HE Chaplaincy – research presentation

“if a university chaplain organises an event but nobody turns up….was it a failure?’

This was the opening question of a session entitled ‘What’s it worth? Impact in HE chaplaincy’ and posed by Christopher Stephens and Sue Miller to university chaplains at their annual CHELG (Chaplains in Higher Education Liaison Group) conference. Questions, too, around the feasibility and the desirability of assessing or measuring the impact of chaplains’ interventions also resulted in significant debate and conversation. Approaches to monitoring and evaluation in universities, the centrality of a framework which focuses on “positive student outcomes” and their measurement, and the challenge to chaplaincy in trying to provide data which fits into this framework all featured. And from this, further questions arose:

‘How can we say that a chaplaincy volunteering event led to better degree outcomes; or that good pastoral care reduced the awarding gap between students of different groups; or that a regular eucharistic service each week meant someone went on to get a better job after leaving university?’

All difficult questions to answer; providing evidence is far from straightforward, although, arguably, at a time of limited financial resources in the HE sector, chaplaincy does need to try to prove its value….and it may be possible, for example, to track the impact of chaplaincy’s work around building a sense of belonging on student engagement and better degree outcomes.

But perhaps what is needed is permission and encouragement for chaplains to provide ‘evidence’ which sits more easily with the focus of their work by looking to sources of data and capturing impact in novel and less prescriptive ways, something which Christopher and Sue have been exploring in their own research.

There is an argument, too, for a counter-narrative – one which honours the spiritual impetus behind chaplaincy’s work and allows for a consideration of that work in terms of broader human flourishing. The conclusion of an article recently published by Aune et al. (2023) chimes with such a position:

‘Chaplaincy constitutes the gift of the relational presence of a particular tradition of wisdom that aims to enhance life. Chaplaincy does not necessarily, therefore, easily accommodate itself to the contemporary notion of performance management: it speaks a different language.’