I start from thinking that every school should be barrier-free for all, and every child is special and should get their needs met. That way, disabled kids would be the same as everyone else, and there would be no ‘special needs’ stigma talk. But I recognise that this utopian answer is some way off.

In the meantime, we need to concentrate resources on some schools, and develop expertise to work with disabled children, so that we can enable them to develop and grow, as we expect with all our children. I do not think that it is about young people with disabilities having the same outcomes as everyone else, because that will not be possible for all. But everyone develops and grows, so the gap I am interested in is between where they are now, and where they will be in five years’ time, with all the educational input they will have received.

Let me say something about disability. I think that disability is complex: people are disabled by social barriers and oppression, and also by bodies and minds which work in different ways, or not as well as the average. I think embodiment is a challenge for everyone, although this is usually only evident by mid-life, when everyone realises that they have special needs for some sort of repair or other. I want us to see our commonalities. As a group of young disabled people said to me more than 30 years ago: they are just like young people without disabilities.

I want everyone, particularly children and young people, to feel okay about having bodies or minds that work differently.

As we thought about, debated, drafted and finalised the second edition of Education, Disability and Social Policy we found ourselves at the start of another significant political transition, with potentially major policy consequences.

The change of government to a Labour administration has brought with it a new manifesto commitment:

This commitment is made against a backdrop of severe financial strain and ‘utter disarray’ in the system in England to support children with special educational needs (SEN), as reported by the Local Government Ombudsman. A report for the Local Government Association revealed that resourcing the requirements of Education, Health and Care (EHC) plans has led to cumulative deficits in local authorities in England which at the time of writing stand at £3.2 billion and are projected to rise to £5 billion by 2026.2 Meanwhile, the same report finds that in 2022/23, only 8 per cent of children and young people with EHC plans achieved the expected level in reading, writing and mathematics, a figure that has remained unchanged from 2016/17. If nothing else, this stagnation indicates a pressing need for a renewed focus on educational outcomes for students with SEN.

Introduction

In the autumn of 2020, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) premiered Small Axe, a British anthology film series created and directed by Steve McQueen. The anthology focuses on the lives of West Indian (henceforth, Black or Black British)1 immigrants in London from the 1960s to the 1980s. One of the films in the anthology, Education, is based on actual events of the 1970s, when some London councils followed an unofficial policy of transferring a disproportionate number of Black British children from mainstream education to schools for those then called ‘educationally subnormal’.2 The practice was exposed by Bernard Coard's 1971 pamphlet How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Subnormal in the British School System. The pamphlet explains that teachers and educationalists in British schools had a pervasive bias toward white children as inherently good and ‘normal’. Instead, ‘[t] he [Black] children are made neurotic about their race and culture. Some become behaviour problems as a result. They become resentful and bitter at being told their language is second-rate, and their history and culture is non-existent; that they hardly exist at all except by the grace of whites’ (2021: 32).

Coard's argument has been widely cited as a summary of the role of institutional racism in the intersection between race and ability in England (Gillborn, 2015; Rollock et al, 2015; Gillborn et al, 2016). His pamphlet exposed what many had been trying to disguise: from the early eugenicists and the origins of IQ testing, racism has been implicated in the history of education in England (Gillborn, 2008).

‘The student experience’ did not exist when I first started my undergraduate degree at the University of Edinburgh in 2008. People may have used those words, but they did not have a ‘thingness’ to them; it was not yet management lingo or survey material. We did not measure it, compare it, or discuss it in such weighty and reified terms. How do you measure something so amorphous as ‘the student experience’? An experience at university is very particular, influenced by biography, expectations, identities, the people one is (un)lucky enough to be surrounded by, and wider events, like COVID-19. Many aspects of the student experience have nothing to do with the quality of the teaching, the general provision of support services, or the supposed value of a degree. And yet, measuring and ranking the student experience is a yearly pursuit in UK universities through the National Student Survey (NSS).

The NSS has been surveying final-year undergraduate students in the UK since 2005, gathering opinions about degree programmes and broader experiences at university. Student (dis)satisfaction is measured through a series of statements, tick-box responses, and the option to include written responses at the end of the survey. Numerical NSS results are then used as a proxy measure for quality of provision, informing university league tables, course comparison websites, the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), and university branding. The survey results continue to be used to rank and compare universities and courses as if factual, accurate reflections of university and course quality, informing prospective student decisions about where and what to study.

Being ‘REF-able’. The impact agenda. The student experience. These terms did not always exist in UK higher education (HE) and yet now they are central concerns for university workers, functioning as ideological codes or conceptual schemata that organise everyday academic life. They are used to assess the value of academics and their work in relation to key audit processes that inform the distribution of funding and prestige in UK HE. Using Institutional Ethnography (IE), I analyse three audit processes in detail – the National Student Survey (NSS), the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Research Grant application process, and the Research Excellence Framework (REF) – through autoethnographic reflections, interviews, and extensive text analysis of publicly available audit-related texts. I consider two key questions: How is UK HE organised by audit-related texts and discourses? And how much agency do academics have when (re)producing institutions, through the reading, writing, and performing of audit processes? As IE is a feminist approach to research, I also consider how these seemingly neutral audit processes (re)produce intersecting inequalities.

For those who are unfamiliar, the NSS is the annual undergraduate student satisfaction survey for UK universities, used in league tables, course comparison websites, and the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), which assesses teaching quality in universities primarily in England.1 The ESRC is one of seven UK government research councils2 and the largest funder of social science research in the UK, and its generic research funding application process is the Research Grant (ESRC-RG).

Why do academics spend so much time preparing funding applications? What do these highly competitive funding processes do to academic working conditions? And who decides what is ‘fundable’? Since finishing my PhD, I have unsuccessfully applied to four postdoctoral research funding schemes and three university-specific postdoctoral fellowships. These applications carried not just the promise of a funded research project, but more importantly paid work, job security, and imagined lives in new places. It was crushing to repeatedly dream up detailed research plans, sometimes up to 5 years long, which were attuned to the university, the department, and potential future colleagues and then … rejection. Sometimes one does not even get a formal rejection; one postdoctoral scheme for which I interviewed did not contact me post-interview to let me know the outcome. Such unnecessary cruelty in the academic job market is intensified for those who are precariously employed, because one's job and ability to stay in academia often depends on highly competitive funding processes.

This chapter is about the extensive work that goes into writing research funding applications within a highly precarious UK higher education (HE) sector. To do this, I examine how social science applicants navigate the Economic and Social Research Council Research Grant (ESRC-RG) funding application process, focusing on the multi-layered strategies required to translate research ideas and researchers into ‘fundable’ formats.

Institutional Ethnography (IE) is a feminist approach to research developed by English-Canadian sociologist Dorothy E. Smith (1922– 2022) in collaboration with colleagues and students (D.E. Smith, 1987, 1990a, 1990b, 1999, 2005, 2006b; Griffith and Smith, 2014; Smith and Turner, 2014a; Smith and Griffith, 2022). It largely focuses on how people's everyday lives are coordinated with others (Smith and Griffith, 2022, p 3), beginning in people's experiences and examining how they are organised by institutional texts and language, including audit processes.

Confusingly, given the name, IE is not simply an ethnography of institutions, but rather provides a comprehensive ontology of the social, concepts to help describe the dynamics of the social, and a methodological framework for doing research. IE has become an expansive interdisciplinary, international field, with researchers taking up Smith's work and the IE approach in vastly different ways, as I discuss in my thesis (Murray, 2019, pp 43– 64), and as shown through IE edited collections (Campbell and Manicom, 1995; Frampton et al, 2006; Smith, 2006b; Griffith and Smith, 2014; Smith and Turner, 2014a; Reid and Russell, 2018; Lund and Nilsen, 2020; Luken and Vaughan, 2021, 2023). As such, it is difficult to succinctly describe and so for those who are unfamiliar with IE, I recommend Smith and Griffith (2022) and Smith (2005), which provide a comprehensive overview of the approach.

Audit culture has transformed academic life into textual and discursive ‘things’ to be assessed, ranked, and differentially funded. This has created enormous amounts of new bureaucratic work, including entirely new jobs in universities – impact advisors, Research Excellence Framework (REF) managers, student survey teams, student experience officers – which redirect money and time away from doing teaching, research, and other front-line services, towards auditing them. Audit processes affect who gets to be an academic in UK higher education (HE), informing hiring, firing, promoting, and funding decisions. Doing meaningful research and teaching does not mean much if one's ‘outputs’ are not REF-able or if one's teaching does not ‘satisfy’ students. Thus, interpretations of the National Student Survey (NSS), the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funding processes, and the REF are profoundly important as they inform who gets to stay and who has to leave the sector, how bearable their working conditions are, and what kind of academic work they can do. And so, while academics might experience audit as a nuisance to get through as quickly as possible so they can get back to their ‘real work’, audit is a key mode of reproducing UK HE and academic culture in which we are complicit.

As my research has shown, academics have interpretive power in the translation between audit rules in institutional texts and actual practice. We are required to do audit processes in exchange for universities receiving public funding, alongside requirements for accountability, and these are implemented within deeply managerial and undemocratic university structures.

What is the point of academic research? Should it be a pure pursuit of knowledge, protected from the whims of government and the zeitgeist? Should we be following Marx's oft-quoted maxim that the point is to change the world? And how much say should governments have on the direction of academic research? Throughout my PhD, I was pre-occupied with these questions around the ‘point’ of academic research, fuelled by an impatience around the slowness of change, the horrors of the world, and a worry that doing a PhD was a luxurious, selfish pursuit. While these impulses have not gone away, I have made my peace with the position of the academic and try to think carefully about the consequences of my research in a humble and accountable way. My theory of change is informed by what I have learnt from Institutional Ethnography (IE) and examining UK higher education (HE) audit processes, acknowledging how difficult and complicated it is to change complex bureaucratic organisations. Political life in the UK and beyond is also instructive; the world is a mess, and the best-laid plans often go awry, but slow and steady organising can produce profound and unexpected change. And so, in this final substantive chapter, I will examine the ‘impact agenda’ in UK HE and consider practices of measuring, tracking, and rewarding ‘impact’.

In UK HE, impact refers to the effect that academic research has on the world, often focusing specifically on changes that occur because of academic research.