Time to transition?
Students are struggling — and the system is too
In the business of making observations, sometimes you need specialist equipment – perhaps a telescope to observe a galaxy lightyears away, or a microscope to observe matter at a molecular level. At the Observatory for Mathematical Education, our observations are generally life-size. Although pupils and students are easy to see, understanding why one thrives while another struggles is far more difficult.
Students are not a production line where knowledge and skills emerge according to a neat equation. They are individuals responding to countless internal and external pressures, often in ways that standard measures fail to capture. Assessment scores, attendance data and student satisfaction surveys may tell us something, but they are imperfect proxies for what really matters. What I, and other educators, want to know is much simpler, and much harder to answer: how is this student progressing, and how healthy is the system that is supporting them?
Signs of strain in higher education
Recent events suggest all is not well within higher education. Last week brought news of Cranfield University merging with King’s College London amid growing financial pressures. Closer to home, the School of Mathematical Sciences at º£½ÇºÚÁÏ is facing staff reductions as part of wider university cuts. These pressures are not just institutional, they shape students’ experiences when they start at university. Students are navigating one of the most challenging transitions in their educational journey: moving from school or college into university.
For students currently sitting A levels or Highers, almost every aspect of learning changes at once. The curriculum changes, often introducing unfamiliar ideas such as proof. Teaching styles change too; asking a question in a lecture theatre of 300 students feels very different from speaking up in a classroom. Alongside this comes wider change in daily life: new friends, new accommodation, and, often for the first time, full independence to manage all the above. It is little surprise that many students find this transition difficult. Confidence can fall quickly, and some begin questioning whether they belong in university at all.
What students are telling us
This month, the Observatory for Mathematical Education published new research exploring the motivations, barriers and support needs of mathematics students during the transition to university.
The findings reveal a mixed picture. Many students felt the curriculum itself builds reasonably well from A level content, reflecting years of effort across the sector to address knowledge gaps. However, students were far less comfortable with the jump in difficulty and changes in teaching style. Perhaps most strikingly, while school and college students often rely heavily on teachers for support, university students are much more likely to turn to friends, lecture notes or YouTube before approaching academic staff. As one student explained: “Sitting in a room for hours with no support can be very daunting, lonely and hard.”
Support structures do exist but somewhere along the way expectations have become misaligned. Universities expect students to demonstrate resilience and independence, while students can interpret asking for help as evidence that they are failing to be resilient or independent. Add in uncertainties around the future of those support structures, and it’s easy to see how quickly students can fall through the cracks.
A transition we cannot afford to ignore
At the Observatory, this is exactly the kind of challenge we are trying to better understand; not simply whether students succeed or fail, but how educational systems shape those outcomes, and how students experience those systems in practice. Until we can observe the invisible, we need to focus on the things we can change. That means moving beyond simply trying to minimise curriculum gaps and instead rebuilding the student-staff relationships that help students feel supported, confident and able to belong.
We may not need telescopes or microscopes to observe what is happening in higher education, but we do need to start paying closer attention to the students struggling in front of us before they disappear from the system altogether.
Author information
Chris Brignell is the Deputy Director of the Observatory for Mathematical Education and a Professor of Statistics and Mathematical Education at the º£½ÇºÚÁÏ.
Observatory for Mathematical Education team