Professor Stan Taylor Discusses the Release of the Third Edition of ​‘A Handbook for Doctoral Supervisors’

Professor Stan Taylor spent many years as a lecturer at Warwick University before transitioning into academic staff development. Subsequently, he became Director of Quality Enhancement at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and then Director of the Centre for Academic and Researcher Development at Durham University, where he is currently an Honorary Professor in the School of Education. 

He formally retired in 2013 but has continued with his long-standing work in doctoral education. He has facilitated workshops with doctoral supervisors to enhance their practice in over 50 universities in the UK and many overseas in Europe and the Far East. 

Stan is an Honorary Life Member of the UK Council for Graduate Education and an Honorary Member of the Association of Professionals in Doctoral Education. He authored the UKCGE Good Supervisory Practice Framework and was the architect of the Research Supervision Recognition Programme. He was also the founding chair of its Research Supervisors’ Network and compiler of its Research Supervisor’s Bibliography. 

He has numerous publications of doctoral education including, most recently, with Margaret Kiley of the Australian National University, the third edition of ​‘A Handbook for Doctoral Supervisors’ which was published by Routledge in July. 

In this interview, Stan discusses the major changes to the supervisory landscape since the past edition and the potential trajectory of the sector of the next couple of years. 

What major changes in supervisory practices have you noticed over the past few years?

Doctoral education has been changing very rapidly. Just to illustrate that, the first edition of the handbook came out in 2005. We waited 13 years before we thought the second one was necessary and that was published in 2018. Here we are, six years later, and we’ve had to write a third edition. The reason for that is five major changes in doctoral education over that period. 

The first one has been the belated discovery of inequality in admissions to doctoral education. After being neglected for many years, recently data on the composition of the candidate population has been collected and published. This makes it clear that people from racial and ethnic minorities, lower-class backgrounds, etc., are not accessing graduate education in anything like the same proportions as they are undergraduate education. So that’s been one major factor, the drive for some kind of equality in admissions. 

The second one has been a foregrounding of the power imbalances in doctoral education. We’ve known about these power imbalances for many years; the supervisor is in a much more powerful position than the candidate. We’ve also known that this has been abused and that there has been bullying, harassment, etc. But fin the past these matters have largely been swept under the carpet. What has changed in recent years is that it’s come out into the open. People have been much more inclined, when things have gone wrong, to actually complain about it, and this has impacted supervision. 

A third one has been the changes in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), which have enabled online supervision and online examination. Of course, those were in the pipeline beforehand but were hugely hastened by the COVID outbreak. Having been told we couldn’t do online supervision [or] online examination for years, suddenly, overnight, we all managed to do it. And that changed supervision because although there has been a return to face-to-face, there’s still quite a large proportion is being done online. We [also] now have, [in] the last two years, the impact of AI, because that is clearly affecting the whole research agenda, including the relationships between supervisors and candidates. 

The fourth one is the evidence that’s been accumulated really since about 2017 showing that doctoral candidates are more likely than other comparable sections of the population to suffer from issues relating to well-being and mental health, including depression, anxiety, clinical depression, etc. While the evidence for a mental health crisis has been all based on convenience sampling, which is not necessarily reliable, it’s certainly a development that’s impacted policymakers and institutions. And, because supervisors are in the front line in terms of being contact with candidates, that’s affected supervisory relationships as well. 

The final one is employment. The assumption was always that, if you did a doctorate, you’d become an academic. That held up [well] until the 1990s. But what’s happened over the last two decades or so is, on the one hand, an explosion in the number of doctoral candidates in most countries. For example, in China, they’ve gone up by 450% since 2000 and even in the UK, by about 140% over that period. So, there’s been a huge increase in number of candidates. But, on the other, there’s not been a commensurate increase in the numbers of academic posts and though choice or necessity increasing numbers of doctoral candidates are finding employment outside academia. 

So, we’re now in a position in the UK where basically, three years after graduation, 70% of doctoral graduates will be working outside higher education. The question then becomes, how far has doctoral graduates’ experience in general and the supervision they have received in particular, prepared them for careers outside academia? 

So those have been the five big changes that we’ve had to focus on in the book. 

What have been the recommendations that the newest edition of the handbook to address and speak to those new problems that have arisen? 

Well, I think the first thing with regard to the area of equality of admissions, the advice is very much in terms of paying attention to the many national initiatives to try and recruit doctoral candidates from disadvantaged groups. Many universities have them. And that’s one area. 

Another is in terms of interviewing: We tend in interviews with applicants to concentrate on the past. So, what we’re interested in is what people have done and what they’ve achieved in the past. Also, many of us, consciously or otherwise, attach weight to which universities they achieved it as prestige indicators. But these foci can penalise disadvantaged applicants and there is now a new emphasis on what’s to come on prospects. So, we ought to be looking less at where applicants have been before, less on what they’ve achieved before, and more on what they have the potential to achieve in the future. That’s been the big change there, namely levering the system so that you don’t disadvantage people from non-traditional backgrounds. 

On the second change, in terms of power relationships, there is a new ​‘Respect Agenda.’ This was pioneered in Australia by the Australian Council for Graduate Research, which produced an agenda setting out very strict conditions for relationships between doctoral supervisors and doctoral candidates. And harassment and worse is now coming much more out into the open. Literally in the last three or four weeks, professors in China, Switzerland, and the Netherlands have been dismissed because of sexual harassment of doctoral candidates. I think most supervisors have always been aware of the power imbalance and respected candidates. But the very small minority that haven’t, it’s something that they have now got to take very, very seriously indeed. 

Thirdly, with ICT, it’s not the same as supervising face-to-face. You need a whole lot of new skills. It’s not the same arranging an examination online as it is face-to-face. You need new techniques and skills there as well. And then, of course, the latest thing is what do we do about AI? How do we advise our candidates to use it? Because it’s a fantastic tool to help candidates’ research, but how would you help them to draw the boundary between using it and abusing it, for example doing your academic writing for you? 

On wellbeing and mental health, again, as this has come out in the last few years. Institutions have put a responsibility onto supervisors to support candidates. Now, most supervisors are not qualified in any way, shape, or form to directly deal with these issues. One of the things in our book was to try to give them the best advice possible as to how to notice whether something untoward was happening with a candidate, how to approach them without upsetting them, knowing very clearly the boundaries of where you intervene, and of the importance of being able to signpost them to the appropriate quarter. 

Also, there is a need to consider the ethics of it. In most cases, conversations with candidates about these matters are bound by the confidentiality of the confessional. But if a candidate threatens to harm themselves or harm somebody else, that’s something else. Supervisors need all this, so we’ve tried to provide advice around all those themes. 

And then finally, supervisors being expected to encourage candidates into non-academic employment. Most supervisors have been in academia all or most of their lives and have very little if any experience of employment outside higher education. So, there’s a real issue there of what can you as a supervisor can support candidates in their career choices. The kind of advice we’ve tried to give is firstly in terms of attitude. Don’t privilege academic jobs. Only, on average, 1 in 3 of your candidates will get an academic job. Don’t make the other two in three feel failures. They’re not. It’s a different ballgame, a different world. Then secondly, how you help them in terms of conducting development needs analyses. Again, pointing them in the direction of the appropriate services where they can take things forward. 

So that’s a sort of very brief run through the kind of advice we’ve tried to give in the handbook. 

Do you have any insights into how the supervisory landscape might evolve in the coming years? 

Well, I think what we’ve got to do is look at the PhD as a whole. When it was first developed in Berlin in 1810, it was a training for academics. That’s what it remained until the late 20th century. But It’s not just a training for academics now. 

It’s now been rebranded as a training for research workers in the knowledge economy. So, it’s essentially [developing] researchers to work inside or outside academia and ensuring that they have the communication skills and the application skills to have to take their research into the real world, develop it, and where appropriate, sell it. 

So, you’ve now got the PhD being used for a very different purpose from that it was originally intended. There have been some adaptation, including the introduction of professional doctorates, particularly in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and to a much lesser extent in the US and Western Europe. However, rightly or wrongly, there have been issues about the status of professional doctorates relative to the PhD, and the outcome is as yet uncertain. 

Another adaptation has been developing different forms of the PhD itself. I’ll give you an example from an Australian university where the PhD is tailored to future careers. So, if you want to become an academic, you can do a conventional PhD but with training and teaching in academic administration as well. If you want to go into industry, you follow the entrepreneurial route, which is where, in addition to the PhD studies, you get training in financial management, team management, etc. The third variant is the international PhD, where if you want to work in business internationally, you do similar things to the entrepreneurial one, but with a focus on languages as well. 

A further adaptation has been doing PhDs with organisations outside of higher education. This is very strongly related to the impact agenda. Originally, the idea was that we pursued knowledge for its own sake. That has, to my regret, has been increasingly questioned. What’s happening is that people are saying, ​‘okay, we’re paying for you to create this knowledge so who will benefit at the end of the day?’ What they want to see is something tangible in terms of positive impacts on the economy, social welfare, climate change, or whatever else it might be. 

The thrust of this agenda is very much particularly for collaborative doctorates with industry, commerce and the public and not-for profit sectors. Again, [this is] fine in itself, but it can create issues for supervisors because normally supervision is shared with the external partner. However, these supervisors may have very little idea of what’s involved in a PhD and may have very different ideas about the outcomes. The usual complaint of academics [regarding] industrial supervisors is that what they want is a fast buck; ​‘let’s get it done, get it out, patented, and then we move on.’ In such situations, the academic verities are neglected, and this creates a difficult situation for supervisors. 

I think in the future we’ll see doctoral education becoming much more commercialised and doctoral supervision becoming much more dependent on outside contacts, reflecting that knowledge economy agenda. 

What steps do you think institutions should take to ensure that doctoral supervisors are well-supported in providing effective supervision? And how can institutions ensure that supervisors can provide effective support in emerging forms of doctorates, such as professional or collaborative doctorates? 

I think that perhaps an obvious first step is for institutions to provide professional development. But the professional development programmes in most of the UK, and indeed most European universities for that matter, tend to concentrate on rules, regulations, and timely completion, with little or nothing on pedagogy. And supervisors have to do it all in three hours. 

It seems to me that the imperative now is to develop much more sophisticated initial professional development programmes. For example, in countries like Sweden, you’re looking at programmes spreading over two or three weeks, and covering all of these different cases of supervision, types of supervision, relationships with external supervisors etc. So, I think that’s the first thing. 

The second is mentoring of new supervisors by established ones. Now, again, a lot of universities have got schemes in place whereby you have to be a second supervisor for one supervisory cycle before you can supervise on your own. But this begs the questions: what are the criteria for the mentors?; How do institutions make sure you don’t have the bad leading the bad? And the last time I looked at this, which was literally three or four years ago, there was only one university in the whole UK that had criteria for the mentors of supervisors. I would like to see universities developing criteria and using supervisors who have got some recognition—one example would be the UKCGE Supervisor Recognition Programme—as the mentors to help colleagues along. 

The third thing, I think, is continuing professional development. Particularly as supervisors get further and further on in their careers, they lose contact with ongoing developments and still see the world as it was a very long time ago. But that world has changed, and changed dramatically, and practice should be developed accordingly. I would like to see institutions do much more in the way of continuing professional development. This need not be unduly time-consuming and can be done online. The example we quote in the book is Queen Mary University in London, which has got a very good online programme for established supervisors, who at the end take a short test and have to get 80% to be signed off. I think that’s an example of a good way forward. 

Another thing which has come out so strongly from the UK Research Supervision Survey (UKRSS) is the need for adequate time allowances for supervision. Institutions vary considerably in if and how far supervision time is included in workload models and/​or setting limits on numbers of supervisees. This was a major concern of supervisors, and one of the central themes in the very good book by Karen (Clegg), Owen (Gower), and Gill (Houston) which reported the results of the survey and made appropriate recommendations. 

I would also argue that more institutions ought to have proper schemes to recognise excellence in supervision. They’ve all got teaching excellence awards; but a much smaller number have got supervision excellence awards. However, many of these are ​‘beauty contests.’ whereby candidates are asked who are asked to nominate their favourites. But there are a couple of awards we mention in the book, namely those of the Universities of Bath and Birmingham, which do have criteria for supervisors to be nominated by students and by staff, and they are highly prestigious. So, I think that’s something that other institutions could look at with a view to enhancing the status of supervision. 

And then the penultimate thing is promotion. I’ve looked at the promotion criteria of the UK universities. Quite a lot of them do have criteria, which includes supervision, but it’s a ​‘bums on seats approach’ based on the number you’ve got through, how long they’ve taken, whether they got it at the end of the day outright or with minor corrections etc. So, the focus is on quantity and criteria relating to the quality of supervision seem to be lacking. So, I would recommend that institutions consider quality as well as quantity in promotions criteria. 

And then the final thing is encouraging external recognition. UKCGE have, in a world first, developed a recognition scheme for supervisors, and a number of institutions in the UK and overseas have supported staff to gain recognition. It is prestigious for them and there is evidence now that recognition can help to attract students because it’s an indication of quality supervision. 

What resources would you recommend to both new and experienced supervisors to help them enhance their supervisory practice?

Their most valuable resource is each other. We know, and again this comes out strongly from the UKRSS, that supervisors’ main source of information is actually talking to each other. It strikes me that institutions can really help to support that in two ways: 

One is decent mentoring schemes, which we’ve already covered: make sure that new supervisors are talking to good established supervisors. 

But the other one, which a number of institutions have established, is supervisor forums. I’ve seen these at two universities—York St. John and Liverpool Hope. Basically, several times a year, supervisors are invited online to talk to each other about issues and problems. That works very well as a resource for them. 

A further thing would be to encourage self-development. The UKCGE framework for Good Supervisory Practice informs the recognition scheme. But you can just simply use it to benchmark your own practice. Have a look at what you’re doing relative to that framework, see what you’re doing well, what you’re doing less well, and then do something about it if there are issues. So, there’s a self-help dimension there. 

A fourth one is access to high-quality training resources. Here, there the Epigeum suite on ​‘Supervising doctoral Studies’ (a commercial programme for which I was an advisor and contributor) is used by a number of institutions. For the future, Research England has funded RSVP directed by Karen Clegg and Professor Doug Cleaver which will soon be producing a whole range of new online resources to support supervisors, which can be accessed freely by supervisors across the globe. This is a very exciting development, and it’s something I’m really looking forward to seeing the resources. 

And then there is access to literature. Here it is worth mentioning the UKCGE Research Supervisor’s Bibliography. It’s about 220 pages now and annotated by topic. So, if supervisors want to look at the scholarly resources, hopefully they should find suggestions of value.