WEEKEND READING: When prestige trumps skills: rethinking excellence in higher education

This blog was kindly authored by Professor David Mba, Vice-Chancellor of Birmingham City University.

What does it tell us about the skills system when we can have newly qualified nurses struggling to find nursing jobs at the same time as we worry about the NHS’s workforce capacity?

That was the striking backdrop to the Government’s ‘Graduate Guarantee’ for newly qualified nurses and midwives in England last summer. NHS England said every newly qualified nurse and midwife would have the opportunity to apply to join the health and social care workforce, with providers encouraged to recruit ahead of vacancies and make greater use of newly qualified staff. It also asked NHS organisations to work with local universities and system partners to improve access to roles across health and care.

It was a welcome response to a very practical problem. But it also exposes something much bigger about the way we talk about skills in England.

We tend to talk about skills as though the difficulty is producing qualified people. The nursing experience exposes that qualification is only one part of the story. There is a difference between educating someone, qualifying them, employing them, deploying them where they are needed and retaining them in the workforce. That distinction matters well beyond nursing.

The problem is not simply producing graduates

A nursing workforce problem can quickly become a conversation about graduates. And a conversation about graduates can quickly become a conversation about universities. Before long, the debate risks becoming about the number, type and status of degrees, rather than the much bigger question of what kind of education and training system we need to meet the country’s skills needs.

The nursing guarantee is revealing precisely because it is not simply about producing more nurses. The challenge is connecting newly qualified professionals with jobs, employers and places where their skills are needed. That brings recruitment cycles, vacancy distribution, geography, job design and workforce planning into the picture, alongside universities.

In other words, the skills challenge sits across a system.

That should change the way we think about excellence in higher education, and it matters because excellence in English higher education is not judged in a vacuum. A powerful hierarchy of institutional prestige shapes which forms of education and contribution are most visible and valued.

England has built a higher education system in which one particular institutional model carries enormous cultural and political weight. Research intensity has become an unusually powerful proxy for institutional excellence. Research funding, rankings, prestige and media attention all contribute to a hierarchy in which research-intensive universities are often treated as the benchmark against which other forms of higher education are judged.

There is nothing wrong with research excellence. England needs globally competitive research universities, and their contribution to innovation, productivity and scientific discovery is substantial. The problem is what happens when the strengths of that model become the organising principle for the wider skills system.

Excellence is not the same as workforce development

The skills England needs are not all research skills. They include nurses, teachers, engineers, technicians, digital professionals, construction workers, social care professionals and people able to apply new technologies in workplaces. Meeting those needs requires professional education, work-integrated learning, employer partnerships, apprenticeships, flexible provision and opportunities for adults to retrain and upskill.

Practice-based education is not simply academic education with more workplace experience. It brings disciplinary knowledge together with professional practice, real-world problem solving and the needs of employers and public services. In many fields, the ability to apply knowledge effectively in complex professional settings is itself a form of educational excellence.

Many of the institutions that are particularly strong at this work are not research-intensive universities. They educate large numbers of mature, commuter, part-time and first-generation students, and supply the workforce of the places in which they are based. Their contribution to innovation may be less visible than a patent or a research citation, but it can be just as consequential: improving public services, changing professional practice, helping SMEs adopt new technology and developing the skills of local workforces.

Nursing makes the point particularly clearly. We can train and qualify someone, but that is only one part of building a workforce. The system also needs to connect a graduate with an employer, a role and a place where their skills are needed – and then create the conditions in which they can build a career and stay.

That is not an argument against research universities. It is an argument for recognising that workforce development is itself a form of excellence.

A problem of prestige?

For decades, the strongest educational signal available to ambitious young people has been the traditional academic higher education route. Russell Group membership has become shorthand for educational quality in ways that extend well beyond research.

That signal matters because prestige affects behaviour. It affects what schools celebrate, what parents aspire to, what students think they should apply for, and what policymakers see as a successful higher education system. It can also affect which forms of learning are perceived as being for the ‘best’ students.

This creates a paradox.

We can say, quite reasonably, that England needs more technical, professional, applied and vocational skills, while simultaneously maintaining a system in which some of the routes most closely associated with those capabilities have lower status. But perhaps the prestige trap is not that research excellence is valued too highly. It is that one particular form of excellence can become the template against which every other contribution is judged.

What if the measures we use to identify higher education excellence are simply better at seeing some forms of contribution than others?

A higher education institution can make an extraordinary contribution to nursing through research, clinical innovation and advanced professional education. Another can contribute through educating large numbers of nurses, working with NHS employers, supporting placements and helping graduates build careers in the region.

Both contributions matter. They are simply different. The answer is not to diminish academic education. It is to stop treating academic education as the only credible definition of educational ambition.

Skills require a more diverse system

This is where institutional diversity matters.

Teaching-intensive universities often have a different relationship with their local economies and public services. They educate large numbers of mature, commuter and part-time students, work closely with employers and professional partners, and provide routes into the occupations that communities depend upon.

At Birmingham City University, our graduates make a significant contribution to the city’s workforce and public services, with 40 per cent of our first-degree graduates staying in Birmingham to start their careers. In the West Midlands, BCU trains 43 per cent of new nurses. This is an example of what an anchor institution can mean to a regional skills ecosystem: educating the professionals who sustain the public services and wider economy of the place it serves.

This is not a plea to divide universities into research and teaching institutions, still less to suggest that one is inherently better than the other.

Russell Group universities increasingly provide professional education, engage with employers and develop apprenticeships. Nor should we romanticise the alternatives: teaching-intensive institutions face their own challenges, and not every applied or vocational course automatically delivers better outcomes for students or employers.

But institutional diversity should mean more than allowing different universities to exist alongside one another. It should mean recognising that different institutions can make different contributions to national objectives.

In short, we require a broader definition of excellence.

Not too much higher education, but too narrow a conception of what it is for

We tell young people that the most academically selective universities represent the pinnacle of educational success; we measure institutional success through metrics that privilege research; and then we wonder why technical, professional and vocational pathways struggle to command equivalent status.

The answer is not to diminish the Russell Group. It is to stop asking it, implicitly or otherwise, to provide the template for the whole system.

The nursing guarantee offers a useful way into this debate because it exposes the limits of thinking about skills as qualifications alone. If the question is ‘how many graduates do we need?’, we will naturally look first to universities and qualifications. If the question is ‘what capabilities does the economy and society need, where are they needed, and what is the best way to develop, deploy and retain them?’, the answer becomes much more complicated. It also changes how we should think about the contribution of universities.

A higher education institution’s contribution to the economy might be a scientific breakthrough. It might also be a nurse who stays in the region, an adult learner who retrains mid-career, a new approach to professional practice, or a partnership that helps a small business, charity or community organisation develop its workforce. All are forms of capability. Not all are equally visible in the measures by which institutional prestige is constructed.

England needs world-leading research universities. It also needs universities and colleges that excel at professional education, applied learning, regional workforce development and lifelong skills. These are not competing ambitions. The challenge for policymakers is to create a system in which these different forms of excellence reinforce rather than compete with one another.

The nursing guarantee reminds us that having the right qualification is not the same as having the right skills system. Perhaps we need to apply the same lesson to higher education.

If England is serious about productivity, regional growth, public service reform and lifelong learning, we need a definition of excellence broad enough to recognise not only the knowledge universities create, but the capabilities they build – and the people, places and communities those capabilities ultimately serve.