Why it will be starting with a KIS for 2013 undergraduates

Fees of up to £9000 at English universities may have dominated the news headlines in recent times but it is not the only big change in UK higher education scheduled for autumn 2012.


24 September sees the launch of the new look unistats website as part of the Government’s drive to ensure that students have as much information as possible to inform their choice about what and where to study. The cornerstone of the new look website will be the Key Information Set or KIS.  As far as possible each course at every university will have a KIS, a series of statistics drawn from the National Student Survey (NSS) and the First Destinations Survey on student satisfaction, graduate salaries and employment rates. Also included will be local accommodation costs, fees, the availability of bursaries and scholarships , contact hours and the proportion of the course assessed through examinations and coursework. A mock-up of what a KIS might look like is on the HEFCE website.

This information revolution is set to gather further pace. The 2011 Higher Education White Paper Higher Education: Students at the Heart of the System recommended that Higher Education Public Information Steering Group (HEPISG) consider the possibility of a survey of taught postgraduate students similar to the NSS. It is timely therefore that the annual LLAS workshop for Heads of Department on 13 September will have a strong focus on exploring the possible implications of this data revolution on departments of languages, linguistics and area studies.

The KIS will enable students, their parents, the Government, the media, our colleagues and our senior managers to make comparisons between courses on an unprecedented scale.  This is not just about comparing your institution with another institution but your French course with your German course, your Spanish course with your European Studies course. Up to now differences in the outcomes and students experiences on different courses in the same department have not been easy to spot, at least to those outside your institution.  From September these differences will be in full public view.

Winston Churchill opined: “True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information”. With more information than ever, easier to find than ever, we need true genius more than ever.


Thriving in an uncertain world: a workshop for heads of department and leaders in languages, linguistics and area studies will be held in London on 13 September. Book online at the LLAS website to reserve your place.

John Canning
Senior Academic Coordinator
LLAS Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies

Discard the irrelevant: Statistics don’t bleed, but our students do.

John Canning, LLAS Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies

Some rise by sin and others by virtue fall. William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

Statistics are everywhere in education. We have the National Student Survey (NSS), the First Destinations Survey, newspaper league tables, and the Times World University rankings among others. Universities are now required to publish ‘Key Information Sets’ (KIS) from 2012. The KIS has data from the NSS (the higher the agreeing percentages the better), the cost of university accommodation (presumably the lower the better), fees (the lower the better), graduate employment rates (the higher the better), percentage of assessment which is written exams (depends on the student) and number of ‘contact’ hours (again, depends on the student). In short if it can be measured the data is out there. And if it can’t be measured, we’ll find a way to measure it anyway, (research impact anyone?). Add to all this the information that students get from visit days, Facebook, twitter, the online student forums, friends and the phrase ‘information overload’ comes to mind. In his report Dimensions of Quality Graham Gibbs warns us about that immeasurable factor, reputation, which can override any real measure of quality. I suspect that all this information only serves to make reputation all the more important.

As I warned in a recent article on the NSS chasing the ratings can be tempting. Bad practices can beget good statistics which are really evidence of a bad situation. Sometime in the early 1990s I watched a football game between Cheltenham Town and Worcester City in the Beazer Homes League. Disappointingly, for those who feel distressed at having missed this mouth-watering encounter, I’m not aware of it being available on DVD, but the Worcester goalkeeper had an amazing game making save after save. But why was he so good that night? He had to be - the rest of his team were dreadful. The Cheltenham Town attack kept him busy all evening. And despite the goalkeeper’s super performance his team still conceded five goals (fans of the statistically excited sport of American football may find the illustrations on the Freakonomics blog even more exciting than my example). A course with a high number of contact hours could be one where students are spoon-fed in endless lectures or who have timetabled ‘group work’ sessions which exist for the sole purpose of increasing contact hours. Low rents may make university cheaper, but they can be a reflection of poor economic conditions or poor quality accommodation.

If we are near the top of the employability league we proclaim it online, at our open days and to anyone who will listen for ten seconds. When they work against us, statistics can motivate us to make excuses. We say that our performance reflects the industries our graduates go into; they have all gone abroad or they like our town so much they don’t want to leave and area doing odd little jobs until they decide what they really want to do. We seek loopholes – are office hours contact hours? Can we ‘reset’ that programme that didn’t do so well, by changing its name or by merging it with a more successful programme? Then there’s outright ‘cheating within the rules’ as when American football wide receivers (the person who tries to catch the ball when the quarterback throws it) once put adhesive on their gloves to enable them to catch better (a loophole in the rules now since closed). I am not going to speculate what the higher education equivalent of gluey hands might be, but statistics can bring out the worst in us. Mark Twain said that we are apt to use statistics like a drunk uses a lamppost – to support ourselves rather than to see the right way to go. As Escalus says in Measure for measure, “Some rise by sin and others by virtue fall” – statistics can facilitate our sins and our virtues. In this ‘New World’ of higher education more and more of us are looking back to our defacto ‘patron saint’ Cardinal Newman.

If then a practical end must be assigned to a University course, I say it is that of training good members of society... It is the education which gives a man (sic) a clear, conscious view of their own opinions and judgements, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them. It teaches him (sic) to see things as they are, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought to detect what is sophistically and to discard what is irrelevant. John Henry Newman, The idea of a University.

Higher Education statistics can lead us to pursue what is irrelevant. Let us seek the truth - the statistics will follow to vindicate us... possibly.

John Canning is Senior Academic Coordinator at the LLAS Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies, but writes here in a personal capacity. He can be found blogging about matters higher education at his website www.johncanning.net