Fees increase had no impact on teaching

University contact hours did not increase following the 2006 fees rise, according to the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI).

HEPI recently published research on first- and second-year students’ university experience nationwide, finding students experienced little or no change in their experiences since fees tripled to around £3,000.

The Director of HEPI, Bahram Bekhradnia, said the average number of contact hours received has “hardly changed in the past five or six years,” falling from an average of 14.2 hours per week in 2007 to 13.9 in 2012. In general, class sizes are also unchanged, with students reporting an average of 48 minutes per week spent in a class with six or fewer students, only six minutes more than 2005-2006.

Though HEPI did not publish results by university, complaints among Warwick students about contact hours are commonplace. Education Officer Sean Ruston argues the University should, “as a minimum standard, be providing an adequate number of contact hours in order for students to learn the course curriculum”.

Ruston acknowledges that quality rather than quantity of contact time should be considered but adds “when students are getting as little as 8 hours a week then obviously things need to improve”.

When ranked by National Student Satisfaction (NSS), Warwick comes seventeenth in the UK despite having the seventh largest expenditure per student and fifth best teaching score.

The Students’ Union is currently pressuring the University for a minimum of 12 hours contact time per week for every student as some students currently receive 8 hours or less.

The National Union of Students (NUS) believes universities are still failing to deliver despite increasing pressure from undergraduates to provide more as a result of increasing fees. NUS President Liam Burns argues “there is no evidence that shifting the financial burden to students gives them more power”.

However, Nicola Dandridge, the chief executive of Vice-Chancellor’s group Universities UK, disagrees as “when universities in England received additional income after the introduction of variable fees in 2006, they invested it in better facilities, more teaching staff, more support and advice for students, and other benefits for students”.

Warwick’s Head of Communications Peter Dunn points to Warwick’s continuing success in league tables, including fifth best UK university in the 2013 Guardian League.

Student experiences seem to vary between faculties as well as individual tutors. Imogen Rogers, a first year biomedical science student, found her personal tutor to be a “fantastic teacher and quick to respond to e-mails”.

Rogers also explained all first-year biomedical science students received a compulsory one-to-one meeting every term with their personal tutor to discuss progress, something not always available for arts students.

Charlie Hindhaugh, the incoming Undergraduate Social Sciences Faculty Representative at Warwick SU and a first-year PAIS student argued that was a “discrepancy between arts subjects and social sciences as well as between subjects”, citing that “in history modules, students receive a fifteen minute compulsory feedback session for every essay handed in which is not received in politics modules”.

From September 2012, all universities will be required to publish the amount of time students receive with lecturers for each degree and the employment outcomes of each course to help prospective students make university choices.