(Photo courtesy of University of Northampton)
In the years since the financial crash of 2007-09, and in the wake of changes in political leadership, the United Kingdom’s Higher Education policies have shifted toward measuring success through student experience and outcomes and accelerating the role of markets. With this marketization, higher education has come to be seen less as a public and more of a private good, making students more like consumers and customers. The result has been that institutions of higher education must compete against each other to ensure their financial sustainability and to consolidate their position within the marketplace. Typically, this means that each college or university must define its strengths and build on what makes it unique.
In this new environment, the University of Northampton has had to reposition itself in the higher education market, and so our challenge has been to commercialize our express commitment to social mobility, to generate social value, and to ensure financial value for the staff, students, and community. But how to bring these commitments together as part of a strategy that could both attract students and help the University meet the metrics imposed by regulations? Our answer has been to embed “changemaking”—the process of developing creative solutions to social problems—at the heart of our strategic plan, making that Northampton’s market advantage.
A relatively small, teaching-focused institution in the heart of England, Northampton has an on-campus community of approximately 11,500 students, of whom around 7,700 are UK-based undergraduates, with overseas students comprising the rest. Less than 2 percent of our students are on research degrees and a substantial proportion are “non-traditional,” whether first in their family to attend university, a low socio-economic category, or from black and minority ethnic backgrounds. A further 6,000 students study University of Northampton programs through partner institutions across the UK and overseas. In general, students arrive with mid-low-end entry grades and qualifications and require a higher level of support to transition to university-life than students with higher grade profiles or a stronger familial support network or experience of higher education.
Graduate employability is one of the key indicators demonstrating the financial value of higher education, so it became an important focus of Northampton’s “Changemaker Campus” strategy. The University’s long track record of community engagement made this strategy a natural extension of its commitment to social good, as encapsulated in the strategic plan, “Transforming Lives, Inspiring Change.” But building a unique student experience out of changemaking also enhances graduates’ future employment and career prospects. Early consultation with employers, following Northampton’s Changemaker Campus designation, as well as the academic literature on graduate employability, indicated that the skills and attributes associated with changemaking are highly valued in the 21st-century labor market. In addition, the articulation of a Changemaker mindset and experience helps differentiate a graduate when applying for competitive graduate roles and, as such, helps differentiate Northampton within the larger higher education market.
A Whole-Institution Approach
Without a whole-university strategic commitment, the resources would not have been available to embed changemaking into policy, process, and practice, and it would have been more challenging to engage colleagues in these changes. But after the strategic plan was adopted, the University’s governing body made “changemaking” a campus-wide priority, not confined in any one Institute or department. The governing body also appointed one of their number as a strategic Changemaker champion with a remit to act as a critical friend, be the bridge between the operational implementation of Changemaker and the strategic decision-making needed to transform the student experience and enhance graduate employability and be the advocate for Changemaker on the Governing Board.
The University’s Institute for Learning and Teaching (ILT) and the newly formed University Centre for Employability and Engagement (UCEE) took up the cross-institutional leadership on enhancing graduate employability through Changemaker, identifying existing exemplars in changemaking and formulating the “Framework of Graduate Attributes” (below). A bottom-up design process engaged faculty, staff, students, and—importantly—key regional employers across several sectors of the economy, ensuring that such a framework had value in the graduate recruitment market, as well as ensuring that improving Graduate Employability through changemaking would contribute to the government’s newly introduced Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) measures. This approach challenged the barriers between faculty and administration, redesigned the relationship between curriculum and the extra-curricular offer to students, and helped create a continuum of experience.
Research with staff, existing students, and potential students from local high schools identified five “Conceptions of Changemaker” that articulated what being a “changemaker” meant to them: (1) university strategy; (2) critical thinking, perspective-shifting, and problem-solving; (3) employability; (4) social betterment; and (5) personal transformation. Further research identified 14 Changemaker attributes at the individual level that could be explored within the curriculum and across subject disciplines to ensure both resonance and engagement, and which would support future employability. The attributes were also designed into the extra-curricular Employability Service, and in 2013, the Employability Award was launched. This award embedded the attributes and provided extracurricular recognition of students’ development of employability skills and attributes in affecting social change through changemaking. In the first year (2013-14), 6.5 percent of students achieved the Employability Plus award. By 2018-19, this had grown to nearly 37 percent of students working toward achieving the award.
The University of Northampton Framework of Graduate Attributes
Despite the success of the Employability Award, meaningful engagement with the attributes within the curriculum only became possible by understanding how they align to the existing learning outcome stratification and subject-specific benchmarks issued by the UK’s academic quality assurance body, the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA). Faculty from across the University were engaged in the process of review, design, and appraisal through which the 14 attributes were grouped into four Graduate Employability statements that together formed Northampton's ChANGE framework (Changemaker Attributes at Northampton for Graduate Employability).
Using the more accessible language of employability skills for this work resonates better with faculty, students, and employers. This work identified a tangible benefit in adopting an integrated framework that enables students to develop personal literacy and graduate identity, and also highlighted that the effective application of the framework across all subject areas would necessitate additional support for faculty. Providing this professional development and support has been a complex issue, however. Primarily, it occurred through the collaborative development of the University’s award-winning COGS learning outcomes toolkit (Changemaker Outcomes for Graduate Success). The toolkit supports faculty to write assessable learning outcomes that scaffold student progression over the duration of their academic program whilst simultaneously embodying and assessing the Changemaker attributes within the context of the subject discipline. Staff development opportunities were provided through the University’s academic development program C@N-DO (Changemaking @ Northampton – Development Opportunities).
These changes were embodied in the curriculum through a root and branch rewriting of the University Modular Framework, replacing the old “key skills” framework with learning outcomes drawn from COGS in each module, capturing the ChANGE framework attributes within the subject discipline (in compliance with nationally approved subject benchmark statements). This rewrite of learning outcomes across all 305 undergraduate programs, comprising 1,512 modules, was completed in 12 months with all postgraduate programs rewritten the following year, in the process embedding a unique graduate attributes framework across every subject area, program, and module. In addition, a comprehensive faculty support offer was in place and, because the model had been developed under a whole institutional approach, spanned both the curriculum and the extracurricular offer. It was also adopted by the Students’ Union and, together, these initiatives have provided a unique approach to developing student employability through changemaking in UK higher education.
So What?
Having undertaken this transformational system change, Northampton is now asking: What does this all mean for our students? It is still too early to know for certain whether these initiatives have achieved their desired objectives. Northampton has made the necessary structural shifts and associated systems change required to improve graduate employability through changemaking, but evidence to substantiate this claim will require a longitudinal evaluation, a central priority as Northampton embarks on the next phase.
However, looking back on the journey that the University of Northampton has undertaken, there are five key lessons we have learned that are also relevant for other institutions considering a whole-institution approach to changemaking.
1. Adoption of a changemaker strategy must be viewed as a 15- to 20-year journey and must be a natural extension of the existing culture and practice of a higher education institution, which provides a foundation upon which to build. Lasting culture change takes time and requires engagement from all stakeholders to ensure the changes become meaningful, accepted, and embedded. It was five years from the appointment of the Changemaker Champion to the point where academic support through the COGS toolkit was available, and while this could have been achieved more quickly through a more directional approach, living our institutional values meant that the project team also had to do the right things in the right way and with the right people.
2. Strategic and governance buy-in to the process is key to unlocking resources, legitimizing change, and dispersing leadership. While Northampton used the lever of improving Graduate Employability as the way to effect change, that lever will differ for each institution. Northampton’s adoption of a strategic plan that explicitly adopted Changemaker as a strategic driver required suitable evidence to inform the development of cross-institutional KPIs that would drive future activity, all of which needed time itself to be designed, developed and implemented.
3. Whatever the lever, once work is underway, institutions should be prepared for the ripples of change that result as systems shift and new ways of working emerge. Senior leaders need to develop management structures that support staff and faculty to recognize and develop leadership across the institution. At Northampton, for example, a core group of Changemaker pioneers was established to drive activity, but in practice, also tended to concentrate and inhibit the power to make decisions. What emerged, instead, was a devolved and dispersed approach to changemaking that enabled anyone to engage and for changemaking to flourish in unexpected ways and to untap changemaking potential in individuals.
4. The engagement and involvement of all stakeholder groups in the design and development process are essential if buy-in and ownership are to be achieved. Individuals will rationalize the change that they are part of in the context of their own values and their role within the organization. For example, the staff has redesigned assessment requirements to surface changemaking within the disciplines, the Students’ Union has aligned their student support and activities to Changemaker thereby reinforcing the development of the attributes, and the University has recently made an 'Employability Promise' which guarantees to find all students who have achieved their Employability Award during their studies a job if they are still unemployed 12 months after graduating.
5. Effecting change is not an event but a process, one that becomes a different way of working and that never ends but continually morphs and develops in ways that cannot be predicted at the outset. Neither the outcomes achieved, nor the processes taken to achieve them, were predictable at the outset but the result of this new culture beginning to take effect.
Conclusion
Today, Northampton is recognized within both the HE and the social innovation sectors as one of a handful of universities to have achieved this global position as a changemaking institution. Northampton is seven years into an ongoing transformational process that has no definable endpoint but is constantly transforming lives and inspiring change. Although it is too early to determine the impact of Changemaker on graduate employability outcomes, Northampton’s Framework of Graduate Attributes must be seen not as an end in itself. It needs to be the raison d’être for how higher education operates and how people are encouraged to go on doing the right things, in the right way, with the right people, and for the right reasons.
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Read more stories by Rachel Maxwell & Wray Irwin .