Making a success of the HEAR conference

On Wednesday I was at the joint AGCAS/CRA conference on Making a success of the HEAR. In case you don't know, this is what HEAR is:

The Higher Education Achievement Report (HEAR) provides a single comprehensive record of a learner’s achievement, as recommended by the Measuring and Recording Student Achievement Steering Group in the Beyond the Honours Degree – the Burgess Group Final Report (October 2007).

And this is what the HEAR s supposed to do:

The HEAR enables institutions to provide a detailed picture of student achievement throughout a students’ time at university, including academic work, extra-curricular activities, prizes and employability awards, voluntary work and offices held in student union clubs and societies that have been verified by the institution. 

The event was pitched to:

• Review the implementation of the Higher Education Achievement Report (HEAR) in UK HE.
• Consider how the HEAR, and the processes that underpin it, can contribute to the development of student employability.
• Receive an up-to-date account of employer engagement with the HEAR led by AGR.
• Have the opportunity to consider how careers services may take a leading role in this development.

Zara has already blogged about it as a 2-parter (part 1 and part 2 definitely worth reading for more detail) so all I want to do is note down a few quick observations using the event objectives.

Review the implementation of the Higher Education Achievement Report (HEAR) in UK HE.

The project has been running for a long time (10 years) and implementation is, so far, patchy. Whilst the case study instituions have clearly done some good work, I was surprised that they weren't further along than they are. At least there is now a website (hear.ac.uk/) and when you put HEAR into Google it appears near the top (it's been difficult to find up to now).

Consider how the HEAR, and the processes that underpin it, can contribute to the development of student employability.

The focus by most early adopters seems to have been on the process of recording details of programme contents, results gained and the overall classification (sections 4.1 and 4.2) - a process governed by the Registry function of institutions. Deena Ingham from the University of Bedfordshire gave an excellent workshop on how the University of Bedfordshire is engaging with the HEAR, in particular the work she has done on breaking down the academic jargon so that employers (and students) can better appreciate what courses are about - starting with the course titles, then 'graduate impact statements', then module titles, then assessment methods. I need to mull this over more to get my head around how it fits with the identifying employability in the curriculum stuff that I started a while ago.

The more obvious area of focus regarding student employability has been section 6.1, which is the bit where all the other stuff gets recorded - student achievements, additional awards, volunteering etc. - verified by the institution. It's that last bit, "verified by the institution" that's difficult. I don't think anyone has got a really good process or system for doing this yet, at least not at scale. and it certainly needs more work.

Receive an up-to-date account of employer engagement with the HEAR led by AGR.

This was the best bit for me. Jane Clark (seconded from Barclays to the AGR to work on this) gave an update on her excellent work on engaging employers with the HEAR. I was particularly pleased to see it connected to the potential social mobility benefits. AGR has produced some useful publications for employers (HEAR the whole story: your Higher Education Achievement Report toolkit and Don't miss out on the best: your guide to social mobility in recruitment. Unfortunately these don't seem to be on the AGR website yet so here's a photo of a useful page (Top ten reasons why you [employers] should support the HEAR and Key misconceptions and why they're wrong.

Have the opportunity to consider how careers services may take a leading role in this development.

Perhaps I shouldn't say this but this was the most disappointing bit for me. Marc Lintern did an excellent job of presenting back the results of the AGCAS Heads of Careers Services survey but the responses were somewhat lukewarm. Clearly there are obstables to overcome in terms of employer uptake, but careers services and universities really need to get behind this if it's going to work, and if it helps with social mobility that's got to be a good thing.