Central management got some consultants in to look into the cause of this unexpected poor performance, and their report identified unusually high numbers of extension requests and requests for extenuating circumstances granted by staff as being the main issue, as these are being used as proxies for measures of ill health and stress.  As a result, the already partly centralised process for extension requests has been further centralised and automated, so that now the requests are processed on the basis of an algorithm, and decisions made about whether they should be granted are taken out of the hands of academics. 

There’s this lecturer on a professional programme, whose students are generally older, have caring responsibilities, often have their own businesses or other complications.  When they first brought in the automated system he thought it was maybe a good thing – it cut down on his work in lots of ways, not only that he no longer had to worry about the requests but also the system automatically creates new assignment dropboxes so he has less to do on the VLE admin side too.  But he’s heard rumours that the data are being used to compare courses and programmes, and that if the numbers are too high, staff – and in some cases whole programmes - are being put under investigation. The argument is that if there are lots of extension requests in one particular course, the lecturer isn’t creating a supportive learning environment.  And if there are lots of requests across a whole programme, then maybe the programme as a whole is not supportive, or maybe it attracts students who are not resilient – either way, the university doesn’t want that kind of hit to its H&WB numbers. Of course no one has actually admitted to being under such an investigation, but he can see it happening. 

The lecturer has decided to check the numbers for his own courses, and to compare them to the numbers for other courses in his programme and to the average across the university, which is published in the university’s weekly newsletter. He goes into the Learning Management System and gets extensions request reports for his courses for the last 3 years.  They’re consistently higher than the university average, and by a long way.  He’s not really surprised by this – there are good reasons for it. He can’t access the data for courses he doesn’t coordinate, so he asks his Programme Director if he can look at the numbers for the other courses on his programme.  His PD responds by saying he has been meaning to talk to the team about this – their numbers have been identified as too high by central management, and their programme is being put under investigation. 

The possible outcomes of the investigation are: that the teaching staff are deemed to be insufficiently supportive, and so are sent for compulsory emotional intelligence training, and told they have one year to turn the numbers round or they’ll lose their jobs.  Or maybe the lecturer manages to make a good argument as to why their students are more likely to be experiencing difficulties, and the university decides it doesn’t want a programme that draws students like that on its books.  Or introduce compulsory resilience training into the programme, so all students have to pass a resilience test during the induction before they’re allowed to proceed.