Category: Leadership & Management

  • The case for playful leadership

    The case for playful leadership

    Of course: UK higher education is in a perilous state, with ever-tightening institutional budgets, thousands of staff at risk of redundancy, institutions on the verge of closure, and the threat of AI causing a rush back to closed-book exams.

    In this context, a call to play might seem mis-timed and perhaps a little tone-deaf.

    Please bear with us. Play is about more than games and goofiness and is far from frivolous. It endorses a philosophy that supports openness, creativity, and bravery: qualities that the sector really needs from its leaders right now.

    Risk aversion

    In times of difficulty there is a temptation for institutions to revert to traditional values and avoid risks. This might manifest in removing small, specialist, or contentious courses in favour of large popular subjects, in stifling academic freedom and discussion, or in a reluctance to explore new ideas or research. As pressures grow from government and popular media, leaders may become increasingly leery of making decisions that make their institution stand out.

    This culture of inertia, pressure, and performativity sucks the joy and creativity from academia, hampers change and makes it difficult for institutions to make the efficiencies necessary to be financially sustainable without shedding staff and closing courses on an endless repeat cycle.

    And this environment is exhausting and unsustainable. In a world where change is the only constant, we need to embrace new possibilities and prepare staff and students to manage and embrace uncertainty. We must all be resilient, creative, and engaged, and play can facilitate this at all levels.

    Playful learning

    The use of playful learning approaches across the sector has increased in the last decade. Play pedagogies are finally being taken seriously: membership of the Playful Learning Association has grown to over 600 over the last fifteen years and the annual conference regularly sells out.

    In research too, play is often the key that unlocks the greatest discoveries (Nobel prize physicists attest to it): having space to experiment, be creative and mess around with ideas, data or materials is essential for ground-breaking contributions to knowledge. The ESRC has recently funded a significant three-year multi-institution research project led by Northumbria university that will evidence what forms of playful learning work and why.

    But it is past time for play to be taken seriously by leadership. Higher education leaders could benefit from a philosophy of play: being willing to change and try new ideas, embracing open leadership, and being brave enough to endorse new approaches that set them apart for the sector. The ability to fail well is crucial and having the vulnerability to publicly accept that leaders do not always know the answers allows institutions to learn from mistakes openly and collegiately.

    Vulnerability and humanity

    There are examples of sector leaders who demonstrate these values. It has been refreshing to see vice chancellors show their humanity and honest vulnerability on social media and platforms like Wonkhe. For example, recently vice chancellors at Middlesex University, Buckinghamshire New University, and Plymouth Marjon University have offered honest reflections on what it means to be the leader of a modern university, giving very different, more personal and playful lenses on senior leadership than the usual corporate statements and press releases.

    At Northumbria University, leadership has driven a strategic push for experiential learning across all programmes, embracing active and authentic learning to provide students with the real-life skills and experiences they will need to thrive beyond university. This has been achieved through open discussion with staff communities of practice and led from the bottom up as well as the top down; staff are encouraged to be creative and experiment. It is not a cheap or easy option, but it differentiates the university and comes from a belief that this approach is best for our students.

    At Anglia Ruskin University, open and empathetic leadership has been key to navigating the institution through challenging times, with senior leaders holding honest community events and talking openly about vulnerability. When trying to understand institutional belonging, leaders facilitated playful thinking through Lego workshops to develop shared principles. Play also influenced a strategic development for student experience, using techniques from video games to create an engaging introduction to the university for all incoming students.

    Open to possibilities

    There are already examples of successful playful leadership in the sector, and we believe that it is those leaders who are not afraid to be open – both to new ideas and to making mistakes – that will have the best chance for success in our increasingly hostile and uncertain climate. Institutions face difficult choices on how to differentiate and survive; higher education cannot continue as it is.

    The next few years will be challenging, and leaders will need to be more open to possibilities, creative in their approaches, and willing to embrace and learn from their mistakes as the sector reshapes into something sustainable – built with and for our current and future staff and students. Now more than ever, play really matters.

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  • In an era of permacrisis, higher education needs to get better at coming up with solutions

    In an era of permacrisis, higher education needs to get better at coming up with solutions

    Readers of Wonkhe need no reintroduction to the storm surge of bad news that, wave after wave, is washing over the sector’s defences and causing the majority of UK institutions to take drastic financial evasive action.

    Given that the government’s response to the growing financial crisis in UK higher education seems to be “let’s do a ranking of vice chancellor salaries compared to graduate salaries” and “let’s introduce an international student levy that the Australian Government decided was a bad idea,” it also seems pretty clear that the sector isn’t exactly cutting through with its political affairs arguments.

    In other words, the sector has to generate our own solutions to the problems we face.

    On the back foot and retreating

    On 25 June The Venn University Leaders Forum will convene senior academic and professional service leaders from across the sector to provide them with the space, inspiration and facilitation needed to help develop these solutions.

    The Venn will feature interactive sessions focused on geopolitical scenario response, unconferences, challenges “from the vice chancellor’s desk” and perspectives from North America and from outside higher education. Most importantly it will take the conversations in the margins’ of conferences that so many of us find the most valuable part of these forums – and provide the space and format for that to happen during the main programme.

    We need a better playbook

    In adjusting to permacrisis, one of the challenges universities and the sector has as a whole is that we risk spending all our time and energy raising the shield to fend off each individual wave of issues; and wielding the sword only in a defensive, reactive measures to trim staff numbers, cut courses and reduce expenditure.

    There are two risks to this approach. First, institutions can’t “take a breath” to think about how they adapt to the new reality, leading to constant reactive churn, burnout of staff, and leadership feeling under siege. This reminds us of that moment in about February 2021 when the adrenaline of dealing with successive Covid impacts and new variants started to seriously ebb away from those within universities, and institutional leaders started to think longer term about how to turn ‘crisis-response mode’ into ‘crisis-as-usual’.

    Second, the sector misses the tsunami lurking on the horizon and fails to invest in measures that either avert or prepare for a much larger impact. Given that on almost every occasion in the last decade we’ve said, “oh, that couldn’t possibly happen” only for the Darkest Timeline to be victor – it’s now odds-on that a Farage-Badenoch ticket will sweep to victory in the next General Election. How is higher education preparing for this possibility?

    “Telling people what do” isn’t working

    When I was in the US recently as part of the CASE Global Leaders Programme, a senior representative from one of the US university associations said they had a shared bingo card with their colleagues that they used every time a university president said “we just need to tell our story better… we need a ‘Got Milk’ campaign.” But we’ve been trying versions of that for a while, and nothing has changed. It’s no longer sufficient for higher education to “tell” better. It needs to “do” better.

    For universities, the question is now no longer “how do you do more with less?” Instead, it is becoming “how do you do less with less?” – and what do you stop doing entirely? As difficult as the current situation may seem, the sector still has the resources, political capital and ingenuity to make bold, impactful choices about what it does differently. This includes new models of delivery that might change the public and political narrative, shift the dial financially and maybe even divert the worst case scenario. Critically it has the opportunity to look at what is happening around the world – most strikingly in the US – and learn what to do (and what not to do).

    This article is published in association with The Venn – find out more about The Venn and apply to attend here. Wonkhe is partnering with The Venn to create a dialogue between the event and our upcoming Festival of Higher Education on 11–12 November – early bird tickets are now on sale.

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  • If it’s top down it won’t work

    If it’s top down it won’t work

    Higher education institutions are complex ecosystems where policies shape the experiences of students, academics, and administrative staff.

    However, the process of policy creation and implementation often lacks inclusivity, flexibility, and responsiveness to the rapidly evolving educational landscape.

    If institutions are to thrive in an era of digital transformation, shifting student expectations, and increasing socio-economic challenges, they must rethink how policies are designed and enacted.

    A more participatory, adaptive, and evidence-based approach is essential to creating institutional policies that truly serve the needs of all stakeholders.

    Top down without engagement

    Institutional policies often emerge from a centralised, top-down approach, where senior leadership teams develop policies without adequate engagement with those directly affected (students, faculty, and professional service staff).

    This results in policies that may be well-intended but are disconnected from on-the-ground realities. For instance, policies surrounding Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL) frequently fail because they do not account for academic workload constraints, staff and students’ digital literacy levels, or disparities in institutional infrastructure.

    The gap between policy intentions and practical implementation then leads to confusion, resistance, and limited adoption.

    Policies should not be dictated from the top – but rather co-created with those who will implement and be impacted by them. This requires institutions to foster genuine dialogue with diverse stakeholders, ensuring that different perspectives and experiences shape decision-making.

    Adopting participatory approaches such as Change Laboratories, a method that engages stakeholders in problem-solving workshops, can provide a structured way for institutions to address contradictions and inefficiencies in their current policy frameworks.

    A recent Change Laboratory intervention at a UK research-intensive university demonstrated the benefits of participatory policy development. The initiative brought together academics, administrators, and digital learning specialists to collaboratively identify barriers to effective blended learning adoption.

    Through iterative discussions and problem-solving exercises, the group developed a Culturally Advanced Activity System (CAAS), aligning institutional policies with pedagogical realities. The process not only resulted in a more practical and effective policy framework but also increased staff engagement and willingness to adopt blended learning practices.

    The success of participatory policy-making in blended learning highlights its potential application across other areas of policy. Institutions could apply similar methodologies to enhance policies related to assessment frameworks, student support services, diversity and inclusion, and faculty development. By institutionalising collaborative problem-solving approaches, HE governance structures can become more responsive to evolving educational needs.

    Rigid policies that fail to account for evolving challenges and opportunities quickly become obsolete. HE institutions must adopt a more dynamic approach, treating policies as living documents that are regularly reviewed and updated based on data-driven insights.

    For example, instead of prescribing a one-size-fits-all approaches, institutions should allow for staff-led experimentation, followed by structured evaluations to refine policies based on what works best in different disciplines.

    An evidence-based policy culture?

    Stakeholder-led policy development is crucial to ensuring that policies are not only relevant but also widely accepted and effectively implemented. By actively involving students, faculty, and administrative staff in the policy-making process, HE institutions can create frameworks that reflect the lived experiences of their communities.

    This participatory approach fosters greater trust, encourages meaningful engagement, and enhances the practicality of policies. When stakeholders have ownership over policy development, they are more likely to support its implementation, leading to smoother transitions and sustainable institutional improvements.

    Additionally, fostering a culture of continuous professional development ensures that policy decisions align with the latest pedagogical and technological advancements.

    For HE institutions to remain relevant and responsive in the 21st century, they must overhaul how they create and implement policies. Moving away from rigid, top-down structures and embracing participatory, flexible, and evidence-driven approaches will ensure that policies are both effective and widely supported.

    Institutional leaders must prioritise stakeholder engagement, foster a culture of continuous learning, and create policies that genuinely enhance teaching, learning, and student success.

    Without these changes, HE risks stagnation in an era that demands adaptability and innovation. By embedding participatory mechanisms and evidence-based strategies in governance, HE institutions can pave the way for a more inclusive and forward-thinking educational environment.

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  • Capability for change – preparing for digital learning futures

    Capability for change – preparing for digital learning futures

    Digital transformation is an ongoing journey for higher education institutions, but there is something quite distinctive about the current moment.

    The combination of financial uncertainty, changing patterns of student engagement, and the seismic arrival of artificial intelligence is pointing to a future for higher education learning and teaching and a digital student experience that will certainly have some core elements in common with current practice but is likely in many respects to look rather different.

    At the moment I see myself and my colleagues trying to cling to what we always did and what we always know. And I really do think the whole future of what we do and how we teach our students, and what we teach our students is going to accelerate and change very, very quickly now, in the next five years. Institutional leader

    Our conversations with sector leaders and experts over the past six months indicate an ambition to build consistent, inclusive and engaging digital learning environments and to deploy data much more strategically. Getting it right opens up all kinds of possibilities to extend the reach of higher education and to innovate in models for engagement. But future change demands different kinds of technological capabilities, and working practices, and institutions are saying that they are hindered by legacy systems, organisational silos, and a lack of a unified vision.

    Outdated systems do not “talk to each other,” and on a cultural level as departments and central teams also do not “talk to each other” – or may struggle to find a common language. And rather than making life easier, many feel that technology creates significant inefficiencies, forcing staff to spend more time on administrative tasks and less on what truly matters.

    I think the problem always is when we hope something’s going to make it more efficient. But then it just adds a layer of complexity into what we’re doing…I think that’s what we struggle with – what can genuinely deliver some time savings and efficiencies as opposed to putting another layer in a process? Institutional leader

    In the spirit of appreciative inquiry, our report Capability for change – preparing for digital learning futures draws on a series of in depth discussions with leaders of learning and teaching, and digital technology, digital experts and students’ union representatives. We explore the sorts of change that are already in train, and surface insight about how institutions are thinking in terms of building whole-organisation capabilities. “Digital dexterity” – the ability to deploy technology strategically, efficiently, and innovatively to achieve core objectives – may be yet another tech buzzword, but it captures a sense of where organisations are trying to get to.

    While immediate financial pressures may require cutting costs and reprofiling investment, long term sustainability depends on moving forward with change, finding ways, not to do more with less but to do things differently. To realise the most value from technology investment institutional leaders need to find ways to ensure that across the institution staff teams have the knowledge, the motivation and the tools to deploy technology in the service of student success.

    How institutions are building organisational capability

    Running through all our conversations was a tension, albeit a potentially productive one: there needs to be much more consistency and clarity about the primary strategic objectives of the institution and the core technology platforms and applications that enable them. But the effect of, in essence, imposing a more streamlined “central” vision, expectations and processes should be to enable and empower the academic and professional teams to do the things that make for a great student experience. Our research indicates that institutions are focusing on three areas: leadership and strategy; digital capabilities of institutional staff; and breaking down the vertical silos that can hamper effective cross-organisational working.

    A number of reflections point to strategy-level improvements – such as ensuring there is strategic alignment between institutional objectives for student success, and technology and digital strategies; listening to the feedback from students and staff about what they need from technology; setting priorities, and resourcing those priorities from end to end from technology procurement to deployment and evaluation of impact. One institutional leader described what happens when digital strategies get lost in principles and forget to align with the wider success of the organisation:

    The old strategy is fairly similar, I imagine, to many digital strategies that you would have seen – it talks about being user focused, talks about lean delivery, talks about agile methodologies, product and change management and delivering value through showing, not telling. So it was a very top level strategy, but really not built with outcomes at its absolute core, like, what are the things that are genuinely going to change for people, for students? Institutional leader

    Discussions of staff digital capabilities recognised that institutional staff are often hampered by organisational complexity and bureaucracy which too often is mirrored in the digital sphere. One e-learning professional suggested that there is a need for research to really understand why there is a tendency towards proliferation of processes and systems, and confront the impact on staff workloads.

    There may also be limits to what can reasonably be expected from teaching staff in terms of digital learning design:

    You need to establish minimum benchmarks and get everyone to that place, and then some people will be operating well beyond that. You can be clear about basic benchmark expectations around student experience – and then beyond that you need to put in actual support [such as learning design experts] to implement the curriculum framework. E-learning professional

    But the broader insight on staff development was around shifting from provision of training on how to operate systems or tools to a more context-specific exploration of how the available technologies and data can help educators achieve their student success ambitions. Value is more systematically created across the organisation when those academic and professional teams who work directly with students are able to use the technology and data available creatively to enhance their practice and to problem solve.

    Where data has been used before it’s very much sat with senior colleagues in the institution. And you know it’s helped in decision making. But the next step is to try and empower colleagues at the coal face to use data in their day to day interventions with their students… How can they use the data to inform how they support their students? Institutional leader

    Decisive leadership may be successful in setting priorities and streamlining the processes and technologies that underpin them; strong focus on professional development may engage and enable institutional staff. But culture change will come when institutions find ways to systematically build “horizontals” across silos – mechanisms for collaborative and shared activity that bridge different perspectives, languages and disciplinary and professional cultures.

    Some examples we saw included embedding digital professionals in faculties and academic business processes such as recruitment panels, convening of cross-organisation thinking on shared challenges, and appointment of “change agent” roles with a skillset and remit to roam across boundaries.

    Technology providers must be part of the solution – acting as strategic partners rather than suppliers. One way to do that is to support institutions to pilot, test, and develop proof of concept before they decide to invest in large-scale change. Another is to work with institutions to understand how technology is deployed in practice, and the evolving needs of user communities. To be a great partner to the higher education sector means having a deep understanding not only of the technological capabilities that could help the sector but how these might weave into an organisation’s wider mission and values. In this way, technology providers can help to build capability for change.

    This article is published in association with Kortext. You can download the Capability for change report on Kortext’s website. The authors would like to thank all those who shared their insight to inform the report. 

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  • Heat networks could help institutions meet net zero targets

    Heat networks could help institutions meet net zero targets

    Heat networks enable heat and hot water to be distributed from a central ‘energy centre’, via mainly underground pipes, to multiple buildings.

    Boiler systems in connected buildings would be replaced with new infrastructure, to enable circulation of heat from the network. The energy centre becomes the source of the heat supply.

    Heat networks have a long history — with the first networks being tested nearly 150 years ago. Distribution of heat from a centralised heat source was taken forward in New York city in the late nineteenth century. In the UK, heat networks were used in blocks of flats in the 1960s and 70s. Denmark was one of the first countries to start using heat networks on a wide scale, in response to the oil crisis in 1973. Currently, heat networks are commonly used in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe and in cities across the USA and Canada. There are around 14,000 heat networks in the UK with many being campus-style, providing heat to groups of social housing or hospital/NHS campuses.

    Modern heat networks can utilise sources of low carbon heat. These include energy from waste facilities, geothermal sources, solar thermal arrays, air and ground source heat pumps and data centres.

    Participating in a heat network is likely to be more environmentally friendly and, in some cases, more cost-effective than maintaining older, inefficient gas-fired heating systems.

    Funding available

    It’s estimated that fifty per cent of buildings in the UK are located in areas suitable for the construction of a heat network, which currently supply around 2 to 3 per cent of the UK’s heat. The Committee on Climate Change predicts that in order to meet net zero targets (with around 20 per cent of heat supply being from heat networks), it is estimated that investment will need to be around £60 to £80 billion by 2050.

    The government has confirmed its support for the sector, as re-iterated at November’s Association for Decentralised Energy Conference by Miatta Fahnbulleh, Minister for Energy Consumers. The government has set a target for at least 18 per cent of the UK’s heat demand to be met from heat networks by 2050. Over £600 million of government funding has been allocated to develop and improve heat networks.

    The government’s recently published “Clean Power 2030” action plan sets out that the national wealth fund will make available an expanded suite of financial instruments, as part of investment in heat networks and other clean energy sectors.

    The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero already significantly supports the sector via capital grant funding from the Green Heat Network Fund. Education institutions have a range of grant options available to them. One example is the Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme (via its delivery body, Salix Finance), being a fund dedicated to supporting energy efficiency and decarbonisation initiatives.

    Financial support for heat networks is supplemented by the work of other bodies such as the Heat Networks Industry Council, which is a joint industry and Government forum that aims to grow the heat network sector.

    Taken together, it is clear that there is genuine ambition to ensure that heat networks play a key role in helping the UK meet its net zero ambitions.

    Notable heat network developments

    A number of major heat network projects are underway, including the hugely ambitious South Westminster Area Network (referred to as “SWAN”), which will supply low carbon heating to the Houses of Parliament, the National Gallery and large areas of Whitehall, and the Leeds PIPES heat network, which connects to over 3000 dwellings.

    The existence of these projects, and numerous others, is evidence of a growing trend in the emergence of heat networks as a major contributor to the UK’s net zero ambitions.

    Campus based networks

    Heat networks can work well on campus-style facilities. Given the location of the projects mentioned above, city-based higher education institutions should also consider whether it is feasible for their buildings to connect to a heat network, and whether a heat network is planned in their area.

    There are a number of recent adopters of heat networks in the education sector, including the University of Liverpool, the University of Bradford and the University of Warwick, with many more universities considering becoming heat off-takers.

    Heat networks present academic institutions with an exciting opportunity to forge the way in supporting both new sources of heat, and decarbonising heat in urban areas.

    Regulation matters

    Aside from regulations that govern billing and metering, the heat network sector is not regulated. This, however, will change – the heat networks market framework regulations 2025 (currently in draft) is to come into force in stages over the next 12 months.

    Future regulation is subject to ongoing consultation, which includes consideration of how different groups of consumers are to be protected, and specific arrangements on standards of conduct and billing transparency.

    In particular, the proposed regulations do not specifically refer to a ‘supplier of last resort’ regime, which would enable a state-nominated entity to continue the operation of a heat network where the relevant operator had become insolvent. We understand that Ofgem and the government are considering how this would work, given the complexity of arranging for the ownership transfer of infrastructure and capital assets. We await further developments on this.

    The scheme rules of the Heat Trust, which operates to protect the interests of domestic and micro-business customers of heat networks, partly informed the content of forthcoming regulations. The Heat Trust’s voluntary scheme is intended to establish common standards of heat supply and associated customer service (with standards of service comparable to those required by Ofgem of electricity and gas suppliers). We therefore anticipate robust standards to be introduced within the regulations, for a wider group of consumers.

    Connecting to a heat network involves technical aspects relating to design, maintenance, service standards, and availability of a ‘green’ heat supply. Legal support is essential in navigating new networks as well as specialised technical support. For example, procurement risks, design and delivery risks, real estate and contamination issues, constructions issues, particularly around connection work and secondary side works, exclusivity arrangements and “change in law” provisions given forthcoming regulatory requirements.

    Mills & Reeve advises a number of Universities and other bodies on their participation in heat networks.

    If you are considering participating in a heat network and would like to speak to us about how we can help, please do contact any member of the M&R team.

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  • Should higher education be thinking in terms of evolution or transformation?

    Should higher education be thinking in terms of evolution or transformation?

    The pervasive sense that five years or a decade or 20 years hence the sector will look radically different might be an exciting topic for panel discussions but it’s not clear whether radical transformation is desirable – not least because the form that transformation might take remains far from clear.

    The drivers of change are well-rehearsed: while demand remains strong for higher education participation, as we’ll be exploring at our Secret Life of Students event this week, the traditional student experience is coming under intense pressure as students with diverse backgrounds, needs and aspirations try to wedge their lives into a fairly boilerplate model of higher education study. Most institutions don’t have the money to throw at additional services, or to carry the risks of innovating in how they structure their portfolio. Income from international students could go some way to smoothing out the rough edges but recent events have demonstrated the consequences of building a system on an income stream that’s so variable and subject to a change of direction in the political winds.

    The Westminster government’s current higher education policy agenda is a rag bag of “stuff we can all agree on” like access, quality, and civic engagement, and contextual mood music around industrial strategy, skills, devolution, and regional economic growth. Reading between the lines it seems there is a direction of travel towards a more coordinated regional post-18 offer broadly aligned to regional economic growth agendas, but against a punishing economic backdrop nobody’s very clear what this ought to look like, how deeply or broadly it should touch the general HE offer, or how it should happen.

    The lack of system-wide or even local coordination is a real worry, as individual institutions make decisions for sustainability and even survival that will have long term implications for the functioning of the system as a whole and the opportunities that are available to students. To give one example: colleges report that what they see as predatory behaviour by universities to try to scoop up the students that might more traditionally be seen in college-based higher education provision is placing that provision under significant strain.

    Choices for change

    Dealing with the immediate pressures on costs while also staring down the barrel of a call for reform is objectively a very difficult psychological space for higher education to be in. Everyone I speak to is desperate for more time in their day to reflect, digest, make sense, and plan. Something I often find useful when I find the world confusing (an alarmingly frequent occurrence) is some kind of model or map to help me structure my thoughts, especially when time is limited.

    I like putting one thing next to another thing and seeing what happens, and so for this case I put change actors on one continuum from individual institutions to multiple organisations in collaboration, and scale of change on the other, from evolution to revolution. I then tried to think of all the “change” activities that are either under way or are being mooted and assigned them to quadrants.

    I’ve taken a few things from this exercise.

    One is that I think it hugely unlikely that the sector will coalesce into one of the quadrants or even at the top or bottom of the model. I think we will see activity in all four quadrants depending on the context – and I think that policy should seek to support all four forms of change to give the sector the best chance of making a good fist of it. I have found arriving at this conclusion oddly freeing, as it stops the circular argument of advocating any single activity such as income diversification, or merger, or shared services, as a unified answer to the sector’s challenges. It is possible to argue, as we have at Wonkhe, that the policy environment could be more conducive to supporting radical forms of collaboration, without suggesting that all institutions must now hasten to adopt these forms if these do not serve wider missions and objectives. Likewise, it does not necessarily follow that introducing mechanisms to support collaboration would reduce competitive pressures in some parts of the sector or geographies, and the sector may collectively need to make its peace with that.

    Another is that it’s noticeable that the activity to the left in the “evolution” space is a much more “comfortable” space for higher education, in the sense that it’s possible to see it already in action and the sector knows how to do it, not that all the activities listed are necessarily things that are desirable in every case. There’s a question, then, about whether, IF substantial change is needed, it’s possible for the accumulation of practices in the evolution space to achieve it – or do we just end up with lots of random examples of interesting practice and not much that is fundamentally different. I instinctively think that policy should accept that the grain of sector practice runs in the direction of evolution rather than transformation, and seek to work with the sector on mapping critical paths towards the change that is desired rather than administering exogenous shocks to the system.

    Finally, I’d like to see what new ideas the sector could come up with in the right hand side of the diagram (especially the top right quadrant) – not necessarily to advocate for, but to help open up the conversation and ask meaningful questions of current practice. It’s quite easy to explain why all the ideas in the top right quadrant are unlikely to happen, so another way to come at that question is to ask whether there are other ideas that might be more plausible.

    Tone matters here though – for some that idea of transformation is something like a playground, where it’s fun to speculate about different possibilities and might spark some useful thinking. For others, it could carry a much more serious weight of strategic challenge and need to be approached accordingly as likely to have a material impact on people’s lives and working conditions. The stakes are much higher on this side of the evolution to transformation continuum, particularly where an institution is operating in the bottom right quadrant – the risks of failure are real.

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  • The five things universities do to cut costs

    The five things universities do to cut costs

    Incoming Office for Students chair Edward Peck would have expected that many of the questions he would face at his pre-appointment Education Committee hearing would concern the precarious financial situations that are the reality at many higher education institutions.

    His answer to this line of inquiry was instructive. As a part of an urgent briefing with the current chief executive he would want to know:

    the extent to which those universities have done all the things you do as an organisation when you face financial pressures. There are five or six things that you routinely do. To what extent have they been done by those organisations? To what extent is the financial pressure they are facing particularly acute because they have not yet got through all the cost reduction measures that would have enabled them to balance income with expenditure?

    To many with an interest in universities – as places to study, as employers, as local anchor institutions – this idea of “five or six things” would have been confusing and opaque. Is there really a commonly understood playbook for institutions facing financial peril? If there is, why would there be any doubt as to whether senior leaders were following these well-worn tracks to safety? If there genuinely is a pre-packaged solution to universities running out of money, why do so many find themselves in precarious financial situations?

    It would help to take each of these “five or six things” (I’m going to go with five) in turn.

    1. Size and shape

    If your university is smaller than expected in terms of students or income this year, the chances are it has been this size before.

    The sector has grown enormously over the last few years, and the way that funding incentives currently work (both in terms of boom and bust in international recruitment, and the demise – in England – of the old HEFCE tolerance band) has meant that the expansion needed to teach more students, run more estate, or conduct more research has had to happen quickly – taking action when the money and need is there, rather than as a part of a long term plan.

    Piecemeal expansion suffers when compared against strategic growth in that the kinds of efficiencies that a more considered approach offers are simply not available. Planned growth allows you to build capacity in a strategic way, in ways that take into account the wider pressures the institution is facing, the direction it wants to head, or plans for long term sustainability.

    Often senior leaders look back to the resources needed in previous years for a similar cohort or workload in determining costs at a subject area or service level of granularity. If we could teach x undergraduates with y academic staff and z additional resources in 2015–16, why do we need more now? – that’s the question.

    It’s a fair question – but it is a starting point, not a fully formed strategic plan for change. You may need more resources because there is more or different work to do – perhaps your current crop of academics are bringing in research contracts that need specialist support, perhaps the module choices available to undergraduates are more expansive, perhaps the students you are currently recruiting have different support needs. There’s any number of reasons why 2024-25 is not a repeat of 2015-16, and the act of comparison is the start of the conversation that might help unpack some of these a bit.

    2. Pausing and reprofiling

    Imagine that at your university the last few rounds of the national student survey have seen students increasingly bring up the issue of a lack of library capacity as a problem. In response, the initial plan was to increase this capacity – an extension to the existing building paid for with borrowing, refurbishment and update of the rest of the building, and more money for digital resources.

    A sound plan, but three years of lower than expected recruitment, declining income elsewhere, and an increased cost of doing business (construction costs are way up, for example) mean that the idea of putting the plan into action is keeping the director of finance up at night. It may be a necessary improvement, but it is no longer affordable.

    In other words some or all of this valuable work isn’t going to happen this year, as things stand. One decision might be to redesign the project – perhaps covering some of the refurbishment and the content subscriptions but not the new build (and thus not the new borrowing). Even these elements would still have a cost, and with no new finance this would be coming out of recurrent funds. And there’s not as much available as there used to be.

    So the other end of this point is reprofiling existing debt. For even a moderately leveraged university the repayment of capital and interest (under 6 per cent is pretty decent for new borrowing these days) takes up a fair chunk of available recurrent funding each year. If you are able to renegotiate your repayments – extending the loan term perhaps, or offering additional covenants, or both – this frees up recurrent funding to meet other needs.

    Both of these solutions are temporary ones – one day that library will need sorting out, and paying less of your loan back now inevitably means paying more back later. But sometimes suboptimal solutions are all that are available.

    3. Bringing things together

    There may well be cases where the same thing is being done in multiple ways, by multiple teams, across a single institution. There might be benefits in every faculty having an admissions team and a research manager, but in a time of financial constraint you have to ask whether a central team might be more efficient – and whether this efficiency is more important than the benefits being realised from the current configuration.

    Again – the calculus here differs from institution to institution. Where faculty autonomy is the norm, it may be that benefits are being realised that the centre doesn’t know exist, much less understand. As I am sure is becoming increasingly clear, questions like these are the start of a conversation – not the end. Even if in bald resource terms centralisation is a saving, you may not be taking all of the variables into account.

    Conversely, where there are clear savings and no meaningful reduction in benefits you are still entering into a course of action that could prove hugely disruptive to individual staff members. For some, your plan may represent a long hoped for chance for progression or role redesign – for others it may be the push that means that their years of experience are lost to the university as they retire or move to another role. With campus redundancies in the news each week, staff are rightly suspicious of change – bringing people along with new structures requires a huge investment of time and effort in communication, consultation, and flexibility.

    4. Focus

    There are many, many more effective ways to run a surplus than being a university. The converse of this is that people who run universities probably have non-financial reasons to want to run universities rather than running something else. In some of the wilder us-versus-them framings of campus industrial relations we can lose sight of the fact that pretty much everyone involved wants a university to keep on being a university, despite the benefits that would come alongside a sudden pivot into, say, rare earth metal extraction or marketing generative AI.

    That’s an admittedly flippant expression of something that is often forgotten in university strategising. We all have our reasons to be there. Expressing these is often the start of understanding which are the things a particular university does that are non-negotiably essential, and which are the things we do that are either generating income to subsidise these, or facilitating these things being done.

    If there is something that a university is doing that is non-essential, is not helping essential activity to get done, and it is not generating income to subsidise the things that are essential, why is it being done at all?

    Of course, this presupposes that everyone agrees on what activity fits into each category. Even posing the question can be painful. Once again, we are at the very beginning of a journey that probably took up a large part of governance and management meetings over the past few years.

    5. Addressing underperformance

    A couple of years ago, my party trick at conferences involving senior university staff was to show them my “fake subject TEF”. Confronted with a by subject analysis of student progression and satisfaction at their own provider, many of the staff I talked to would give me a similar answer – and it started “ah, I know why that is…”

    The problems our universities face are already known to those who work there. External datapoints only confirm things that are pretty well understood, and usually confirm an instinct to act on them sooner rather than later – a reason why OfS investigations have tended to find the smoking guns already put beyond use by the time they get on campus.

    If the problems within your institution are less obvious, a well-judged comparison with a competitor could help make things clear. A lot of the data you might want to play with is closely guarded, but there are ways in which you might use HESA’s public data to make a start (my tips – Student table 37, Staff table 11, Finance table 8). Otherwise, your staff will have a rich experience of working at other universities – what are the key differences. What is special about the way your place does things – and are there ways you can learn from the way things are done elsewhere.

    Bring to the boil and mix well

    If you are a university governor hoping for the mythical playbook, I can only apologise. If there was an easy way to make university books balance, we wouldn’t be where we are now.

    What is on offer is the hard choices and difficult conversations that will very often lead to arguments, mistrust, and conspiracy theories. At boards and councils up and down the UK, variations on the above conversations are at the root of everything you feel is going wrong on campus.

    You’ll be learning just how good your senior executive and governors actually are at running large, complex, beautiful organisations like universities. Parts of the university you may never have given a second thought to – the planning team, the finance department, the data analysis directorate, internal audit, procurement – will be coming up with ever more ingenious ways to make savings while preserving the university as a whole.

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  • How does the higher education sector sustain digital transformation in tough times?

    How does the higher education sector sustain digital transformation in tough times?

    Higher education institutions are in a real bind right now. Financial pressures are bearing down on expenditure, and even those institutions not at immediate risk are having to tighten their belts.

    Yet institutions also need to continue to evolve and improve – to better educate and support students, enable staff to do their teaching and research, strengthen external ties, and remain attractive to international students. The status quo is not appealing – not just because of competitive and strategic pressures but also because for a lot of institutions the existing systems aren’t really delivering a great experience for students and staff. So, when every penny counts, where should institutions invest to get the best outcomes? Technology is rarely the sole answer but it’s usually part of the answer, so deciding which technologies to deploy and how becomes a critical organisational capability.

    Silos breed cynicism

    Digital transformation is one of those areas that’s historically had a bit of a tricky reputation. I suspect your sense of the reason for this depends a bit on your standpoint but my take (as a moderately competent user of technology but by no means expert) is that technology procurement and deployment is an area that tends to expose some of higher education’s historic vulnerabilities around coordinated leadership and decision-making, effective application of knowledge and expertise, and anticipation of, and adaptability to change.

    So in the past there’s been a sense, not of this exact scenario, but some variation on it: the most senior leaders don’t really have the knowledge or expertise about technology and are constantly getting sold on the latest shiny thing; the director of IT makes decisions without fully coordinating with the needs and workflows of the wider organisation; departments buy in tech for their own needs but don’t coordinate with others. There might even be academic or digital pedagogy expertise in the organisation whose knowledge remains untapped in trying to get the system to make sense. And then the whole thing gets tweaked and updated to try to adapt to the changing needs, introducing layer upon layer of complexity and bureaucracy and general clunkiness, and everyone heaves a massive sigh every time a new system gets rolled out.

    This picture is of course a cynical one but it’s striking in our conversations about digital transformation with the sector how frequently these kinds of scenarios are described. The gap between the promise of technology and the reality of making it work is one that can breed quite a lot of cynicism – which is the absolute worst basis from which to embark on any journey of change. People feel as if they are expected to conform to the approved technology, rather than technology helping them do their jobs more effectively.

    Towards digital maturity

    Back in 2023 Jisc bit the bullet with the publication of its digital transformation toolkit, which explicitly sought to replace what in some cases had been a rather fragmented siloed approach with a “whole institution” framework. When Jisc chief executive Heidi Fraser-Krauss speaks at sector events she frequently argues that technology is the easy bit – it’s the culture change that is hard. Over the past two years Jisc director for digital transformation (HE) Sarah Knight and her team have been working with 24 institutions to test the application of the digital transformation framework and maturity model, with a report capturing the learning of what makes digital transformation work in practice published last month.

    I book in a call with Sarah because I’m curious about how institutions are pursuing their digital transformation plans against the backdrop of financial pressure and reductions in expenditure. When every penny counts, institutions need to wring every bit of value from their investments, and technology costs can be a significant part of an institution’s capital and non-staff recurrent expenditure.

    “Digital transformation to us is to show the breadth of where digital touches a university,” says Sarah. “Traditionally digital tended to sit more with ‘digital people’ like CIOs and IT teams, but our framework has shown how a whole-institution approach is needed. For those just starting out, our framework helped to focus attention on the breadth of things to consider such as digital culture, engaging staff and students, digital fluency, capability, inclusivity, sustainability – and all the principles underpinning digital transformation.”

    Advocating a “whole institution approach” may seem counter-intuitive – making what was already a complicated set of decisions even more so by involving more people. But without creating a pipeline of information flow up, down and across the institution, it’s impossible to see what people need from technology, or understand how the various processes in place in different parts of the university are interacting with the technologies available to see where they could be improved.

    “The digital maturity assessment brought people into the conversation at different levels and roles. Doing that can often show up where there is a mismatch in experience and knowledge between organisational leaders and staff and students who are experiencing the digital landscape,” says Sarah.

    Drawing on knowledgeable voices whose experience is closer to the lived reality of teaching and research is key. “Leaders are saying they don’t need to know everything about digital but they do need to support the staff who are working in that space to have resources, and have a seat at table and a voice.”

    Crucially, working across the institution in this way generates an evidence base that can then be used to drive decision-making about the priorities for investment of resources, both money and time. In the past few years, some institutions have been revising their digital strategies and plans, recognising that with constrained finances, they may need to defer some planned investments, or sequence their projects differently, mindful of the pressures on staff.

    For Sarah, leaders who listen, and who assume they don’t already know what’s going on, are those who are the most likely to develop the evidence base that can best inform their decisions:

    “When you have leaders who recognise the value of taking a more evidence-informed approach, that enables investment to be more strategically targeted, so you’re less likely to see cuts falling in areas where digital is a priority. Institutions that have senior leadership support, data informed decision making, and evidence of impact, are in the best place to steer in a direction that is forward moving and find the core areas that are going to enable us to reach longer term strategic goals.”

    In our conversation I detect a sense of a culture shift behind some of the discussions about how to do digital transformation. Put it like this: nobody is saying that higher education leaders of previous decades didn’t practice empathy, careful listening, and value an evidence base. It’s just that when times are tough, these qualities come to the fore as being among the critical tools for institutional success.

    Spirit of collaboration

    There’s a wider culture shift going on in the sector as well, as financial pressures and the sense that a competitive approach is not serving higher education well turns minds towards where the sector could be more collaborative in its approach. Digital is an area that can sometimes be thought of as a competitive space – but arguably that’s mistaking the tech for the impact you hope it will have. Institutions working on digital transformation are better served by learning from others’ experience, and finding opportunities to pool resources and risk, than by going it alone.

    “Digital can be seen as a competitive space, but collaboration outweighs and has far more benefits than competition,” says Sarah. “We can all learn together as a sector, as long as we can keep sharing that spirit of internal and external collaboration we can continue that momentum and be stronger together.”

    This is especially relevant for those institutions whose leaders may secretly feel they are “behind the curve” on digital transformation and experience a sense of anxiety that their institution needs to scramble to “catch up”. The metaphor of the race is less than helpful in this context, creating anxiety rather than a sense of strategic purpose. Sarah believes that no institution can legitimately consider itself “ahead of the curve” – and that all should have the opportunity to learn from each other:

    “We are all on a journey, so some might be ahead in some aspects but definitely not all,” says Sarah. “No-one is behind the curve but everyone is approaching this in a slightly different way, so don’t feel ‘we have to do this ourselves’; use networks and seek help – that is our role as Jisc to support the sector.”

    Jisc is hosting Digifest in Birmingham on 11-12 March – sign up here for online access to sessions.

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  • Supporting higher education’s emerging leaders

    Supporting higher education’s emerging leaders

    In the ever evolving world of higher education, effective leaders are required at all levels of our organisations.

    Emerging leaders lead in the middle of an organisation, with responsibility for delivering aspects of an institution’s mission, vision and strategy. Their roles are wide-ranging, they work with colleagues at all levels, striving to deliver an enhanced student experience, assuring academic quality and contributing (sometimes delivering) key aspects of their provider’s strategic plan.

    Emerging leaders find themselves sitting on committees, representing others, and championing particular topics, having listened to the views of their teams. For some these are new experiences, requiring support and encouragement from peers and senior leaders to embrace the opportunities and challenges.

    These colleagues are often leaders of a team or group, responsible for delivering not only their personal objectives, but that of the collective group. Emerging in their leadership journey they are often new to people management, navigating the concept of developing others. Their skillset requirement is vast, their teams need them to listen to many voices and views, and synthesise this into priority areas for campaign.

    Learning as leaders

    Attention must be paid to those embracing leadership roles, ensuring they are supported to develop. There will inevitably be contextualised opportunities and challenges, requiring understanding of the provider, location, and/or disciplinary focus. Leaders must swiftly understand the context in which they operate, previous developments in topical matters, and the drivers of various stakeholders. We must make space for leaders to learn, providing opportunity to develop.

    Emerging leaders learn through observation of senior or more established leaders, modelling behaviours and approaches, through peer networking, and crucially through experience. At different times, in different circumstances, the most beneficial learning opportunities will vary. Emerging leaders will be adaptable, recognising their own developmental need, seeking support and input based on their growing networks, and reflect on their own experiences as part of the learning journey.

    Space and encouragement are needed to explore and experience leadership qualities, styles and approaches. Important qualities for all leaders in HE are highlighted here by Shân Wareing: curiosity, confidence, team work, clarity in complexity, and fearlessness.

    Not as easy as it sounds

    While they are learning to lead, their university requires understanding, interpretation and application of activity to ensure delivery of strategic priorities – which, as we know, aren’t always aligned to the voices and views they are being asked to represent.

    Representing the views of others can be challenging, especially when a range of views need collating and presenting back to university management or the team from which they came. Colleague feedback provides leaders with the thoughts and opinions of those around them, through listening to what is being shared – and what isn’t.

    Emerging leaders have to synthesise great volumes of information, pulling out the very core of an issue, articulating this back to others, making strategy understandable. Collating and considering the voices of others is important, but critically, as we know from experiences with students, we must keep those who have contributed informed about what may happen next as a result of their engagement. This can empower communities to recognise input, and demonstrates an appreciation of the value of shared views.

    The views of colleagues do not always align to strategy or intended direction. In this space leaders develop heightened negotiation and articulation skills, an ability to represent strategic drivers as the mechanism for change, whilst recognising an interconnected web of views and opinions. Often responsible for the support and welfare of colleagues, they are mindful of the impact of decisions and actions on others.

    Developed with experience is the ability to identify where and when swift intervention is required, or when a longer-term more measured approach is needed. Uncertainties, questions and challenges surround daily life. There are times when action is required without full knowledge of a situation, confidence and the support of your surrounding team are critical when the occasion arises.

    Significant transformation

    It’s widely recognised that higher education has experienced significant transformation in recent years. Emerging leaders in our sector must recognise what has gone before and seek to make the most of the opportunities and challenges to come. Transformation can be invigorating, but it also brings uncertainty, and if poorly managed can cause greater uncertainty, leading to more challenges, and so the cycle continues.

    To avoid this, Catherine Moran summarises the skills required in three key principles for academic leadership. Leaders must be aware of what they are aiming for, and recognise it when achieved. Emerging leaders will develop the ability to be “present” in relationships with others, drawing on authentic skills of listening and inclusivity. And once a decision is reached, emerging leaders need to be accountable.

    Emerging leaders play a vital role in HE, and must be supported to develop appropriate skills, attributes and behaviours. They are delivering strategic impact, leading teams, and enhancing the student and staff experience – let’s take a moment to ensure all those in leadership roles have the opportunity to develop and grow.

    The author has written this piece as an emerging leader who has participated in Minerva’s Emerging Leadership Programme, and wishes to acknowledge the support and guidance received from Mary Stuart, Kerry Shepherd, Ben Tucker, and fellow programme participants, in shaping their emerging leadership journey.

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  • Filling their boots? The rationale for growing loss-making home student numbers

    Filling their boots? The rationale for growing loss-making home student numbers

    The release of provider-level end of cycle data for the 2024 cycle confirms what has been long known informally; this year a group of “higher-tariff” providers went for growth, in some cases by reducing their entry tariff significantly. You can see DK’s crunching of the provider data here.

    Typically, behaviour like this leads to grumbling elsewhere in the sector. That’s partly because there’s a direct impact on other institutions’ bottom line when the big players flex in this way, meaning that those who lose out may need to suspend planned investment and/or embark on portfolio rationalisation, rounds of voluntary redundancy, and other cost-reduction measures to stay afloat.

    But it’s also because there’s a perception that the selective institutions are pulling in students that mid or lower tariff institutions consider themselves to be best equipped to support and nurture. This (arguably) creates additional risk for the students who find themselves studying at an institution that culturally may assume a greater degree of academic self-efficacy than they actually have.

    The debate rumbles on as to whether it’s reasonable to “permit” popular institutions to grow at the expense of others. But much less attention is generally given to the question of why any successful provider with significant overheads would seek to grow home student recruitment at all. In 2022 the Russell Group warned that the average deficit incurred by English universities per home student per year was £1,750 per student per year, and that a “conservative estimate” would see that deficit increasing to £4000 by the current academic year.

    Assuming you’re not an economist or a strategy consultant (if you are, do write in), you might legitimately be scratching your head about the strategic intent behind increasing sales of a product you don’t make any money on – indeed, that you have to subsidise from other sources. Higher education institutions don’t have to make money of course – the goal is generally to realise a small surplus across the breadth of activities, recognising that some degree of cross-subsidy, primarily from international student income, is part of the business model. But even with that caveat, growth of a loss-making activity in times of financial pressure remains, on the face of it, a peculiar approach.

    What’s going on?

    There are three strategic rationales for this that I can think of. It might be that hitherto high tariff institutions are growing for public interest reasons – to meet their access and participation targets, or because they are offering new courses of value to their regions or that will attract a wider range of international students or even support a particular research ambition.

    It might be that they are growing in the subject areas that are cheaper to teach in hopes of making inroads into that average deficit and reducing the level of cross-subsidy from other sources. Over on DK’s end of cycle data visualisations you can take a look at the general subject areas where particular institutions have seen growth. DK would no doubt be the first to tell you that HECoS subject grouping isn’t quite as nuanced as you’d need to be able to make that case plausibly, though there’s probably a bit of it going on. This was a concern the Augar review flagged back in 2019 – that the fixed unit of resource, all other things being equal, tends to incentivise growth in subject areas that have higher margins and for which there is stable or growing demand, rather than trying to generate additional demand for more expensive and less popular subjects.

    It is possible there might be changes to teaching and/or student support provision that have generated sufficient efficiencies to get to a break-even or modest surplus situation on home students that would make overall growth a sensible business strategy. This is the current focus of a lot of sector thinking on efficiency – if the unit of resource isn’t increasing fast enough, but student (and regulatory) expectations aren’t reducing, then the sector has to figure out ways to make its provision sustainable, through technology adoption, more sharing and collaboration among institutions, reducing costs in areas where the institution believes there is minimal impact on student experience, and so on.

    While there is a lot of interesting thinking going on around efficiency, it’s doubtful that this number of institutions has made such significant progress as to get to the point of wiping out the home student deficit in its totality, though there may be some efficiencies to be gained through economies of scale.

    There are also several less overtly strategic options. One is that the institutions in question don’t have that strong a central grip on their admissions. It’s easy to imagine in a devolved academic system individual departments and faculties pursuing growth to increase their own overall income without a great deal of attention being given to the aggregate effect on the institution as a whole.

    The final possibility – and in all honesty I think this is probably at least a somewhat accurate assessment – is that the calculation is that growth, even cross-subsidised growth, will demonstrate market strength, which will satisfy boards of governors, reassure lenders, and keep the university in good fettle with the bond markets. Which raises the question about what happens next year and the year after that. Growth, even for the most popular institutions can’t be an indefinite strategy. And what happens to the rest?

    For the big players, growth can generally be deployed as a tactical response to immediate financial pressure, while structural or operational change can be deferred to future times, when there’s more bandwidth and appetite for change, or clarity about the policy environment. Other institutions don’t in most cases have that luxury and some are likely to be less stable as a result.

    The policy response

    So how should government respond? It’s very hard to make the case that students should be forced – or at least obliged – to attend an institution that isn’t their first choice simply to ensure that that institution remains generally healthy and sustainable. We should also on principle give those selective institutions the benefit of the doubt on their strategic preparedness for a different intake this year. Growth in the hundreds in an institution of thousands, if fairly evenly spread, needn’t be an issue if there is a plan in place to support those students and notice if any are struggling.

    It’s still worth saying, though, that if you’re looking through the lens of student interest, the market principle that student choice is the most important thing only holds true if the basis on which prospective students are making choices has a meaningful relationship with their prospect of flourishing at their chosen institution. So it remains a bit of a worry that if there are issues we’ll only know about it when the outcome data surfaces in the coming years – too late to do anything about it.

    Some in the sector wish there was a way of putting restraints on the market without resorting to institutional student number controls. There are options short of total control that might focus on restraining or encouraging recruitment in particular subject areas, or asking institutions to evidence the case for growth, and/or subjecting them to more stringent oversight when growth exceeds a certain margin. It would also be theoretically possible, though very complicated, to set quality thresholds around inputs ie set conditions around the available resources in the learning environment all students should be able to expect.

    But it’s also worth government giving consideration to the idea that in market terms all of this only is an issue because the perception is that the size of the market is pretty fixed and institutions are by and large vying for a larger slice of the pie rather than trying to grow the pie. UCAS data tends to support that view as applications via UCAS have seen growth at a lower rate than the sector hoped given the demographic growth in 18-19 year olds in the wider population.

    Published UCAS data does not, however, capture applications made direct to institutions or, indeed, PG-level applications, and there may be growth or potential for growth in other parts of the market. Market purists would argue that if a provider is not seeing success in its traditional market then the smart move is to tap into a different market. While this might be accurate in strategic terms, this analysis tends to gloss over the risks and complexities involved in making such a pivot, especially when the provider in question is already feeling financially squeezed.

    Even if your market share is eroding, trying to win it back can be perceived as a path of less resistance and more immediate potential reward than entirely retooling the whole offer – even if thinking this way is also a highly risky strategy if things continue as they are and the rewards fail to materialise, as some institutions have discovered to their cost.

    If government wants a policy win on two key fronts: widening access to selective institutions and broadening the pool of people who benefit from HE in general, it could do worse than to create a programme of support explicitly targeted at those institutions who are less powerful in the “traditional” market but that still have a great deal to offer their localities, and work with them to develop the offer to prospective students where there is latent growth potential – pooling risk and transition costs, with a payoff ultimately realised in skills and economic growth.

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