What is Educational Gain – and what's it good for?

The question of what gains students obtain from their education and how this is measured has been an ever-increasing focus of attention in discussions on UK higher education for some years. Traditionally, discourses relating to students' educational gains have pointed to the likes of degree outcomes and wider debates about the experiences and graduate attributes gained by students during their studies, such as participation in clubs and societies. The trouble with these debates were that they made it hard to pinpoint specific measures and this desire to 'measure' a student's experience, or rather their improvement, led to work on learning gain. More recently, the focus has been on Educational Gain, where HE providers were asked to articulate their own approach to Educational Gain in their submissions for the 2023 Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF).

As we are now just beyond midpoint from the submissions for the 2023 TEF and the next exercise, we think it is important to stress the importance of Educational Gain. At its most basic level Educational Gain refers to the experience a student has through their educational journey and what they gain from it – from their entry into higher education to their exit, and beyond.

This rather basic or straightforward approach can be in danger of reducing education down to a transactional exercise, which is something that does not reflect the values and ethos of our education at DMU. Rather, we refer to 'Empowering Educational Gain', which is reflective of our Empowering University Strategy. This focus on empowerment is really important to us as it puts a focus on the values that underpin a DMU education.

Our Empowering Educational Gain approach considers the whole of the student experience and how this impacts on and benefits our students. On the one hand, it could be argued that some aspects – such as the differential between entry qualifications and final awards – are easier to measure than others. Some of the knowledge, networks, skills, understanding and experiences they've gained can be quantified, while other aspects of the distance they have travelled may be less easy to reduce to numerical metrics. This means we sometimes need to think qualitatively about the quality of Educational Gain. 

In this sense, Educational Gain is not just a numbers game. It's about the journey each individual has taken – about how they've built their confidence, about how their horizons have expanded, how their cultural, social, professional and intellectual experience and understanding has grown, taking them into places they could never have imagined being, realising that things they'd never thought possible can be done. In this sense, there are some things that can't be represented as figures on a spreadsheet.

But, of course, key metrics are important and we need to be accountable for them. Like universities across the sector, we at De Montfort University have put a great deal of thought and effort into developing our own data on Educational Gain. We use, for example, some of the optional add-on NSS questions to help us measure our students' Educational Gain. 

As we work on Educational Gain we make sure we have all the data points we need and we have crafted additional ones for ourselves as being especially relevant to our mission and values – while at the same time acknowledging the need to triangulate certain of our local datasets which may see things through particular lenses. 

At the same time as we recognise the value of such metrics, we at DMU – and across the sector – also share the belief that education is transformational, and we must therefore at times concede that not all of its impacts can be measured by numbers.

At DMU have found it both valuable and essential to ensure that our sense of Educational Gain is closely aligned with our institutional ethos, mission, strategic direction and ambition. We're very proud that we have defined ourselves as "The Empowering University", and our definition of Educational Gain has been fundamentally impacted by that. Our sense of Empowering Educational Gain reflects what we do and what we aspire to do, our values around social justice and inclusion, and what we strive to be.

It's therefore been refreshing and reassuring to hear more recently politicians starting to talk about the societal good and social benefits offered by higher education. Of course, the sector must continue to serve national and regional economies by ensuring that it develops the skillsets which employers need, but we can also recognise the value of how our work more broadly impacts on individuals, communities, society and the environment.

As such, a focus on Educational Gain has come as a useful and timely opportunity for the sector, one that has perhaps proven more beneficial than some might have expected. 

Back in the days of HEFCE, millions had been spent and years expended in trying to define learning gain, and the more recent challenge to the sector to define this new concept of Educational Gain – and to articulate what it meant to us as individual providers – had therefore been met with some scepticism in certain quarters.

Yet, rising to that challenge, the sector generated in its submissions to TEF 2023 some of its most thoughtful and authentic statements, as providers did some real soul-searching in considering what their work is truly for.

Clearly, Educational Gain isn't an entirely new concept. We've for example known variations on its themes, in different times and settings, as 'learning gain' and 'value added'. It may be a relatively new phrase but it's a long-embedded idea. Colleagues and students think about it every day, although they may not express it to themselves and to each other exactly in those terms. Part of our work in defining and developing Educational Gain must therefore involve the translation of its frameworks into a language which is accessible to all.

This was a particular theme of an enormously useful workshop that we organised at DMU with colleagues from the University of Leicester, as we've developed our work on Educational Gain. The workshop was led by Professor Dilly Fung, Emerita Professor at the LSE and author of the influential Office for Students (OfS) report on HE providers' approaches to Educational Gain – a report which crucially distinguished between individual benefits for students and collective benefits for society, and demonstrated how providers have articulated the differences between comprehensive gains (for all students), targeted gains (for groups of students) and personalised gains (for individual students).

Helpful in so many ways, Dilly's workshopping day taught us in particular how many teams need to be involved in the development of a provider's approach to Educational Gain, and the value of the contributions and perspectives to be advanced by colleagues from diverse areas of an institution – from careers, planning and library services, to faculties and facilities, educational development, learning & teaching and academic & pastoral support departments – as well, of course, as students' unions.

Our focus on Educational Gain has in this respect reminded us how important all our individual teams are. It's not about a bunch of academics going off and deciding what Educational Gain should be. If it's to reflect the totality of the student journey and its outcomes, Educational Gain needs to be underpinned by the efforts and the integration of all parts of an institution, and by how well those parts work together – in a complex ecosystem into which colleagues and students come together to support and develop an experience and a trajectory that's much more than just the sum of its parts. 

In the end, then, it's about all our students, and what they gain from their time with us is. The journeys and successes of each and every student are just as important as any student whose high-profile achievements a marketing team may celebrate.

The impact of those gains may be felt most keenly and most clearly not on the day they graduate, but for years thereafter and for the rest of their lives.

Those of us who recall our first days as students in higher education may remember the wonder and awe we felt as we stepped for the very first time into this new learning environment… whether it was the creative space of a studio and lab, or the wonder of the resources and walls of books in a library, more books than we'd ever seen before – or experienced learning in ways we'd never learnt before, or had dreamt we'd ever learn. 

Our own first experiences in higher education settings can awe us and inspire us, and can take us out of our comfort zones. It would be fascinating to ask colleagues across the sector to cast their minds back to their younger selves and consider what they consider their own educational gains. 

So, please, just take a moment to do so.