Student:Staff Ratios in the Disciplines

Staff:Student Ratios

I have problems with League Tables (some of them are discussed in the introduction to this paper), but the individual metrics within a league table are often objective and - within certain interpretive constraints - useful. One of the metrics used in the Guardian League Table 2022 (GLT22) is the Student:Staff ratio (SSR), and the Excel spreadsheets that accompany the table allow for a swift analysis of this particular metric by subject.

SSRs are an interesting metric. In broad terms, low SSR numbers are good, indicating that there are few students per member of staff: lower scores boost your GLT rank. SSRs don’t relate directly to teaching quality (most of us have had a lecturer who inspires hundreds of people at a time). They probably do speak to the working conditions of staff and the student experience of non-scalable activities (e.g. personal tutoring, marking/feedback) as well as influencing some of the structural decisions (e.g. group sizes for workshops, assessment diet, timetabling of labs).

Caveat: It is not completely clear to me how SSR data is produced. I know that HESA has a protocol for compiling these figures, but I do not have the knowledge or skill to critique them - I’m pretty much taking SSR numbers at face value for the rest of this blog.

Chemistry SSRs

Chemistry’s median SSR is 13, with an inter-quartile range of 11.5-15.9 and a range of 9-20. These ranges are quite wide, meaning that staffing levels vary substantially (by a factor of 2) across UK Chemistry departments.

The SSRs of Chemistry departments in the 2022 Guardian League Table. Each dot is one department. The median is represented by a vertical line.

Some variation is expected in any data set, but the size of this variation is interesting. Are SSRs of 20 challenged by the RSC in the accreditation process? Are staff workloads lower in places with low SSRs, or do the pedagogies change (e.g. smaller workshop groups)? Did the pandemic resilience of departments relate to SSRs at all?

SSRs in Other Disciplines

Comparing Chemistry with other subjects is interesting, too. I’ve plotted some representative subjects and dotted in the median Chemistry SSR.

Box-and-Whisker plots of SSRs by discipline, with the median SSR for Chemistry represented by a dashed line.

There are two readings of this data. The first is to say that the Chemistry SSRs look pretty good compared to most subjects. The second is to say that the Chemistry SSRs are worse than Medicine and Physics.

I think it’s this second reading which is the most appropriate, because (1) Chemistry is a ‘high-cost subject’, attracting extra government funding compared to subjects like History; and (2) the contact hours for Physics and Chemistry degrees are comparable with Medicine. A 2019 HEPI report suggested that Physical Sciences students have 15 contact hours a week compared to 18 for Medicine students. In contrast, Law had 10 and History 8.

Physics and Chemistry

Direct comparison with Medicine is difficult because Medicine attracts unusually large amounts of additional funding per student from the government (producing medics is a strategic priority for the UK in a way that producing Chemists isn’t).

Note particularly the isolated upper outliers in Physics, compared to the ‘long tail’ of high SSRs in Chemistry departments; the third quartile values are 9.8 for Medicine, 12.35 for Physics, and 18.45 for Chemistry.

But why doesn’t Chemistry have SSRs low enough to rival Physics? Oxford’s SSR values were 14.9 for Chemistry and 9.9 for Physics; in my setting, staffing Chemistry and Physics’ levels could reduce every hour of my marking to 40min. Why does Physics have such low SSRs?

I don’t really have an explanation for this, though a few ideas seem plausible. Is the opportunity cost of Chemistry teaching labs (the estates cost, the consumables budget) an SSR margin of 2 students/staff? Is the prestige of a Physics Department something generously subsidised by the (few) Universities which have one? Does Physics have a managerial culture of sustainable staff workloads? Is there something about IOP accreditation which has acted to ratchet down SSRs in Physics to support its staff and student members?

Disciplinary Policy Response

The rise of the corporate university has weakened the disciplines as it has strengthened central university management, so it is really curious to see such wide differences between the SSRs of different disciplines: there’s a factor of 2 between the median SSRs for the traditional professions of Medicine and Law.

With the difficult allocation of A Level grades during the pandemic, the SSR has become even more relevant from a policy perspective: the growth of some departments - mostly in the Russell Group - has come at the expense of others, and SSRs might track some of this upheaval in the next few years.

I find it surprising that the RSC has said so little in public about the threat that pandemic recruitment poses to UK Chemistry departments, or the crushing workloads experienced by many academic staff. SSRs sit in the middle of these issues, and could be readily operationalised into a gentle upwards pressure on student learning conditions and staff working conditions. I have a modest, concrete proposal for how to do this.

Policy Suggestion

The RSC has the power to include SSRs in its accreditation criteria, which might be leveraged to reduce some of the higher SSRs in the sector (e.g. by declining to renew course accreditation when HESA-recorded SSRs lie above the 90th percentile for three consecutive years). The data is all there - it would place minimal additional burden on accreditation procedures. This mechanism might serve to support not only student members of the RSC (smaller workshop groups etc), but also staff: the high workloads experienced by practising academic chemists have massive consequences for the culture and inclusivity of the discipline.