Professor of Organisational Sociology
Gerard will be working with the Queen Mary Academy as a Fellow 2023-24. His project seeks to develop a better understanding of how BTEC students learn at college and the transition of BTEC students into university.
Gerard Hanlon is Professor of Organisational Sociology in the School of Business and Management and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Through his Academy Fellowship, Gerard is working with New City College to examine how non-traditional university students (eg those who have taken BTEC, or the new T-Level qualification) learn, what they learn, and how this experience enables them integrate into university. This project emerges from the School of Business and Management’s long experience of teaching such students. This experience has encouraged us to alter how we teach in attempts to further integration.
Specifically, Gerard draws on experience of teaching non-traditional students on a core first year module of 500+ students, historically with some of the highest College staff-student ratios, and the fact that non-traditional students make up the majority of our students. As such, the provision of the best possible student integration and experience is an issue in terms of the school’s capacity to both teach and learn.
For universities this cohort is a growing proportion of students, but they are also a diverse group of learners that may, or may not, experience learning in ways that are easily transferable to university. If not easily transferable does this prior learning hinder their experience and future mobility? If learning routines and patterns are non-transferable, and attainment gaps suggest they may not be, this begs some questions of universities – do we need to provide extra resource to these students or to subjects areas where these students congregate (eg lower staff-student ratios), etc.?
In addition to these different experiences to the historically typical university student, statistically, these students experience other challenges e.g., they are more likely to be from working class backgrounds, from racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, to have received free school meals, to live at home, to be the first in their family to go to university, etc. Thus, the university will appear a very unfamiliar, and perhaps alien, space. If so, how should the universities respond to potential alienation? Are different mentoring systems required? Should more pastoral and academic supported be provided? If so, how, when, by whom? Does this too require further resource or simply a different allocation of the same resources e.g., moving university efforts from A to B?
Finally, inclusion should be celebrated as an enhancement of everyone’s experience in the sector, as bringing benefits to universities, and as a means improving social mobility. Yet, if not fully integrated and resourced, universities risk making claims that are unfounded e.g., inclusion is not inclusion if students are alienated, cohorts of alienated students damage everyone’s experience, social mobility is not mobility if people are only compared to their parents and not their student peers, etc. This project teases out these issues considering Queen Mary position as leading this integration within the university sector’s Russell Group.
Read Gerad Hanlon and Nceku Nyath’s article Transitioning to university published in SEDA Educational Developments magazine (page 23) Issue 25.3, September 2024 / ISSN 1469 – 3267