Derek Keenan and Alexander Cuthbert, University of Strathclyde, 14th August 2025
Prompted by recent developments in both the Learning Development (LD) community and in Higher Education in the UK as whole, we saw the emergence of crisis and potential threat to Learning Development as a distinct discipline and the Third Space that Learning Developers offer to learners.
We decided to put some questions to our colleagues in Scotland at the ScotHELD Winter Meeting in January 2025, in order to get a sense of whether we were correct in our fears and how Learning Developers are experiencing the present situation.
The three questions were:
How is the funding crisis in Higher Education impacting LD? (Q1)
How does where you are currently positioned impact upon what you are asked to? (Q2)
How do we defend LD as a Third Space within the current crisis in HE? (Q3)
Funding Crisis in HE
Higher Education in the UK is under siege with roughly 50% of institutions experiencing cuts to staff and provision through voluntary severance/exit schemes, compulsory redundancies, closure of departments, closure of campuses. closure of courses and suspension or severe restriction of recruitment.
Our ScotHELD colleagues’ responses, in great part, mirrored these developments, stating the unlikeliness that their services could grow despite “strong demand and need” whilst they were experiencing “increased pressure to do one-off, lecture-based work sacrificing embedded work developed over years” and were finding themselves “being asked to teach subject-specific content” to make up for shortfalls in lecturing staff.
LD Positioning
Practitioners said that they were “definitely experiencing an increase in people asking us to teach basic academic skills (like referencing) because their academic teams are too stretched to cover these topics themselves”, talking about fragmentation and inefficiencies. Others mentioned the challenge of multiple campuses with fewer staff leading to an inconsistency of provision.
Defence of LD as a ‘Third Space’
Responses to this prompt were fewer due to constraints of time, but it was noted that LD might be defended through the development of “colleagues’ knowledge about the benefits of keeping LD in 3rd space rather than merging it with subject specialism”.
The responses showed that a spectre was haunting UK Higher Education, casting a significant shadow over Learning Development. But what was happening in the rest of the world?
We got the chance to find out through our engagement with ICALLD’s Symposium Over Time (01-02 May 2025). We were unsure whether the financial crisis engulfing UKHE was replicated elsewhere so we were interested to find that it was. Participants talked of there being “no chance of growing staff base”, despite demand and a “lack of sustained investment”. Even more so than from our ScotHELD responses, we heard that some colleagues were facing uncertain futures due to “short term contract [s] and job precarity” with the “pressure to do more with the same hours” being a concern. One practitioner stated that “we have moved from a team to me”, whilst we heard that “concern about technology replacing some staff work in name of economic efficiency” (Q1).
On Q2, responses were varied, as we expected. A number of respondents were part of centralised services, including one such service “with one liaison officer in each faculty”. A notable level of dissatisfaction with positioning was reported with one Learning Developer saying that they felt an expectation on the part of the institution that their remit was “to fix everything for everybody”. This may be relatable to many practitioners.
Some colleagues were part of broader services teams another and one was physically positioned in the corner of the campus library, which they feared may be the “physical manifestation of how we are often seen (or not)!”. Hopefully not! Others related that they had been “lumped in with tutoring services” or didn’t agree with being seen as a part of a portfolio of student services, rather than a “teaching and learning one”. Another participant suggested they we seen as just “one unit of many supporting students”. Which for them, brought difficulty getting attention and promotion.
Q3, concerning the defence of LD as a Third Space within the current crisis in HE, some participants were relatively new to the idea of the Third Space, one stating that they found it a useful “way to describe what we do, and how” within academia, whilst on the other hand, another said that they saw themselves in a Second Space as “faculty”. There was some agreement that we as a profession should seek out collaboration with academics whilst remaining ourselves. As one respondent said “we need to position our third space not as totally separate from disciplinary study, but as a natural place to utilise within that – “same but different”.
ScotHELD Summer Meeting (UWS, Paisley 23/04/25)
Having had a chance to reflect on the wealth of experiences and insights gathered from our international colleagues, we collated the responses we received from the two ICALLD facilitated sessions and shared our summaries with ScotHELD members at our Summer Meeting hosted by the Student Services Academic Skills Team at University of the West of Scotland. Broadly speaking, in response to the question regarding current pressures (Q1), ICALLD Symposium participants identified issues regarding the misunderstanding of their roles and practices, an increased pressure to deliver generic or subject-specific content, as well as the impact of financial and resourcing constraints.
With regard to Q2, issues of geography and the nature of widely spread large/multiple campuses was identified and the “spread of centralised and in-faculty teams”. As is often discussed, there was a clear desire for “more collaboration” across faculties and subjects, as well as the experience of feeling pressured to “fill gaps” in teaching or other university service provision.
In a response to such challenges (Q3), ICALLD members suggested that we can “use the freedom we have” to define our roles and practices to demonstrate how we can “educate through dialogue and collaboration with colleagues” to enhance the position of learning development (in its many international guises) to enhance the experiences of the learners, researchers, and staff we work alongside.
What next?
With these date-stamped snapshots shared, we will return to the themes and responses they foreground in future discussions with ScotHELD and ICALLD members to get an evolving sense of their continuing relevance (or otherwise) and plot their positions against the ever-changing landscape of LD practice in Scotland and beyond.
Thanks to everyone who attend our ICALLD and ScotHELD discussion sessions in 2025. Your contributions and advice were greatly appreciated. Thank you.