Briefing Paper for MPs:

The Subject Centres and the HE Academy

1. What are the Subject Centres?

Subject Centres (SCs), whose directors are respected academics in their field
reputed for their championing of teaching and learning, work with individuals,
departments and professional associations to support academics in the teaching of
twenty-four subject areas. They offer services individual institutions cannot provide,
identifying and spreading good practice, and providing up-to-date information on
approaches to the learning and teaching of a range of disciplines. They fund
innovative projects in teaching and learning and disseminate their results to the wider
subject communities. They offer staff development in key subject-specific areas of
pedagogy, quality assurance, and staff support (e.g. problem-based learning,
assessment and feedback, external examining, training for new lecturers or for heads
of department) and advise policy-makers on strategies for developing particular
disciplines. Each SC serves about 100 university departments across the U.K. They
are widely respected, and greatly valued by the disciplines they serve.

2. Context and history

The SCs were established in 2000 as the Learning and Teaching Support Network
(LTSN), with, at that time, a small co-ordinating Executive. About 85% of the initial
budget was allocated to the SCs, which were put in university departments, enabling
academics to work part-time in the SCs and giving the SCs’ staff direct, day-to-day
access to members of the subject communities they respectively serve. In 2004, the
SCs became part of the newly formed Higher Education Academy (HEA), which
incorporated the Institute for Learning and Teaching, a membership body for
lecturers. The HEA headquarters (Academy York) is located adjacent to the
University of York but unlike the SCs is not part of a university.
Academy York has greatly increased its administrative/ managerial staff numbers
since 2004. It now employs just over 100 full-time equivalent staff (each SC typically
employs around 6) and consumes over half the total HEA budget.
In January 2010 Academy York began a consultation about reconfiguration,
ostensibly in the interests of cost savings. Three options were put to internal and
external stakeholders. Option 1 (the Unitary Model) centralised operations into
Academy York. Option 2 (the Cluster Model) grouped subject support into faculties.
Option 3 (the Distributed Model) proposed a structure similar to that which currently
exists. Published internal postings in that consultation were unanimous in opting for
Option 3. This was also the preferred option of many of the external interventions,
including the Russell Group PVCs for teaching and learning.
These views were ignored, and on 10 November 2010, the HEA Board accepted the
HEA Executive’s proposal to incorporate all activity into the centre, at York. All SCs
are to be wound up over a 6–10 month period from August 2011. Vice Chancellors of
universities currently hosting SCs have been informed that funding for them is to be
withdrawn.
This decision has had continuing coverage in the Times Higher Education (THE):
almost 200 people put their names, in 48 hours, to a letter urging the HEA to reverse
its decision. Signatories to that letter include:
 • the Secretary-General of the Royal Economic Society;
• the President of the British Sociological Association;
• the Director of the Drug and Alcohol Research Unit, University of Plymouth;
• the Chair of the Academic Board, College of Law, Bloomsbury;
• the two Co-convenors of History UK;
• the Director of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies;
• the Chair of the UK Council of Heads and Professors of Sociology;
• the Chair of The Association of University Language Centres, UK and Ireland;
• the Chair of The Association of Law Teachers;
• the Chair of the University Council of Modern Languages;
• the Head of Education from the Bar Standards Board;
• the Chair of the Forum for Access and Continuing Education;
and a further 40 directors and heads of units. 1
An online version of the letter, at http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/heasubjectcentres/ has
attracted, to date (17th January 2011) a further 830 signatories, bring the total to more than
1000. An Early Day Motion calling upon the HEA to reverse its decision has now been tabled
by Paul Farrelly, MP ( EDM 1185, on “UK University Teaching and the Role of the Subject
Centres”).

3. The Value of the Subject Centres.

Until recently, teaching has not been a greatly valued activity in British universities: a
long-term, large-scale, prestige differential between teaching and research has
operated both nationally (prestigious institutions tend to be research-intensive ones,)
and at the level of the individual academic (traditionally rewarded for research rather
than teaching success). The SCs have done more to change this than any other
body. They have made teaching and learning – and enquiry into teaching and
learning – compelling and interesting to lecturers, and have transformed the prestige
and the profile of teaching and learning within the British HE landscape.
Intrinsic to this success is the subject specificity of the Centres. This gives them
credibility with the communities they need to engage, and allows them to address
specific pedagogical issues in a way that generic pedagogical training provided within
universities, or by any other external generic bodies, simply cannot. Academics are
notoriously tribal, suspicious of the discipline over the corridor, let alone of disciplines
in a different faculty or training staff with no discipline at all. Disciplines have their
own cultures, conceptual frameworks and methodologies: Medicine, Mathematics,
Literature, Economics, Law, or Languages (for instance) demand, in their teaching,
very different skills. Being discipline specialists themselves, the SC staff can address
the challenges of communicating these very different subject materials to different
bodies of students, and most important, they have authority with respect to their
audiences: lecturers in universities across the U.K whose foremost professional
identity is as a teacher of their particular subject. This was clearly recognised in the
2008 review of the Academy and Subject Centres commissioned by HEFCE which
drew attention to the SCs role “in … enhancing teaching quality”. “Widely cited as the
Academy’s flagship programme,” the review maintained, the Subject Network’s value
to the sector lies in its “discipline-led focus”. “The need for such a network in the
future” it concluded, “is, in our view, manifest.” 2

1
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=414397

2
Interim Evaluation of the Higher Education Academy: A report to HEFCE, HEFCW, SFC, DELNI,
GuildHE and UUK by Oakleigh Consulting Ltd, section 1.5, (HEFCE, January 2008) and 1.6.4
The SCs are perceived as belonging to their subject communities: this sense of
ownership is vital to their success. And the reasons which underlie the extraordinary
success of the SCs also doom the HEA’s alternative proposal – to replace the SCs
by generic, York Academy based specialists – to failure. Lecturers have no
confidence in instruction in pedagogy from those who are not practitioners in their
own fields. Hence they will have no confidence in instruction provided directly – and
generically – from a centralised body such as the HEA.

4. Alternative Futures.
Many are asking how the HEA can have got it so wrong, disbanding the only element
both valued at home and emulated abroad in order to shore up a centralised
structure which is of limited credibility amongst staff in UK Higher Educational
Institutions. Yet there are many ways in which the Subject Centres, and the valuable
work that they do, might be saved: they might, for example, be funded through the
Academy, with a reduced role for the centre; or directly funded through HEFCE. The
HEA could regain a good deal of its credibility amongst ordinary academic staff by
listening to the many voices speaking out so loudly in support of the Subject Centres.
Whether or not the HEA chooses to do that, what is fundamental is that no other
bodies in the UK at the present time support teaching – and hence student learning –
as effectively and as efficiently as do the Subject Centres. At this juncture, where
what students get for the time and the money that they invest in their education is a
more pressing public concern than ever it has been before, it is imperative that the
HEA decision to disband the Subject Centres be reversed. Anything else, as a
signatory to the online petition on the subject put it, is an act of academic vandalism:
short-sighted, unimaginative, and grossly detrimental to the interests of university
teachers and their future students.