Discussion: The Changing Role of the Photography Course Leader - What Do We Do Next?

Across the country, course leaders are holding their courses together with equal parts skill, ingenuity, and sheer stubborn will. They are leading teams, supporting students in crisis, rewriting curricula to fit shifting policy agendas, absorbing every new technology that’s thrown at them, and still finding time to nurture the next generation of practitioners. Yet much of this work is invisible, under-recognised, and increasingly unsustainable. This is not a quirk of photography education - it is a structural reality creeping across the whole sector. Across education, course leaders are being asked to carry more, absorb more, and answer for more — often without the power, training, or resources to shape the very changes they are tasked with implementing. It’s a slow erosion of professional autonomy, wrapped in the language of “flexibility” and “responsiveness,” but the cost is real: creative risk is stifled, pastoral care is stretched thin, and critical voices are drowned out by managerial demands. The question is not whether these pressures exist, but how we, as a collective body, respond to them before they reshape the education profession into something unrecognisable.

For those of us in photography, the stakes are heightened. The pressures course leaders face are compounded by the precarious position of creative subjects in the current higher and further education climate. Photography is both cultural and technical, artistic and commercial, a discipline that must defend its critical and experimental core while meeting external demands for “employability” and “value for money.” This creates a double bind: leaders must fight to preserve the integrity of the subject, even as they are tasked with bending it to fit market priorities.

In practice, the photography course leader has acquired an ever-expanding portfolio. Pastoral care, safeguarding, industry engagement, inclusion work, AI adoption, marketing, curriculum compliance - each is layered onto the role without equivalent capacity, training, or authority. The result is a slow but steady erosion of the time, freedom, and focus needed for genuine pedagogical leadership. And eventually, something has to give.

If we, as APHE, exist to defend and champion photographic education, then silence is not an option. We need to decide how we show up for our members when they are being pulled apart by competing pressures. Do we organise? Do we lobby? Do we create spaces that refuse the metrics and reclaim the conversation?

The future of photographic education will not be secured by waiting politely for change - it will be built by those prepared to demand better.

Let’s discuss these themes and see what emerges…

Dr Graham Wilson is a Departmental Tutor in Psychology and Counselling at the University of Oxford, the author of a number of Psychology, Photography, and Organisational Behaviour textbooks, and a member of the APHE executive committee.