Consolidating neoliberal ideology in higher education policy: the case of ‘value’

The significance of policy discourse in shaping the values, roles and practices of contemporary education is widely acknowledged in the educational research community. In particular, Critical Policy Discourse Analysis (Montessori et al., 2019) offers a contextually sensitive, theoretically informed text analytical framework through which to explore the role of policy discourses in the evolving social dynamic of educational power and knowledge. Working with policy data also poses practical, methodological difficulties associated with analysing a large body of data. This paper presents a method for addressing this problem by means of a well-established approach in discourse studies, that draws on computer-aided ‘corpus linguistic’ tools as a heuristic device for identifying salient linguistic features for further qualitative analysis using critical discourse methods (Baker, 2006; Fuster et al, 2021). The approach is illustrated by means of a case study from UK higher education policy. Since the latter half of the last century, both compulsory and higher education in the UK (and elsewhere) have been progressively framed by neoliberal values and market-derived governance practices. In particular, this has led to greater use of audit mechanisms for monitoring and measuring the ‘performance’ of individual educational actors, who are increasingly enmeshed in a competitive, outputs-focused field (see Mulderrig, 2008 on the emergence of competition and skills as key education policy discourses). A key development in this respect has been the introduction in 2017 of the ‘Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). Its core purpose is twofold: firstly, to audit and rank universities by teaching quality, and secondly to open up the university market to private (for-profit) providers. The mechanism draws heavily on proxy measures of teaching and learning like the National Student Survey scores as well as student retention and outcomes data. Following initial criticisms, a number of modifications have been made to the way this regime operates, although its core commitment to the quantification of teaching quality remains. This paper examines the policy trajectory of the TEF, critically exploring the discourses by which it sought to reframe university education in more firmly neoliberal terms. Drawing on the heuristic value of the corpus-aided approach, I argue that the TEF calls into question the very basis of social relations and engagement in university education. Through textual repetition and grammatical framing, market concepts like ‘competition’ and ‘value for money’ are systematically (and spuriously) represented as the keys to greater access and social mobility for students. I argue that this policy takes a significant step towards recasting (higher) educational relations in extrinsic, exchange-value terms, which are deeply damaging to universities’ original purpose of building communities of trust, critical reflection, and intellectual freedoms. Baker, P (2006) Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis Continuum Fuster-Marquez M, Santaemilia J, Gregori-Signes C & Rodriquez-Aburneiras P (Ed.), (2021) Exploring discourse and ideology through corpora (pp. 233-262). Bern: Peter Lang. Mulderrig, J. (2008) Using Keywords Analysis in CDA: Evolving discourses of the knowledge economy in education, in: B. Jessop N. Fairclough & R. Wodak (eds), Education and the Knowledge-Based Economy in Europe (Rotterdam, Sense Publishers), pp. 149–170.