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Government policy for economic development across Scotland and the UK is driving an increasing number of strategic alliances in higher education to achieve economies of scale and economies of experience. Higher education institutions have been encouraged through strategic funding to further develop externally facing university-business engagement. Effective collaboration could theoretically produce the advantage of a better student experience and, at the same time, make the market for higher education more competitive. Collaborative structures are complex including the interaction between the people or agents who work within and between them. The challenge is how such collaboration can best be organised to deliver across organisation boundaries. The purpose of the study was to explore and report on a causal story of collaborative practice by examining the insider perspectives of the people engaged in collaborative strategic projects in higher education. Collaboration is defined as a relationship which is mutually beneficial to organisations to achieve common aims, including the structure, roles and relationships within collaborations. The study considered one such strategic project, the Scottish HE Employability Forum,in particular, the lived experience of the members of its project management group and was informed by the evidence based literature. The interpretivist qualitative approach to the study, with semi-structured interviews, represented one specific time interval of the participant voice considering the set-up, implementation and evaluation of the strategic project. The data analysis and findings confirmed a priori themes, for example, the need for trust building, effective leadership and strategic planning. A principle emergent theme was that the notions of agency and reciprocity were not mutually exclusive and impacted on the causal mechanisms and explanation of observed behaviours and relationships of the participant members. A conceptual framework from the current study is presented suggesting themes of collaborative activity being comprised of a broader pattern requiring relational behaviour, expert and champion roles for successful collaboration. A series of recommendations is given for collaborative practice; for project management, effectiveness and sustainability along with key messages of knowledge transfer and learning.

Research into ‘ethnic’ attainment differences in British higher education tends to depict students from minority ethnic backgrounds as disadvantaged, marginalised, discriminated against and excluded. This shapes the current theoretical perspective adopted by university policies and informs practice. However, the consequences of this perspective for students, their educational attainment and university education as a whole are largely unexamined. This study explored the teaching and learning experiences of students, alongside their views concerning how these experiences may have impacted on their attainment. To arrive at a more unbiased and better informed understanding of ethnic attainment differences, the student narratives in this study were analysed from a realist philosophical position. The experiences students related included student interactions, participatory and intellectual engagement, (un)equal treatment and academic study and support. The richness and variety of the individual narratives defied simple analysis and required further discussion of perceptions, interpretations, meaning, understanding and categorisation. Some students talked of social interaction in terms of race, colour, ethnicity, nationality, culture, class and age, while others thought such social grouping unproblematic. Engagement was seen either as participatory engagement in the learning process or as intellectual engagement with the subject. There were perceptions of unequal treatment due to race or ethnicity which contrasted with suggestions of straightforward unprofessional practices. Attitudes to academic study ranged from descriptions of struggling with the academic workload to feeling the lack of intellectual challenge. The analysis and discussion revealed a process of minoritisation that resulted from the current approaches to ethnic attainment. The continued use of group-based social differentiation inadvertently fosters the idea that ethnic and social attributes matter and creates a divisive subtext which loses any sense of our common humanity. Group-based social differentiation can undermine the resilience and human agency of students because it suggests that educational attainment is predominantly determined by ethnic and social attributes, downplaying the students’ capacity to act in pursuit of educational goals. As a result, university policies and practice perpetuate rather than ameliorate the status of minority ethnic higher education students.