For academics and specialist guidance staff seeking to cope with ever increasing pressures
on time and expertise, strategies which make learners more autonomous are invaluable.
Student centred approaches to learning - project based, resource based and distance learning can make the management of learning more efficient, but they depend critically on the
kind of individual autonomy which guidance seeks to develop.
A university with well developed guidance services will be easier to manage, more productive, and a more rewarding place to work and be. The greater the degree of individual
autonomy, among students and staff, the less pressure is placed on remedial and emergency support systems. An institution which operates on a “sink or swim” strategy for
dealing with student problems not only wastes the lives of individuals through unnecessary withdrawals and poor reputation, it is also a less rewarding place to work, and one
which will operate at a high level of stress, generating student complaints and calls on
emergency services.
Employers are also major stakeholders in higher education, and studies of employer needs
have repeatedly stressed the priority which they give to “personal transferable skills”.
When they recruit graduates they are typically seeking individuals not only with specific
skills and knowledge, but with the ability to be proactive, to see and respond to problems
creatively and autonomously, and all the predicted trends in the world of employment suggest that these pressures will increase. The processes which make learning effective in a
changing higher education also develop the qualities which are needed in the changing
workplace.
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Many of the changes taking place in higher education are mirrored in the workplace, and
an increasing number of employees are engaging in some form of higher education alongside their employment. In the workplace too we see the blurring of traditional role distinctions, with line managers, for example, taking on roles in supporting the learning and personal development of workers As more students are engaged in some formal work placement, and more employees are engaged in formal learning in or with HE institutions, the
potential for sharing expertise and developing common systems will increase, involving a
range of people from personnel officers to line managers and mentors supporting individual employees’ learning.
3.4 Naming the service
What do we call these services? Because they have traditionally not been seen as part of a
coherent body of activity, there is no agreed single term to describe them, and all those
which have been used cause misunderstanding and confusion. Since they are central functions of higher education terms like “support” are inappropriate. “Pastoral” implies permanent dependence, a protective role, which runs counter to the focus on developing independence and autonomy. Notions of “tutoring” differ widely - for some people it excludes
the academic, for others that is its principal function. Some careers professionals would
argue that a broad concept of “career” could embrace most of these functions, but the
model would not be universally recognised, even within careers services. “Advice” is too
limited, and lacks the sense of an ongoing organic process.
In the absence of any more appropriate term we have chosen the relatively neutral “guidance”, despite the fact that for some people the word has directive overtones. The good
guide helps the client to identify what he or she requires, in the context of the possibilities
available and conceivable, and then helps them to take appropriate decisions and actions,
reviewing progress periodically, advising on new options as they emerge and reflecting on
the implications of progress for future choices. Good guidance ensures that the client
takes, in a planned way, increasing responsibility for his or her own decisions. Its ultimate
goal is the fully autonomous individual. This is the focus of the services which we examine in this paper.
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4 An historical outline
The notion that guidance should be considered as a coherent whole, is a relatively new
one, reflecting changes in the labour market and the emergence of interest in lifelong
learning in the mid 1980s. Before then:
“educational guidance” was seen as a minor interest of adult educators;
“careers guidance” was seen as a service ancillary to the educational processes, with a
strong role in placing graduates in jobs, and delivered separately by specialists who
were perceived as “helpers” rather than educators;
“student support” was seen as a set of emergency services to handle exceptional crises;
“tutoring” - often divided into “academic” and “personal”, was seen as a proper role
for academics in many institutions, but without much formal training or support, and in
many places was felt to be in decline
As a result, development work in the field has tended to be concentrated in the hands of a
relatively small group of committed individuals within the specialist professions - especially in careers guidance, while the elements of guidance which are closest to teaching
and learning have been relatively neglected. This pattern has brought concentrated professional expertise to bear on thinking and development of some aspects, but has yet to engage the majority of academic staff, and its penetration to most students has been weak.
4.1 Before 1992
National development work in guidance in HE began to expand seriously in the mid
1980s, led by a series of national agencies, and with the Employment Department (now
merged into the Department for Education and Employment) in a key role1.
The Department’s Enterprise in Higher Education programme was by far the largest intervention. Over 8 years it funded curriculum change in 56 HE institutions with the aim of
helping each to produce more employable graduates. Institutions designed their own strategies, many of which featured the development of personal transferable skills in students,
and in many cases careers service staff played a prominent role. Nearly 30 institutions created careers education modules, and a similar number experimented with processes of recording and reviewing achievement. Two major reports reviewed these developments. The
National Institute for Careers Education and Counselling (NICEC) examined careers education within the Enterprise institutions (Watts & Hawthorn 1992), while Ball and Butcher
(1993) reviewed how students’ career planning skills were being developed.
In 1990-91 the Employment Department funded the Unit for the Development of Adult
Continuing Education (UDACE2), in partnership with the Council for National Academic
Awards (CNAA3), to look more specifically at the nature and development of guidance
within institutions. The Unit worked closely with six universities and colleges as they developed their services, to identify key issues, and produce a national development agenda,
much of which has been pursued in subsequent development work (HEQC 1994a).
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Other key players were the Council for National Academic Awards (CNAA), the Unit for the Development of Adult Continuing Education (UDACE) and its National Educational Guidance Initiative (NEGI), the National Institute for Careers Education and Counselling (NICEC) and the Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services (AGCAS).
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A national development agency created by Government, merged in 1992 with the Further Education Unit - now the FE Development Agency.
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National body constituted to oversee academic standards in the Polytechnic Sector. Its functions
were absorbed in 1992 into the HE Quality Agency - now part of the Higher Education Quality Assurance Agency.
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In parallel with this work the Department also funded a range of projects on Work Based
Learning. A number of these focused particularly on the role of the “mentor”, as the individual who takes on, in the workplace, the parallel role to the academic tutor. This work
revealed that many of the changes, and ambiguities of role, facing staff in the workplace
were the same as those facing staff in HE (Jowett 1995).
4.2 The new HE sector
The 1992 Further and Higher Education Act restructured the higher education sector,
abolishing the binary divide and creating new processes for quality assurance and development. The new quality bodies, HEFCE and HEQC, both addressed guidance. HEFCE
included guidance and support as one of six aspects of student learning to be examined in
Teaching Quality Assessment, giving the issue a higher profile as departments prepared
for assessment.
HEQC built on the UDACE work, looking more closely at practice across the higher education system, developing a Quality Assurance Framework (HEQC 1995a), and embedding its principles in the processes of quality audit. The Council also, in partnership with
the Employment Department, undertook a major study of the future of Credit Accumulation and Transfer in higher education (Robertson 1994), one strand of which was concerned with guidance, which was seen as a central, and essential, component of a more
flexible and accessible HE system (Sheffield Hallam University 1993).
All these pressures for change were reinforced by the publication by Government in 1993
of the Student Charter for Higher Education, which stated:
you should receive well-informed guidance from your tutors and careers staff and
appropriate access to counsellors
In 1993 the Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services (AGCAS), concerned
about the need for greater professionalism within careers guidance, launched the Diploma
and Certificate in Careers Guidance in Higher Education, in partnership with the University of Reading.
In 1994 the new Department for Education and Employment4 funded a further round of
projects on Guidance and Learner Autonomy. These aimed at developing whole institution
approaches to guidance, and one project (in Bangor) also undertook a study of the notion
of learner autonomy itself. Each project produced a final report, and the project network
jointly produced a book Putting learners at the centre (McNair 1996), which drew lessons
from the experience. The work was evaluated by a team from Manchester Metropolitan
University (Hustler et al 1996).
The Department also funded two dissemination initiatives with the Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services (AGCAS) which sought to strengthen networking within
the careers profession and encourage the careers services to play a more central and strategic role in the HE system.
In 1996 a further eight projects were funded, under the theme of Career Management
Skills, to explore ways of embedding the skills of lifelong career management in the curriculum (DfEE 1996b). Three of these sought to do this across whole institutions, while
the remaining five focused on specific areas (like guidance for postgraduates, or linking
guidance to vocational qualifications). Two of the projects focused particularly on applications of new technology in this field. At the same time the Department launched a series
of projects concerned with the use of graduate skills in small and medium firms, which
raised related issues about guidance.
In 1997 the DfEE invited further bids for work to explore the guidance needs of graduates
in the early stages of their employment careers, recognising that graduates now take
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DfEE - formed by the merger of the former Department for Education with the Employment Department
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longer to become established in the labour market, and that no agency has an explicit remit to deal with their particular problems.
4.3 The National Committee of Inquiry
In 1997, the National Committee on Inquiry into HE (the “Dearing Committee”) published its report into the future of HE. Much of the report has a bearing on the development of guidance functions, and it reported specifically on careers education and guidance, on non-academic support, recording achievement and advice and guidance. It noted
increasing demand for guidance services, and increasing involvement of non-academic
staff in guidance activities. It recommended:
the integration of careers services and academic activities
periodic review of careers education and guidance by the Quality Assurance Agency
integration of careers advice for lifelong learning across sectors and agencies
regular review by students unions and institutions of services to students, and especially to part-timers
institutions to develop processes of recording achievement for all students
QAA to develop a code of practice for guidance, and institutions either to adopt it or
develop compatible codes themselves
Much of what follows in this paper has a bearing on these comments and recommendations.
4.4 Developments outside HE
While these changes were taking place in higher education, guidance was receiving much
greater attention in a wider policy arena. Several attempts were made in the late 1980s to
bring together the various professional bodies and national agencies (including the HE
specific bodies) to develop a common agenda and vision. This culminated in 1990 with
the creation of the National Council for Careers and Educational Guidance, which published a policy paper, seeking broad commitment to some common principles for all those
engaged in guidance activity, (including those providing it in the workplace, in educational settings, and in independent guidance agencies). The Council’s model proposed a
set of gateway services, providing free access to front line information and advice, with
more specialised services which might be charged for. The Council was also funded by
DfEE to develop service standards for guidance of all kinds.
Government in turn indicated a positive commitment to develop guidance, and in 1997 announced the creation of a national guidance telephone helpline to help individuals find appropriate learning opportunities5.
Other significant changes included the creation in the late 1980s, of a national Lead Body
for Advice, Guidance, Counselling and Psychotherapy to develop occupational standards
and qualifications for all those working in the guidance professions (DfEE 1996a), and in
the early 1990s, the government decision to contract out the local authority careers services to new independent companies, with clearer and more specific requirements in terms
of quality.
Most of these initiatives have had, to date, limited impact on higher education, but as political and economic pressure grows for a more coherent post-school education and training system, it is likely that there will be increasing need to relate what happens to lifetime
learners inside HE with lifetime learning outside.
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Due to open in 1998
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4.5 The current situation
Despite many efforts, there is not yet a clear national policy on guidance for learning and
work - on what should be provided, on what terms and to whom.. Guidance is available to
those entitled to support from the statutory careers service (mainly young people), now delivered under government contract by independent careers companies; to the unemployed;
and in varying degrees to those in publicly funded education provision. Beyond that,
guidance for lifelong learners remains uneven and unpredictable, with small pockets of
high quality provision resulting from historical accident, individual enthusiasm and the vagaries of European funding.
The evidence of demand for guidance is not lacking. The first major population survey of
potential demand (Alloway 1987) suggested that 10 million people would like guidance
about their learning and work within a five year period, and further work since confirms a
substantial latent demand. In higher education, the strong student and staff support for improved services which was found by the Guidance and Counselling in Higher Education
(GCHE) project, was reiterated in the subsequent HEQC work. Furthermore, those institutions which place the highest value on the employability of their graduates treat guidance
very seriously6. However, in 1992 the GCHE project found :
significant discrepancies between what guidance services institutions claim to
provide and what students perceive to be available.
The staffing of guidance services (in the broad sense) remains a problem. Despite the efforts of the Lead Body for Advice, Guidance, Counselling and Psychotherapy many workers receive inadequate support to carry out roles which are rapidly changing, and this is
particularly problematic where guidance functions overlap with those of teachers or managers.
Since the GCHE project report in 1992, and partly as a result of that report, there has been
improvement. The inclusion of guidance issues in guidelines for Quality Audit and Teaching Quality Assessment, and the creation of Student Charters, have helped institutions to
look more carefully at their provision. However, pressures on resources, student diversity,
modularisation, graduate unemployment, and on teaching and research priorities for staff
continue to make progress difficult (though, ironically, more urgent), and the picture
painted by HEQC’s second Learning from audit report (1996) confirms that in many institutions progress has been limited. In the same year, commenting on personal tutoring and
academic advice services, HEQC (Rivis 1996) reported that:
student expectations of help consistently outstrip the help that is actually given.
This mismatch between student expectations and what staff are able to offer raises
fundamental questions about the roles of staff..
However, as that report also indicates, progress is possible, and the projects on which this
paper draws demonstrate that most of the identified difficulties can be overcome.
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In 1993/4 the London Business School (where courses are relatively expensive, and students have
a strong sense of the value of their time and energy) spent £430 per head on such services, compared with an average of £29 in universities overall (Watts 1997).
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5 The Policy Framework
5.1 Matching the Institutional Mission
Higher education, like all institutions in developed countries, is undergoing change. The
recommendation of the report of the National Committee of Inquiry into HE may, if implemented, lead to the creation of a set of distinct institutional types, and institutions will
need to define what model they propose to adopt. Dimensions of this choice which will
affect the form and function of guidance include:
balance of student body - what proportion will be part-time, mature, professional, or
postgraduate?
clientele - how strongly will the institution focus on recruiting students locally, nationally, or internationally?
modes of delivery - what will be the balance between face to face, resource based and
distance learning?
curriculum model - how much emphasis will there be on single subject degrees, modular or credit based programmes, and short courses?
5.2 Entitlement: the contract with the learner
Access to guidance is a core element of the implicit contract between the HEI and the
learner. However, since different parts of the provision will be delivered by different staff
and units, it is important that the institution has an overview of what is to be offered, by
whom, when and how. Some institutions have built this into statements of entitlement or
student charters.
This does not imply a single standard model, nor a solution imposed from the centre. Most
institutions will wish to define the broad elements of the contract centrally, but devolve
much of the implementation to schools or departments, to reflect their particular cultures
and ways of working.
The core elements of such a contract have been identified by HEQC in its Guidelines on
quality assurance (HEQC 1994b), and elaborated in its subsequent Quality assurance
framework for guidance and learner support (HEQC 1995a) and Guidelines on the quality
assurance of credit-based learning (HEQC 1995b). The first of these defined learner entitlement as including:
1. access to reliable and valid academic advice and guidance services at all
reasonable times throughout the academic session
2. regular access to a designated personal tutor, or academic adviser(s) able to
offer:
 information on policies /procedures/resources/programmes;
 subject specific advice
 assistance with evaluation of progress of study towards personal/educational
and vocational aims;
 referral to other sources of advice and support as appropriate
3. opportunities to evaluate and register their views on the guidance/advice
provided
In addition students and staff should have a clear understanding of the underlying values
implicit in the policy. All need to know how the institution deals with issues of impartiality, confidentiality, access, and equitable treatment.
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5.3 Creating policy
A consistent message from the development projects and Enterprise in Higher Education,
is that improving the quality and coherence of guidance within an HEI calls for simultaneous development from top down and bottom up. Enlightened policy at the top can achieve
nothing without the participation of the full range of academic and other staff, while inspired practice at departmental level can be undermined at a stroke by administrative
changes, if those at the top do not understand or do not share the commitment to the work.
Although each of the GALA projects produced a distinct whole institution policy for guidance, all found that the process of formulating policy was critical to its successful implementation. Without widespread staff involvement in its development, policy remained
merely a formality. A combination of top down and bottom up approaches is the most
likely to create a sense of ownership, with general agreement about the range of needs to
be met, and roles and responsibilities of staff and students, while allowing the various
parts of the institution to develop appropriate strategies for meeting those needs, to reflect
their particular professional traditions, cultures and values.
5.4 Linking policies
All the DfEE projects have started from the principle that guidance is essentially a learning process, though which individuals develop skills and knowledge. It follows that guidance policies need to relate closely to institutional policies for teaching and learning. Similarly, changes in the roles of staff which the development of guidance proposes, call for
staff development both for specialist guidance staff (careers advisers, student support
staff) and mainstream academics and support staff. In developing institutional staff development policies and strategies guidance must have a significant role.
5.5 Defining terms
Development projects in guidance usually find the issue of terminology problematic. Although this may seem pedantic, it is important to establish how key terms are to be used
within an institution, because there are no simple nationally agreed definitions, and the
different uses of terms like “guidance”, “counselling” or “tutor” reflect genuine philosophical debates about the nature of guidance and learning, as well as professional territorial
boundaries. Each institution needs to establish how the key terms are to be used in its particular context, to ensure that staff and students do not become confused about their rights
and responsibilities.
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6 Organisation
Development work suggests that there are a series of common issues which institutions
need to address when formulating an institutional policy. This section identifies them, and
comments on what conclusions projects reached on each.
6.1 Organising services - four models
There is no simple “right” way to organise guidance within an HE institution. Students are
increasingly diverse in their backgrounds and expectations, while HE institutions, and the
departments and schools within them, embody major differences of purpose and culture
which will influence how services are delivered. A modular institution with a high proportion of mature and part-time learners will need to offer a different kind of service from an
old university with most of its students full-time on single honours courses. This diversity
is properly reflected in the many ways of allocating roles to groups of staff, and dividing
responsibilities between central services like careers or counselling, and devolved ones
like tutoring. However, while it is rarely appropriate to try to impose a single model, it is
important to define the nature of the service to be delivered to the individual.
The shape of guidance in an institution will reflect decisions, explicit or implicit, about
how the institution sees:
the internal/external focus - a balance between developing individual talent and fitting graduates for the outside world
the central/devolved delivery - a balance of responsibilities between central services
and individual academics or departments
These are not simple either/or choices, and within a single institution there may be a range
of models in operation. However, the intersection of these two dimensions produces some
identifiably different broad approaches.
A student centred model is most common in fully modular institutions, especially where
they have a high proportion of part-time and mature students, or of flexible modes of
learning. Here the curriculum is flexible but complex, and individual students can rarely
develop long term relationships with individual academic staff. This implies a more prominent role for central guidance services, providing direct assistance to individual learners
in managing their individual programmes (of which there may be thousands at any one
time within a single institution) and creating and maintaining the infrastructure to ensure
that such programmes remain intellectually coherent and manageable.
A tutorial model is most common in institutions with a high proportion of full-time single
honours students. It too reflects a leaning towards an internal focus, but built around a
more controlled curriculum. Here some or all academic staff take the main responsibility
for the development of individual students, guiding them through the experience of higher
education, and perhaps managing the process of recording achievement. In such a model
central guidance services are relatively weak, addressing primarily those with exceptional
difficulties or very specialised problems. Nevertheless, the model implies that the academic discipline is a vehicle for individual development, representing a way of understanding the world and oneself, rather than a career choice. As a result, it sits well with a
graduate labour market in which most graduates do not find (or even seek) employment
directly related to the degree discipline.
A discipline based model may adopt similar processes to the tutorial one, but focuses
more heavily on induction into the discipline. Again individual academic staff play a central role, because of their membership of the discipline community (since what a “historian” is is a matter for academic historians, not HE institutions, employers or government).
However, the strong focus on the discipline makes this model problematic for students
who do not wish, or are not able, to make a career in the discipline. As a result, central
services may play a larger part in broadening the horizons of individual students, as well
16
as handling personal difficulties, which are less likely to be seen as the territory of the individual academic.
A professional model is like a discipline based one in its external focus - on fitting the individual for an externally determined role - but the locus of control of that role is in an occupational or professional community outside the higher education institution. The influence of academic staff is moderated by other members of that professional community,
including employers and professional bodies. The processes of guidance, including things
like records of achievement and professional development records, may well be integrated
with those used in the occupation itself, and student placement usually plays an important
part in the learning experience. As with the discipline based model, central services are
mainly concerned with those who do not move into the profession.
6.2 Mapping the service
One problem faced by many institutions is the complexity of guidance services available.
To counter this, project institutions have produced student handbooks, outlining the services and how they relate to each other. Some have turned this material into learning
packs, and used them as the basis for taught induction programmes.
6.3 Curriculum
Changing modes of teaching
A number of institutions have consciously chosen a strategy under which, across the
whole institution or in particular academic fields, staff student contact is concentrated in
the early stages of study. They argue that concentrating effort on developing the skills of
independent learning in the first year, means that students will be able to learn more effectively with less staff intensive approaches at later stages. One of the institutions which has
chosen this approach is Sheffield Hallam, where it is accompanied by a strong central advice and guidance service, and a substantial strategy for staff development to develop the
skills of teaching in new ways.
Compulsion
The development of “guidance modules” (covering induction, personal effectiveness,
study skills or career management) was one of the outcomes of the Enterprise in Higher
Education programme, and 30 of the Enterprise institutions saw this as a way of addressing the development of students’ personal skills systematically and economically. The
skills involved varied, as did the coverage of the module.
All projects which adopted this approach had to confront the difficult question of compulsion. Guidance specialists, whose professional ethic is based on the development of individual autonomy, instinctively resist compelling students to participate, but often feel that
those in greatest need are those least likely to join in on a voluntary basis. Significantly,
student evaluation of such modules consistently found that those who had taken guidance
modules advocated making them compulsory for all students.
Assessing guidance
Assessment has also proved problematic. Some institutions do not attempt to assess students, others assess only on a pass/fail basis, while others seek to grade performance. The
last of these becomes more important if the module is being offered at levels 2 or 3, but
the criteria for assessment have proved difficult to define on a comparable basis with other
areas of the curriculum.
There is a serious danger that the underlying purpose of a guidance module - the development of individual autonomy - will be undermined by a need for academic rigour, conceived in terms of comparability. Two problems arise. Firstly, if comparability is seen as a
matter of similar activity, assessment will tend to value the ability to expound and criticise
17
theories of career choice more highly than the ability to manage one’s career. Secondly, if
comparability is expected to produce similar levels of performance across the individual’s
work, scores on guidance modules may well appear aberrant. Since ability as a physicist
does not necessarily correlate with ability to reflect on and manage ones’ own learning,
legitimate assessments of the latter can appear suspect. In the long term this issue may
prove less significant, but in the early stages of development it has often proved a particular barrier to the adoption of a module based approach to guidance.
Group processes
Guidance, in the narrow specialist sense, has traditionally been viewed as an individual
activity, conducted in one to one interviews, often of some length. However, alternative
models have been developed, including particularly group based guidance, where such activities as recording achievement, or module selection are dealt with in a group, or where
tasks are set for students to work on together. Such approaches can be more cost effective
in staff time, but also encourage autonomy, by helping students to see their peers as
sources of support, and avoid undue dependence on staff. Some institutions have used
such processes with particular groups of students at critical points, like those planning to
progress from HND to degree programmes, where it can be easier for individuals to test
and explore the implications of decisions and processes in a group of peers than in an individual formal encounter with an academic. Such approaches can also help to demystify the
notion of the “expert”, and provide a basis for ongoing mutual support within the group.
Interesting examples of such approaches have been adopted in institutions which deliberately structure much teaching around team based projects, or in those disciplines like architecture or the fine arts, where the shared studio becomes the focus of learning activity
involving students at a number of different stages of their academic careers - simulating
the experience of the workplace, where colleagues learn to support and learn from each
other.
6.4 Resourcing guidance
Managing the financing of guidance within an HEI can be problematic, because the elements of expenditure are diverse, and scattered across a range of budget headings. On one
hand there are identifiable individual services, with relatively small budgets, and on the
other, the much larger, but hidden, sums committee to tutorial work within the mainstream
academic staff budget. As a result, decisions in one area can have consequential effects on
others.
It is therefore important to consider the resourcing of guidance functions as a coherent
whole, asking not about the cost of a particular element in isolation, but in the overall context. Sometimes an apparently expensive service is saving much greater expenditure in
another field. It is particularly important to consider this in relation to the institution’s
evolving model of teaching and learning. A move towards more resource based learning,
for example, shifts the balance of staff time from face to face teaching, towards materials
design and tutorial support. Expenditure on guidance may need to be increased in order to
make larger savings in teaching costs. The key question is what strategy is most appropriate to deliver the learning objectives of the institution, not what are appropriate numbers
of staff in one support service.
The development of careers and guidance modules is one of the strategies which has been
used to improve the resourcing of guidance. By this means guidance becomes part of the
mainstream curriculum, resourced like any other teaching programme, rather than an overhead or ancillary service. The formal quality assurance requirements then act as a spur to
improve the consistency and cost effectiveness of delivery. However, there have been difficult debates in some institutions about how teaching funds are to be allocated in this situation, especially where modules are jointly taught, by for example, a careers adviser and a
mainstream academic.
18
External project funding has been of great importance in developing guidance in institutions. Such funding can be very valuable, especially when a project in one institution is
linked to related work in others, so that experience and ideas can be shared. However,
when such projects are undertaken without adequate forward planning for continuation
important development work may be later abandoned, with considerable damage to the institution’s standing with staff, students and the community which it serves. An equally unsatisfactory outcome can be the development of a “project culture” where the service
comes to be seen as marginal precisely because it is funded outside the mainstream mechanisms. There have been clear examples where staff have to spend a disproportionate
amount of their time chasing resources for a further extension, rather than delivering the
service itself.
6.5 Assuring quality
The development of guidance within an HE institution raises two distinct quality issues.
The first is how to assess and secure the quality of guidance itself, and the second is what
contribution the intelligence gathered by guidance services, can make to broader institutional and curriculum quality processes.
In 1991 the GCHE project found little evidence of quality assurance in institutional guidance provision. Four years later HEQC reported that the situation had not changed greatly,
although monitoring and review processes were much more developed in relation to careers guidance, and some institutions had undertaken major reviews, in response to the
Student Charter, to external quality assurance pressures or evidence of problems like increasing student drop out, (see for example Moore 1995).
As part of the process of creating and embedding guidance policy most of the GALA project institutions developed statements of entitlement to guidance - Nene College created a
Statement of Service, Bangor a Contract. Northumbria stressed the principle of mutual
rights and responsibilities, and the inseparability of guidance and learning with its Partnership in Learning. Projects also identified a number of key principles of effective practice. All were underpinned by the belief that serious quality can only be the product of a
shared commitment of all relevant staff, which implies ownership of processes at individual and departmental level, within an agreed institutional framework. The GALA evidence
suggests that institutions should:
 build quality assurance processes and standards for guidance as an integral part of the
institution’s guidance policy
 avoid creating new processes for monitoring and evaluation - where possible, use
evidence already being collected for other purposes
 seek to define quality standards in collaboration with external partners (both to share
expertise and to ensure a consistency of service for learners moving between sectors)
 ensure that guidance requirements are embedded in course and programme design, in
order to relate institutional policy to disciplinary requirements and cultures
Where institutions have chosen to deliver some aspects of guidance through formally assessed and accredited modules, as at the University of Central Lancashire, or the College
of Ripon and York St.John, they have found it necessary to define the outcomes of guidance more specifically. Where this happens an additional source of information for quality
assurance processes becomes available, although finding appropriate ways of describing
the outcomes of guidance has not proved easy.
The GALA projects identified a number of unresolved problems in relation to quality. One
was that most quality assessors and auditors have limited experience or specific professional expertise in guidance, which means that, despite the formal guidelines, this area
may receive less serious attention than other aspects of quality. A second was the dependence in evaluating the employability of graduates on the First Destination Survey. In the
developing graduate labour market, where graduates are typically taking longer to become
19
established in careers, project staff felt that this data was collected too soon after graduation to be a reliable indicator.
The second quality issue concerns how the institution can hear messages about the quality
of its general provision which are conveyed through guidance services. It is often in the
course of a guidance process that a breakdown in teaching quality becomes evident. Students seeking transfers, considering withdrawal or having difficulty with work are often
signalling inadequacies in teaching which the institution, if it takes quality assurance seriously, must be conscious of. However, institutions often do not have appropriate feedback
systems, to ensure that such messages (appropriately anonymised where necessary) are
conveyed back to the institution and academic staff, and guidance staff are not always
clear about how and when to do this, and about the ethical issues of confidentiality which
it can raise.
6.6 The role of careers services
Careers services are usually the largest and most well known of the specialist elements of
guidance, and are under considerable pressure. They face increased student numbers but
an increasingly diversified graduate labour market, with fewer major “graduate employers” and far more graduates entering temporary work, small firms and jobs outside the traditional “graduate market”. In general Careers Services in HE are seeking to shift their focus away from the management of transition to work, into the broader field of developing
skills of career management, but none are generously staffed, and individual services operate with between 1000-7000 full time students per careers adviser (and full time students
constitute only two thirds of the student body). The review of the future of the service
commissioned by AGCAS (Watts 1997) identifies the problems, and some of the dysfunctional responses which services have found themselves forced into7.
Watts analyses the relationship between careers services and the rest of the institution in
terms of three kinds of partnership - with other student services, with other academic services, and with marketing services. He proposes four models for a careers service within
an institution, each with a distinct view of its role:
integrated guidance - guidance is an integrated process, helping individuals plan and
manage a coherent learning career
integrated placement - the careers service focuses on the work related dimensions of HE,
including student placement and part-time jobs
curriculum
- the careers service supports the embedding of career management
in the mainstream curriculum, acting as specialist consultants or
teaching staff in partnership with departments
learning organisation - the careers service supports the career management of all members of the institution, students, staff and researchers.
He also explores the implications of lifelong learning and offers three models of guidance
after graduation:
extended support - extends traditional career management support into the post-graduation period, recognising that graduates now typically take longer to
establish themselves in careers
lifelong guidance - places individual services as part of a coherent lifelong guidance service, supporting graduates of all institutions, perhaps on a n income
generating basis
Among these were “firefighting”, moving too many ways at once, guilt and stress, erosion of core
services, territorial defensiveness, lack of strategic purpose, preoccupation with survival)
7
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alumni model
- focuses on support to the institution’s own alumni, strengthening the
notion of a community of members/graduates of the particular institution
6.7 The potential of new technologies
Students in British higher education have better access to information technology than
their peers in almost any other developed country, and the uses of this technology for
guidance purposes are developing, especially in relation to careers education and guidance. On one hand are major careers guidance systems like PROSPECT HE, provided by
the Central Services Unit for the Careers Service.(CSU). This single system embraces
most of the elements of the careers guidance process, taking students interactively through
many of the key guidance processes, and providing access to databases of careers information. Another major resource is the CSU’s rapidly expanding Website, which includes a
large range of occupational profiles, details of many graduate employers, and current vacancies as well as guidance on aspects of the career choice process. Other computer based
systems exist for developing personal profiles and matching them to particular career
routes.
There is also a developing range of career databases available, of which one of the first
was the Welsh PROSPER system, which records details of employers and students in a
large public database, enabling both to search for appropriate matches. A similar model is
being developed by a project in the Yorkshire and Humber Region (under the DfEE’s
“Using Graduate Skills” programme), involving all the Universities and TECs, and focusing particularly on small and medium employers, who are particularly difficult for careers
services to reach. Such job search and matching systems are expanding rapidly, although
some anxieties have been expressed about the personal and ethical issues raised by presenting CVs online to the world at large.
In the last few years the potential for interactivity in the technologies has been increasing.
The Career Management Skills project at the University of Central Lancashire has been
developing interactive CDs to enable students to explore career choices related to particular disciplines, and the Institute of Physics has produced a similar CD, enabling students to
search a mass of information on careers for physicists, including accounts of work experience by graduates, managers and careers staff.
More radical uses of the technologies are also being explored. A notable example is the
University of Humberside’s Learning to Learn initiative, which uses the University’s computer network as a basis for a range of interactions between the university and all students,
from enrolment and module choice, to the diagnosis of learning styles and needs.
Finally it should be noted that uses of technology create their own guidance needs. Those
institutions, like Wolverhampton University, which aim to make all their learning programmes available at a distance using IT make it possible for learners to take programmes
of study which would be physically impossible by traditional means (like different modules taught on three sites 25 miles apart), but also raise issues about the coherence of the
programme, and how the learner is to remain in touch with the institution.
6.8 Supporting development
Some staff engaged in guidance have strong support networks outside their institutions,
but others do not. Watts (1997) has pointed to the importance of such networks to careers
advisers, many of whom (like many academics) see their professional identity rooted in
their profession at a national level rather than in their particular institution. However, academic and personal tutors rarely if ever meet outside their institutions to consider issues of
tutoring. The need for such external links is likely to increase as we move towards a lifelong model of post school education.
21
There is likely to be increased pressure (and the Dearing report supports it) to increase the
degree of integration between guidance processes and standards inside and outside HE.
This reflects the development of national frameworks for occupational standards for staff
and service standards for guidance agencies, and increasingly complex student career
paths, as well as the development of local and national guidance networks. Training and
Enterprise Councils are playing an increasing role in promoting such network development.
The DfEE projects all demonstrated the relative isolation of institutional staff, and the support for networking and sharing expertise and ideas in a developing area like guidance.
For this reason DfEE projects have been consciously networked, encouraging regular
meetings of project staff, and mutual visiting and collaboration.
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7 Staff Issues
7.1 Staff roles and responsibilities
The GCHE study found that most staff in HE engage in some form of guidance activity,
but that most were untrained for the roles, and there was little coherence in approach or
linkage between the elements. Furthermore, the picture is constantly changing. The National Committee’s report notes, for example, that in many institutions technical and administrative staff and students are carrying out guidance roles previously considered to be
the exclusive preserve of academic staff, especially in relation to developing open and
flexible modes of learning. In other institutions traditional tutorial systems are quietly dying under pressure of numbers. The result for the student can be incoherent and haphazard
provision, which may be extremely good or extremely poor, but is probably more often
simply patchy and unpredictable.
If the quality of provision is to be guaranteed it is important to establish which elements
are to be delivered by whom, and how this is to be monitored. This calls for a review of
who is carrying out what functions, with what groups of students and staff, and particularly a clarification of whether the response is to be a broadening or narrowing of the roles
of academic staff.
Such reviews have become more common as pressure on staff resources increases. Both
GCHE and GALA projects found it necessary to include a very wide range of staff roles in
an institutional review (McNair 1996). Relevant categories are likely to include (at least):
academic and administrative staff,
careers advisers,
counsellors,
hall of residence and college staff,
librarians and managers of learning resource centres,
personal and academic tutors,
placement tutors,
student support staff,
student union staff,
technicians,
workplace mentors and supervisors,
students themselves.
Some institutions divide functions vertically, with a series of parallel services for different
functions (academic advice, personal tutoring, counselling, careers, etc.), while others divide horizontally, on a “general practitioner” model with a first level responsibility resting
with a tutor, backed by a range of specialist services for referral of more difficult or specialised issues. In some institutions student tutors take on part of such a front line support
role.
Concentration or devolution?
Some institutions seek to distribute roles widely. Bangor, for example, as part of its review of tutorial functions in the GALA project, decided that all academic staff, including
those on fixed term and part-time contracts, should take on tutorial roles. Views are divided on this approach, since clearly staff vary in their personal skills and inclination to
carry out such work. The alternative is to identify a cohort of people who will specialise in
this area. Whichever option is chosen it is important to ensure that there is training and
support available for all those involved, since without it the quality of service received by
students and staff will be unpredictable, with those tutored by competent or conscientious
staff receiving better support than others. Training is particularly important when establishing a new structure, with newly defined roles. Academic staff may find themselves in
unfamiliar territory dealing with the development of personal skills, while careers advisers
23
may be inexperienced in teaching groups. However, support is also needed on an ongoing
basis, since new skills take time to develop, and student and institutional needs will
change over time. Northumbria developed a Personal Tutor Pack, which provides guidance on roles, including the boundaries of roles and referral mechanisms. The University
also allocates formal responsibility for the allocation and oversight of guidance responsibilities to Heads of Department or School, who are supported by academic staff appointed
as part-time Tutorial Advisers to provide ongoing support to all tutorial staff, and to provide feedback on the development of the system.
Competing priorities
One clear dilemma for institutions is the place of guidance work in the hierarchy of staff
priorities. For academic staff in particular, guidance is one of many competing pressures
which include increasing teaching loads, and rising research demands, both of which traditionally are seen as higher status activities. In many institutions there is no incentive except professional conscience to encourage staff to prioritise it. Some institutions have
now formally included it in promotion criteria, or offered honoraria to staff to take on additional tutoring loads. Others, in the course of an overall review of guidance, have formalised the allocation of staff time for tutorial functions, making it clear that this is not an
additional function to the mainstream business of the institution, and enabling staff to legitimately reserve time for it.
Staff roles in relation to careers guidance present a special case, because of the volume of
specialist knowledge which careers advisers have, and their particular concern for the development of personal transferable skills. In 1992, Watts and Hawthorn reviewed careers
education within the Enterprise in Higher Education programme, and concluded that the
roles of staff will depend on the nature of the discipline:
in “vocational” disciplines (like education or medicine) academic staff tend to see the
main careers guidance role as theirs, reserving central services for the exceptional
“drop-outs”
in “non-vocational” disciplines (history or english) on the other hand, careers guidance
is seen as a role for central services, and no business of the mainstream academic;
in the “semi-vocational” disciplines (chemistry or psychology) responsibility is
shared, because the degree subject is perceived to be directly relevant to employment,
but not to lead to a specific professional route.
7.2 Guidance for staff
Students are not the only learners in higher education, and one important finding of the
GALA projects, and especially of the work at Northumbria and Bangor, was the similarity
between the guidance needs of students and those of staff. Many of the difficulties which
institutional managers have in persuading staff to change directly parallel those of academics trying to persuade students to change. Psychologically, the same barriers to
change arise, and individuals use the same strategies to avoid unwelcome change and individual responsibility. In developing new systems and structure for guidance it can be
helpful to recognise this, and to provide similar guidance processes for staff and for students. This helps to overcome the learning blocks which may inhibit change, as well as
providing staff with direct experience to reflect on as they develop services for their own
learners.
Guidance is also particularly important for those who are entering academic careers, including those who take on teaching roles as postgraduate students. It is at this point that
they are potentially most open to appreciating the need for guidance, and being motivated
to develop relevant skills.
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8 Student Issues
8.1 Responding to student diversity
Higher education students are becoming more diverse in a number of ways, and even
those who enter with “traditional” A level qualifications have often experienced a very
different kind of curriculum from their predecessors a decade ago (including modular
study, A/S levels, and a mixture of A levels and GNVQs).
A more diverse student body calls for a more diverse range of guidance responses. While
it should never be assumed that all members of a particular group share a single response
or perspective, projects have identified a number of specific groups where particular responses may be needed. The Nottingham CMS project, has identified the particular isolation of postgraduate students, while the Northumbria GALA project produced guidelines
for all staff on cultural conventions affecting particular groups of overseas students. The
Bangor GALA project found that the gender of staff could have a significant impact on
the nature and effectiveness of the tutorial relationship, while all services need to be able
to make specific and appropriate responses to the needs of students with disabilities.
Mature students, who now constitute half the students in higher education, were a particular focus of the GCHE projects, which suggested that their needs are often more diverse
than students who have come straight from school. The GCHE final report noted that mature students tended to be more anxious, and express their needs more strongly, partly because they perceived themselves as having to fit in to institutions designed for young people. Many have particular needs, arising from external commitments, to employers and
families, which constrain how they can receive guidance, and how they can interact with
the institution8, though as more students take on paid employment in term time this issue
may become more widespread. Those who entered from access courses had often had a
particularly supportive experience of tutorial relationships, and came to higher education
with high expectations of guidance, which were not always fulfilled. The transition from a
small group, working intensively together, to a large and impersonal institution can create
stress which makes particular demands on guidance staff. Intermittent learners are also an
expanding group, and the institution needs to establish what degree of ongoing support it
will offer to those who are studying in stages over a prolonged period, or those who leave
and later return to update or refresh skills and knowledge.
8.2 Addressing lifelong learning
Half the students in higher education are mature, and a third are part-time. The report of
the National Committee of Inquiry into HE anticipates a higher proportion of students
studying intermittently, with more shorter programmes (Certificates and Diplomas) and
more people returning repeatedly to update skills and knowledge, or to change career direction. It also implies the expansion of flexible and open modes of learning, more distance learning and more credit accumulation and transfer between and within institutions.
As a result, guidance services will find themselves increasingly working with learners
who are in contact with the institution for shorter, but possibly repeated, periods. The
Open University is the only institution with long term experience of dealing with such a
model. It is no accident that the OU has always given a central role to “counselling” staff,
and now offers a Personal and Career Development unit to provide a formal means by
which students can develop their personal management skills and have them accredited.
Both these ideas were taken up in the national review of Credit Accumulation and Transfer (Robertson 1994), which proposed the creation of a new “professional para-academic
8
One vivid example quoted pointed out that attendance at a late or postponed seminar may be inconvenient to a young student, but impossible or expensive to a mature student with childcare responsibilities
25
service” to provide educational guidance in this more fragmented world, and the creation
of credit bearing modules in “personal planning for learning and employment”.
8.3 The student contribution
Students are not merely recipients of guidance: they are also providers of it. Most students probably receive more guidance from fellow students than from all the formal
guidance services together, but this is rarely recognised, nor is this potential resource
often exploited. One of the unexpected outcomes of the EHE programme was the
growth of student led initiatives in teaching and guidance. Institutions in both EHE and
GALA found that, when such approaches are well planned and managed, they can both
enrich the learning and reduce staff workloads. However, such initiatives do need careful planning and management, including initial training and ongoing support for student tutors. The evidence is that the benefits are mutual, with the student “tutors” or
“guides” consolidating their own learning and skills as they assist others. Oxford
Brookes University, through its GALA project developed a sophisticated and systematic approach to this, using student mentors across an extended induction period (Evatt
& Briggs 1996)..
Some institutions, mindful of the financial pressures which students are often under,
have paid students to take on these support roles. Although payment is usually only on
a token basis, this can help to avoid excluding those who, for financial reasons must
undertake paid employment in term time from a valuable educational experience.
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9 External Links
Traditionally, guidance in higher education has been only loosely linked to guidance agencies in other education and employment sectors. However, with a move towards more lifelong learning, with individuals moving between educational institutions and employers
more frequently, coordination and sharing of expertise becomes more important. This
matters if individuals are to receive a consistent quality of service, and since similar
changes and pressures have been affecting all guidance agencies there is much to be
gained from learning together.
Issues of quality are particularly important here. HEQC and HEFCE have both sought to
improve the quality of guidance in higher education through their Quality Audit and Quality Assessment processes (now merged in the HE Quality Assurance Agency). Outside,
the Lead Body for Advice, Guidance Counselling and Psychotherapy has defined occupational standards for those working in these fields, and these are being incorporated into all
professional qualifications. The National Guidance Council is undertaking a parallel project to define service quality standards for guidance agencies. The HE professional bodies
have been involved in both these exercises.
External links are particularly critical in relation to entry to and exit from HE. At the entry
stage the University of Greenwich GALA project explored ways of strengthening collaboration with feeder institutions and careers. University staff worked with these partners to
develop generic guidance materials to help those considering entry to HE and to provide
tools to enable individuals to manage the transition and induction phases. Other institutions like Nene College have found that collaboration with Training and Enterprise Councils (TECs) has been helpful in sharing expertise, building links with local employers, and
sometimes in gaining development funding. TECs play a critical role in the development
of guidance policy and strategy in their areas, sponsoring and supporting, and sometimes
delivering, services to adult learners in all sectors. Careers services have been among the
leaders in higher education in building bridges to TECs, whose links to HE have strengthened greatly in recent years (Leigh 1997).
Exit is also a point where external links are important, and a relatively recent development
has been the expansion of interest in post graduation guidance, stimulated partly by rising
graduate unemployment, and also by pressures on institutions to develop stronger links
with alumni. However, as careers services struggle to keep up with expanding numbers
and a diversifying labour market, the traditional “mutual aid” agreement between university careers services, under which graduates are able to receive assistance from any university careers service, has come under increasing strain, and ways of collaborating with
other guidance agencies in the community have been explored.
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10 Guidance processes
10.1 Preparing to enter HE
Guidance before entry to HE is a particularly sensitive issue. Here the natural individual
centred ethic of the guidance professional is most evidently in tension with the marketing
requirements of the institution. It is often complicated by the devolution of admissions decisions to departments and individual admissions tutors, which makes the application of
institutional policy difficult to monitor or control. Although most people would agree that
the long term interest of the institution is not served by recruiting unsuitable students, the
pressures of admissions targets and their resource implications can be considerable.
The Greenwich GALA project sought to address these issues through a formal partnership with local FE institutions and careers services. This provided an impartial base from
which to monitor and evaluate all the institution’s interactions with potential entrants, and
to develop generic resource materials. One outcome was the production of a “Routeplanner” which takes an individual systematically through series of decisions, examining skills
and options and making choices about entry to HE in general before considering a particular institution. Greenwich is also one of a number of institutions which have developed, in
collaboration with local FE Colleges and careers services, formally accredited pre-entry
units, which provide potential students with an opportunity to develop their self awareness, opportunity awareness and transition skills before entering HE. Humberside university has introduced formal diagnostic processes as part of the induction period, to help individuals to analyse and understand their personal learning styles, and particular areas in
need of attention if they are to benefit fully from HE.
Increased diversity of applicants makes pre-entry guidance more complex, since individuals may have less information about HE from relatives and friends, and may have expectations of HE based on outdated stereotypes, or unrealistic expectations of the future graduate labour market. Students transferring from HND or HNC programmes and degrees may
have particular difficulties in joining established groups, and Sheffield Hallam University
has used group tutorials to assist with this. Institutions also need to develop systems for
assessing more diverse qualifications, for accrediting prior achievement and workbased
learning, raising complex issues of assessment.
Work based learners face a slightly different set of issues at entry. Their participation is
usually sponsored by an employer with a particular view of what is to be achieved. The
Work Based Learning projects have explored how to make this relationship productive,
and how to clarify the roles of employers and mentors (Brennan & Little 1996).
10.2 Induction
The induction stage is the point at which drop out from higher education is at its highest,
and induction into higher education was a particular focus of the GALA projects. The
University of Northumbria, for example, developed formal induction modules, while Oxford Brookes developed a systematic induction process in which second year students,
trained and supported, played a key role. The Brookes project found that student managed
induction could be more effective than staff led induction, since new students were more
willing to ask questions of fellow students, and students are better able to provide answers
rooted in real experience.
Induction is, however, more than merely orientation to the institution. It also involves developing appropriate working patterns and study styles. Northumbria used their induction
module to provide space for students to reflect on their developing understanding of their
relationship to the institution and the subject, and the induction module became a way of
providing a tutorial service which had previously proved impossible to resource.
28
Some common principles which emerged from the GALA projects included the importance of building a diagnostic process into induction (reflecting the increased diversity
of entrants), the importance of carrying out induction over an extended period, to allow
time for reflection and questioning and avoid information overload, and the importance of
integrating induction into the overall learning process - it should be the beginning of learning in HE, not an inconvenient addition before the real business begins.
10.3 Tutoring
Many people believe that one of the defining characteristics of British higher education is
the close interaction between individual students and academic staff, and the “tutorial system” forms a powerful underlying mythology within the system. However, in the HEQC
review of personal tutoring and academic guidance Rivis notes that
The classic system of personal tutoring, where the role of personal tutor
encompasses both academic and pastoral care and support, and where one to
one interaction between student and tutor is assumed… has not been consistently
practiced across the sector, or even across institutions, for some time. (Rivis
1996)
She also suggests that in the current higher education system, such models may be both
impractical and inappropriate, although commitment to the underpinning principles from
both students and staff remains strong. In the same volume Ann Allen, reporting on the
review conducted by the University of Greenwich echoes the findings of the GCHE projects four years earlier when she comments that:
This mismatch between student expectations and what staff are able to offer raises
fundamental questions about the roles of staff in personal tutoring and academic
advice
A number of institutions have reviewed of their tutoring arrangements, and most of the
GALA projects refined and made explicit their expectations of students and staff. The
Bangor project saw the transition from a problem centred model to a learning one as critical - making tutoring a process not of solving problems but of collaborative exploration.
Northumbria found that a comprehensive review, and definition of roles, made it possible
to agree a framework of entitlement for all students, with some of the workload eased
through the structured use of group processes. Here the development of group tutoring
was seen not as a watering down of the traditional model, but enriching it, by developing
skills of collaborative working and teamwork in students, and making it easier to share
ideas and difficulties which might not emerge in more individual encounters.
10.4 Recording achievement
A critical element of learner autonomy is the ability to reflect constructively on one’s own
experience and learning, to record the results of that reflection, to use these both to plan
one’s own future actions, and to present oneself to others (including potential employers,
tutors, or collaborators). It is for this reason that there has been widespread development
work on Records of Achievement in all sectors of education and training.
In higher education there has been strong resistance to the imposition of a single model of
recording, reflecting strongly diverse disciplinary and professional cultures. Nevertheless
many institutions have carried out development work, often creating distinct models for
particular disciplines, and sometimes linking the processes to formal tutoring systems. A
consortium of universities and other partners in the North of England9 has carried out an
extended programme of development work, part funded by DfEE over a number of years.
Ball and Butcher (1993) in their review of career planning skills development in Enter-
9
The Recording Achievement Consortium, 39 Bridgewater Terrace, Wigan
29
prise in Higher Education, found that 29 of the EHE institutions had done some development work on recording achievement, and a further 11 had created some form of formal
portfolio (the physical record of the reflection process). However, Otter, reviewing progress on Recording Achievement in the HE sector for the DfEE in 1997, found few institution wide policies on the issue, and progress remains patchy.
The central principle of recording achievement is the reflective process itself, which is the
source of learning and individual change, rather than the formal document which may
emerge. Some institutions integrate this process into guidance module, while others use it
as a basis for tutorial sessions. In their GCHE project, Edinburgh University created a Career Development Record, developed jointly by the careers service and academic departments, which is managed through a formal guidance module, but which uses employers in
an annual review process, mirroring the processes of annual appraisal in the workplace. In
some occupational areas, like Hotel and Catering and some professions, there have been
projects to use the mainstream appraisal processes used in the workplace for recording
student achievement, especially in work placements and sandwich years.
10.5 Exit and careers guidance
Careers education and guidance have gone through great change in recent years in response to expanding student numbers and a diversifying graduate labour market. The reluctance of students to consider career choices early in their higher education creates particular problems, making it impossible for them to engage in extended reflection on options, and forcing careers services into a reactive crisis management role. The London
University Careers Service GALA project addressed this by introducing optional careers
education modules in all Colleges, but predictably found that many of those with the
greatest needs did not opt to participate.
Services have moved away from the traditional model of the extended one to one careers
guidance interview and now offer more opportunities for brief encounters with careers
staff, ensuring a more rapid response to queries. The changing nature of the graduate labour market has led to a decline in the traditional “milk round” of employer visits in many
institutions. There is now considerably more group work, more partnership with academic
staff to provide careers education to subject groups, or to provide consultancy to academics who will themselves provide the careers education embedded in the mainstream curriculum. The reshaping of the Graduate Careers Services is documented in depth in Watts’
review for AGCAS (Watts 1997).
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11 The future
British higher education is changing in many ways. The system evolved to meet the needs
of a small minority of the population, at the end of their initial education. They were a relatively homogenous group, similar in social and educational background, and with access
to a common pool of information and networks to provide formal and informal support.
The curriculum of HE was relatively stable, as was the labour market which graduates entered. Choices were few and relatively well understood. Their needs for guidance were
limited, focusing on entry and exit, and on tutorial functions which could be met by mainstream academic staff.
The last decade has seen major change in all these elements. The number and diversity of
students has grown; the curriculum has become more complex and unstable; the labour
market for graduates has been transformed, with the rapid decline both of the “graduate
job” and of the “job for life”. To thrive in this new, and less predictable, world individuals
need better skills to manage lifelong learning and working lives, and, from time to time,
access to appropriate support systems to help them make key decisions. Institutions too
need better mechanisms to ensure that there is a good match between what they provide
and those who participate. Without this, teaching and learning will become increasingly
difficult and unrewarding for students and staff, and graduates will be less employable.
The changes of the last decade have already placed our systems for meeting these needs
under great pressure, but the future is likely to bring more change, not less. Expansion, in
some form, is likely to continue, and with it a continuing diversification of students, demanding more individualised responses, precisely as institutions struggle to cope with
larger numbers. The lack of common cultural assumptions about the nature and purposes
of HE will call for better induction, while a shift towards funding through the learner rather than the institution will force institutions to become more sensitive to the needs of individuals who will be more like clients and less like beneficiaries.
Increasing availability and use of credit, for both accumulation within an institution and
transfer between institutions across a lifetime, will offer greater responsiveness to individual, social and economic needs, but will make decisions about what to learn, how, and
when more complex. Expansion of open and distance learning, and the uses of communication technologies will change the ways in which learners interact with the institution,
increasing the risk of individual isolation and premature withdrawal, making guidance
more critical at some points, while offering new ways of providing it. The changing interlock between learning and working careers will bring more part-time learning, more learning in the workplace, and probably longer periods of transition between being a full time
student and a full time employee. Decisions about learning and work will become increasingly intertwined, while individuals returning repeatedly to HE for continuing learning
may expect a degree of continuity in support which institutions do not currently offer.
All these changes imply an increased need for guidance, and suggest that it will become
more central to institutional processes and priorities. Although we know how to address
some of these issues, good practice is not widely distributed, and there are a number of areas where we need further research. We need a better understanding of learners’ perspectives of guidance services and their impact on students’ experience of HE, particularly for
those like work based learners, refugees, and learners with English as a second language,
who have particular needs. We need to understand the changing guidance needs of graduates during the early years in employment, especially for those who are employed in small
firms which lack traditional induction programmes.
In the move towards a learning society, with an economy driven by high level skills and
knowledge based industries, higher education will have central role. But it will only be
fully effective if it succeeds in making its students into autonomous lifelong learners. This
requires a judicious balance of services, on one hand to help learners to develop skills of
31
self management, and on the other to help them to make immediate decisions about learning and work. These services need to be seen as a whole, underpinning lifelong learning,
and central to the purposes if higher education. The learning society depends on autonomous individuals, able to manage their lifelong learning and working careers efficiently
and confidently. The work outlined in this paper points the way.
32
12 References
AGCPLB (1996) Advice, Guidance, Counselling and Psychotherapy Occupational
Standards Sheffield: DfEE
Assiter A & Shaw E (1993) Using Records of Achievement in Higher Education London: Kogan Page
Ball B. and Butcher V. (1993) Developing students’ career planning skills: the impact
of the Enterprise in Higher Education initiative . Sheffield: Department of Employment
Brennan J. & Little B. (1996) Work based learning in higher education: a technical review London: Open University quality support Centre
Brown R. (1997) “Student Achievement and Standards” in Mission Impossible: developing student achievement, papers of a national conference. Wigan: Recording
Achievement Consortium
Byers S and Gee R (1997) A Successful Career London: Labour Party
CBI (1993) A credit to your career London: CBI
DfEE (1996a) Occupational Standards for Advice, Guidance, Counselling and Psychotherapy Sheffield: DfEE.
DfEE (1996b) Development projects Digest Sheffield: DfEE
DfEE (1996c) Developing the Front Line: a learning resource pack for staff working
with adults who need information advice or guidance Sheffield. DfEE
Evatt J & Briggs A. (1996) Students Supporting Students: principles and practice (conference papers) Northampton: Nene College of HE
Fazey D and J Guidance and Learner Autonomy Project Report Bangor: University of
Wales
HEFCE (1995) Quality Assessment between October 1996 and September 1998, Circular 26/95 Bristol HEFCE
HEQC (1993) Guidance, support, information and the student experience Group Five
report of National CATS Development Project. London: HEQC
HEQC (1994a) Guidance and counselling in higher education. London: HEQC
HEQC (1994b) Guidelines on quality assurance. London: HEQC
Robertson D. (1994) Choosing to change: extending access, choice and mobility in
higher education London: HEQC
HEQC (1995a) A quality assurance framework for guidance and learner support in
higher education. London: HEQC
HEQC (1995b) Guidelines on the quality assurance of credit-based learning London:
HEQC
Rivis V. (1996) Personal tutoring and academic advice in focus London: HEQC
HEQC (1996) Learning from audit 2 London HEQC
Hustler D et al (1997) Guidance and Learner Autonomy Evaluation Report Manchester
Metropolitan University
Jowett V. Working for a Degree: mentoring project report Leeds: Leeds Metropolitan
University, Academic Quality & Development Unit.
Kileen J. White M. and Watts A.G. (1992) The Economic Value of Careers Guidance
London: Policy Studies Institute
Leigh C (1997) Best Practice in Collaboration between higher education institutions
and Training and Enterprise Councils: a UACE research report for HEFCE and DfEE.
Bristol: HEFCE
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Little B. Developing students’ subject area knowledge and skills in the workplace: an
annotated bibliography London: Open University Quality Support Centre
McNair S. (1992) Guidance in higher education Leicester: Unit for the Development
of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE)
McNair S. (ed.) (1996) Putting learners at the centre: reflections from the Guidance
and Learner Autonomy in Higher Education Programme Sheffield: Department for Education and Employment
Moore R. Retention rates research project final report. Sheffield: Sheffield Hallam
University
Otter S. (1997) Recording Achievement in Higher Education (DfEE internal report)
Sheffield Hallam University (1993) Final report of the advice and guidance in the flexible institution working party Sheffield
UCoSDA (1994) Recording Achievement: Potential for Higher Education
Ward R. (1997) Portfolio Development for Progression: a working manual. Wigan:
Recording Achievement Consortium
Watts A.G. (1997) Strategic directions for careers services in higher education Cambridge: CRAC
Watts A.G. and Hawthorn R. (1992) Careers education and the curriculum in higher
education Cambridge: CRAC
Wyatt J (1996) A Framework for Guidance Project University of Greenwich
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13 Participants in Development Work 1990-1998
Institution
(titles as at 1997)
GCHE
Anglia Polytechnic
x
HEQC
Frame
Bradford
x
Central Lancashire
x
HEQC
CATS
GALA
x
Cheltenham & Gloucester CHE
x
Coventry
x
Edge Hill CHE
Edinburgh
CMS
x
x
Exeter
x
Glamorgan
x
Greenwich
x
Huddersfield
x
x
Leeds
x
Liverpool John Moores
x
x
London Institute
x
London University Careers
x
Manchester/UMIST
x
Nene College
x
North London
x
Northumbria
x
Nottingham
x
Open University
x
Oxford Brookes
Ripon & York St.John
x
x
Salford College of Technology
Sheffield Hallam
x
x
x
x
x
x
Wales Bangor
x
CMS
- DfEE. Career Management Skills
GALA
- DfEE. Guidance and Learner Autonomy
GCHE
- ED. Guidance and Counselling in Higher Education
HEQC CATS - HEQC CATS Project Group on Student Information
HEQC Frame - HEQC Quality assurance framework pilots
In addition to the projects listed here, many institutions carried out relevant through the
Enterprise in Higher Education initiative, or as part of projects on Work Based Learning. DfEE also funded two small dissemination projects concerned particularly with the
35
role of the Graduate Careers Service with Luton University and the Association of
Graduate Careers Advisory Services.
36