Engaging and Changing Higher Education through Brokerage

Citation

(2004), "Engaging and Changing Higher Education through Brokerage", Education + Training, Vol. 46 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/et.2004.00446aae.002

Engaging and Changing Higher Education through Brokerage

Engaging and Changing Higher Education through Brokerage

N.J. Jackson (Ed.)Ashgate2003£45ISBN 0754631486

We are currently mid-way through a 20-year revolution that is fundamentally reshaping British higher education. The system of offering higher education to only an elite, and funding them generously through free tuition and maintenance grants, has been replaced by a mass higher education system in which students (or their parents) are responsible for paying tuition fees and living costs and student loans are the norm. Large numbers of students work part time during term time to finance their studies. More students take the cheaper option of attending their local university, rather than living away from home. "Modules", "credits" and "semesters" become part of the vocabulary of higher education. Continuous assessment plays an ever-greater role as the importance of finals examinations diminishes. "Traditional" disciplines such as physics, chemistry and mathematics decline in importance as the range of courses offered widens to include, for example, golf studies and the popular-music industry. Polytechnics become universities. Universities begin to merge with further-education colleges. "League tables" of universities, unheard of when all universities were thought to be good, grow in importance. Institutions and individuals are rated according to the quality of their research and teaching. Senior politicians challenge the most prestigious universities to admit more people from disadvantaged backgrounds. And on the horizon is the two-year degree course. Successive governments have used the full panoply of levers to achieve these radical reforms – legislation, moral pressure, funding to encourage expansion and change, and reviews such as those chaired by Lord Dearing and Sir Ron Cooke.

This book examines brokerage as a key agent for change in higher education. Brokerage is presented as a process that facilitates change at all levels of the education system and enables UK higher education to be more adaptive and responsive to society and more competitive in the global educational marketplace. New educational organizations are seen to be emerging as brokers to facilitate systemic change, and many people working in higher education are shown to use brokerage in their day-to-day professional activities.

The editor gets the volume off to a cracking start with three neat chapters that introduce brokering in higher education, highlight the complexity and messiness of change and describe the art of brokering. Peter Knight then examines how to evaluate the brokers, before a sequence of chapters by a wide range of authors provides organizational case studies. These illustrate brokerage at work in the Higher Education Quality Council's quality-enhancement group, the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, the Learning and Teaching Support Network and the University for Industry. The book closes by examining international perspectives on brokerage in higher education.

In his foreword, Professor Ronald Barnett, of the University of London, comments: "The book picks up the term of 'brokerage' and shows, in its analyses and several examples of the idea in action, that the term has a conceptual weight that has probably not, as yet, been recognized. I believe that Norman Jackson and his contributors are to be applauded in doing nothing other than adding a concept to the vocabulary through which we understand contemporary higher education."

Such is the importance of this volume to all those caught up in the maelstrom that is the current world of UK higher education.