Students’ unions and consumerist policy discourses in English higher education

ABSTRACT

This article centres on the recent Higher Education and Research Act 2017 in England and the consultation documents leading to the legislation. I will start by arguing that the reform promotes consumerist understanding of students. Guided by Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis, I will further explore the ways in which five students’ unions from England and their sabbatical officers understand and respond to the consumerist policy discourses. The unions’ official responses to the government’s consultation demonstrated a strong opposition to the reform, particularly against the tuition fee increase and metrics used to measure teaching quality. The follow-up interviews with sabbatical officers, however, highlighted that this opposition can often be fragmented by consumerist counterarguments. The interviewees emphasised consumer rights as benefiting students and the unions. The differences between the written and verbal discourses will be discussed, and the reasons for a lack of consistency in the participants’ discourses questioned in relation to their relationship with the university management and wider student population they represent.

KEYWORDS:

• Consumerism
• critical discourse analysis
• higher education
• student politics
• students’ unions

Acknowledgements

I am highly grateful to all the participants who took part in this research project. I also wish to thank Prof Rachel Brooks and Dr Jan Smith for their generous feedback on the earlier version of this paper. Furthermore, I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers and the editor for their very detailed and highly supportive feedback on the earlier manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. As part of the Green Paper consultation from November 2015 to January 2016, students’ unions and other interest groups (e.g. universities, research councils) were invited to respond to the government proposals. The consultation resulted in the White Paper that is available at https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/higher-education-teaching-excellence-social-mobility-and-student-choice.

2. The CMA is a non-ministerial government body in the UK, aiming to ‘promote competition for the benefit of consumers, both within and outside the UK’ (CMA, n.d.).

3. The study included interviews with 1019 undergraduate students in the UK in January 2017 (Universities UK, 2017).

4. The Higher Education and Research Act was approved in April 2017, and is available at http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2016-17/highereducationandresearch.html.

5. Alternative providers of higher education do not receive direct annual public funding or funding from regional funding councils (HEFCE, 2017).

6. The first UK students’ union was established at St Andrew’s University in 1864 (Brooks et al., 2015a). The National Union of Students (NUS) was founded in 1922, and it currently has over 600 UK students’ unions as members (NUS, n.d.).

7. The Russell Group includes 24 UK universities ‘which are committed to maintaining the very best research, an outstanding teaching and learning experience and unrivalled links with business and the public sector’ (Russell Group, 2015).

8. For the June 2017 elections, the Labour Party manifesto proposed a national education service, including abolishment of tuition fees and reintroduction of maintenance grants in higher education (BBC, 2017).

9. The boycott was supported by about 25 students’ unions across the UK (Buckley-Irvine, 2017).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the British Academy (with the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain as the partner organisation) under British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant [SG160696].

Notes on contributors

Rille Raaper

Rille Raaper is Assistant Professor in the School of Education at Durham University. Her research interests include neoliberalisation of higher education policy and practice, and consumerist positioning of students. She applies critical theory and discourse analysis to explore these themes. Her most recent research project explores students’ unions’ response to consumerist higher education policy discourses in England.