In memoriam: Professor Claire Callender OBE

Professor Claire Callender OBE, who held joint professorships at UCL Institute of Education and Birkbeck, University of London, died at home amid her family on Tuesday, 15 April, after the cancer which developed in one lung and was in remission had moved to the other. She dealt with her illness and the rollercoaster of treatments, tests and diagnoses with exceptional strength, characteristic realism and eventually, open acceptance, making the best of her remaining time. Claire’s life and contributions will now be celebrated, but her passing at a relatively young age has sent a wave of sadness through UK and world higher education. She touched the lives of many as a scholar, colleague and mentor; played a central role in policy and public discussion for three decades; and had much respect and friendship in the sector. She was awarded an OBE for services to higher education in 2017.

Claire attended Notting Hill and Ealing High School between 1961 and 1972, completed a BSc in Social Administration and Sociology at Bristol in 1979, after a period as a community worker in the Beit She’an Community Centre in Israel, and a PhD in Gender and Social Policy at the University of Wales in 1988. Her thesis topic was ‘Women’s employment, redundancy and unemployment’: both gender and the labour market for graduates were to become lifelong research preoccupations. She worked successively at University College Cardiff, and the Universities of Leeds, Bradford and Sussex (in the Institute of Employment Studies), before becoming head of the Family Finances Research Group at the Policy Studies Institute in London (1994-1998). Her first chair appointment was at London South Bank University as Professor of Social Policy (1998-2008). Claire’s social research star was rising and early in the Blair years (1999-2000) she spent time in the Cabinet Office on secondment as Head of Research in the Women’s Unit and a member of the Senior Management Team.

In 2006 and 2007, Claire was a visiting scholar successively at the Center for the Study of Higher Education at Pennsylvania State University, and the Graduate School of Education at Harvard, and was also a Fulbright New Century Scholar in 2007/08, forging productive research collaborations in the United States that continued throughout her career. Her post as Professor of Higher Education Policy commenced at Birbeck in 2008, followed by the Professorship of Higher Education Studies at the Institute of Education (which merged with UCL in 2015) in 2010. She juggled the respective cultures, needs and demands of the two rather different neighbouring institutions with aplomb. Her heart might have been with Birkbeck, and there her policy focus on part-time, adult and evening students had its natural home, while UCL IoE placed her squarely in the centre of the university-policy interface and brought multiple opportunities for fruitful collaborations and ongoing academic friendships.

In 2012, she worked with Peter Scott to develop a bid to the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for a five-year centre with a multi-project focus on higher education. The bid was unsuccessful but the theme caught the attention of the ESRC and the Higher Education Funding Council of England (HEFCE), and in the next ESRC centre round in 2014 there was a specific call for bids focused on the future of higher education, with HEFCE underwriting part of the cost. A team headed by myself was successful, establishing what became the ESRC Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE) with £5.9 million for 2015 to 2020. Claire was named as a Deputy Director alongside a formidable group of England-based researcher-scholars including Peter Scott, Mike Shattock, Gareth Parry, William Locke, Lorraine Dearden, Gill Wyness and Paul Ashwin, as well as Ellen Hazelkorn at Technological University Dublin in Ireland and researchers from seven other international partner universities.

Claire convened five CGHE research projects under the heading ‘Social and Economic Impact of Higher Education’. Appropriately, given Claire’s own interests and skillset, these projects were all sharply focused on UK policy issues, while mindful also of global comparisons and relevance. The researchers on her list included the leading economists Bruce Chapman and Lorraine Dearden who together modelled income-contingent loans systems of tuition funding in a dozen countries. They achieved a major breakthrough in Columbia in 2022 where their blueprint was adopted by the ministry. Bruce and Lorraine were awarded the ESRC prize for policy impact and paid tribute to Claire’s role in supporting their work.

CGHE received a further tranche of £1.5 million in ESRC funding for 2020 to 2024 before entering its present phase as a largely self-funded operation. Claire continued as Deputy Director, central to CGHE research management and in public forums, and an appreciated mentor to junior researchers. Her own quantitative and qualitative CGHE inquiry into ‘The effects of student loan debt on graduates’ financial and life decisions’, working primarily with Ariane de Gayardon, led to successive papers on the human and social costs for diverse populations associated with the uniform system of student-user charges in England. From 1998 onwards, after fees were introduced into what had been a free higher education system, Claire had been concerned about student financing and its impact, including comparisons between England and Scotland where free education was maintained. She was frequently and eloquently public on those issues. Uncomfortable with debt financing as a deterrent, a long burden and a source of inequalities, like many in higher education she was a staunch advocate of maintenance grants. Her concern that the 2012 full fee system would discriminate against part-timers proved wholly justified when full-time enrolments held up while part-time numbers plummeted. The then Minister for Higher Education, now David (now Lord) Willetts, acknowledged that Claire’s work on the issue was unique and crucial.

As this suggests, perhaps the key aspect of Claire’s scholarly work was her eye for policy relevance. During her career she was commissioned to undertake research and/or invited to present evidence to the OECD, the European Commission and governments in Germany, Finland (where she was appointed by the Ministry of Culture and Education to the peer-review panel for the assessment of the Finnish Higher Education System in 2015), Poland, and Malaysia. She reported to numerous Parliamentary Select Committees in UK, and all the major reviews of student funding that took place in the UK after 1997 – including the most recent review, the Augar Report of 2019, where she was extensively cited. Claire’s contributions to research scholarship included more than 125 books, reports and chapters, more than 30 peer reviewed journal papers and numerous conference and seminar presentations. Some of her very best scholarly work was done in the final years. The last journal paper, with Ariane de Gayardon, was published in Policy Reviews in Higher Education earlier this year. Claire became a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2003 and her standing in Europe was recognised in 2023 by her elevation to Academia Europaea. The OBE acknowledged her UK policy work.

The formal honours were and are appropriate, but they do not capture the essence of Claire Callender in the world: the way she focused her formidable capacity for rational thought on matters to which she was committed, her gravitas that held the room when speaking, and the warmth that she evoked without fail in old and new acquaintances. Claire leaves her partner Annette and a large circle of family and friends. She is much missed.