Category: post-16 white paper

  • What’s in the post-16 white paper for postgraduate study?

    What’s in the post-16 white paper for postgraduate study?

    The term “postgraduate” appears exactly 14 times in the Post-16 Education and Skills white paper : a clear improvement over 2021s Skills for Jobs (a mere two mentions in the appendix) and one more than 2016s Success as a Knowledge Economy (the one with the actual postgraduate student loans).

    So it looks like, more so than I’d personally have expected, “post-16” really does include “postgraduate” for once. But what does that mean?

    Fees & maintenance

    The obvious place to start is with the big headline: the planned increase to maximum tuition fees in the next two parliaments and the legislation to enable this to happen automatically thereafter. There’s also the (re)commitment to increase maintenance loans each year (I’ll leave Jim to explain what’s wrong with that).

    None of this really impacts postgraduate Masters and PhD students. Masters loans will also continue to increase with forecast inflation, but fees aren’t regulated and still aren’t properly monitored, despite promises to do so in 2016. PhD fees are largely shaped by the size of UKRI studentships, about which more below.

    I do think it’s interesting to consider what these undergraduate changes will do to perceptions of postgraduate fees. Will the cost of an MA or MSc provoke less sticker shock once BA and BSc fees (very quickly) cross the £10k rubicon? Or will greater undergraduate student loan debt make another £13k or so for a Masters feel less palatable?

    Personally, I think this stuff could end up mattering a lot, particularly if the government wants to improve postgraduate participation. Which apparently it does.

    Postgraduate participation

    We’re told that the government will “for the first time seek to address the barriers faced by disadvantaged students in accessing and succeeding at postgraduate level.”

    It’s fascinating to think about what this actually means.

    On access right now, little is known and less is done. There are some pockets of committed good work, often spotlighted here on Wonkhe and often supported by organisations like UKCGE (who I’m pleased to see will be funded to develop their involvement). But I can still point to data across our platforms demonstrating that postgraduate participation often looks very different to postgraduate interest.

    Postgraduate success, meanwhile, isn’t included in OfS B3 metrics and there’s still no postgraduate TEF. That means that, whilst continuation to a Masters records a good outcome for a university, progression from there isn’t really evaluated. The closest we have is LEO, which, though cited as “one of the best data sources” to drive informed student choices, is a crude and lagged metric taking no account of someone’s background.

    But what’s most intriguing is that all of this appears in relation to Access and Participation Plans.

    APPs determine a university’s ability to charge the higher undergraduate fee level. Postgraduate fees aren’t regulated, which leads to some of the mess around postgraduate funding. What’s here clearly isn’t a proposal to start scrutinising and intervening around PG fees but – like several other parts of the white paper – talking in this way is a potential step towards fundamental change.

    Home-grown PGR

    The white paper actually has a lot more to say about PhDs than it does about Masters degrees. Here’s where we find the most specific references to barriers faced by disadvantaged students and to challenges faced within specific subject areas.

    Here’s also where we find repeated references to a ‘home grown’ pipeline for UK research talent. Again, this is an interesting distinction to make. One of the few major interventions in PhD funding in recent years was the decision to open 30 per cent of UKRI studentships to international applicants from 2021. It hasn’t had a big impact on enrolments but it has meant more students – of all origins – competing for the same broad pot.

    The specific policy is light here (lots of verbs like ‘explore’ and ‘consider’) but prioritising domestic PhDs leads naturally to thinking about interventions around domestic funding.

    Elsewhere there are much clearer and very positive changes to medical and parental leave for UKRI-funded PhD students. This is explicitly framed as bringing conditions in line with employment law and therefore a step towards recognising that PhD students aren’t just students. Of course, this only applies directly to the relatively small proportion of students funded by UKRI.

    Post 16 postgraduate

    This is the first white paper in around ten years with a meaningful amount to say about postgraduate study. It does seem to understand what some of the key problems are and it seems to appreciate that PG is part of a joined-up system.

    There are other questions to ask – there’s little on Masters study and the perverse quirk of the international fee levy robbing PG to pay for UG feels worth scrutinising – but for once the government is asking questions about PG too. That is a good thing.

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  • The white paper kept quiet on market exit

    The white paper kept quiet on market exit

    The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology’s annual report in early July said that the government was working on a legislative programme to “ensure higher education sector access to an insolvency regime.”

    Yet for all that Monday’s post-16 white paper compiled together much of the ongoing work that had been trickling out of Whitehall for the previous 12 months, such plans were notable by their absence.

    Similarly, the Office for Students’ 2025–26 business plan said it was putting together proposals for a system whereby a “validator of last resort” for the English sector, which would protect students if the provider that validates their degree exits the market, as well as a possible “bespoke clearing system” for students in the event that their institution closes.

    Again, neither of these ideas got airtime in the white paper, despite skills minister Jacqui Smith having given her endorsement to the latter in comments to the media.

    The white paper in fact steers wholly clear of policy thinking around what would happen in the (ever more likely) event that a large English higher education provider finds itself in severe financial distress threatening its very viability. This omission is even more stark even against a background where we know that this risk has been scored “critical” and “very likely” on the DfE risk register, and the Office for Students has told the Commons education committee that it would be unlikely that it could “secure reasonable outcomes” for students if a large multi-faculty university closed, reeling off a list of all the ensuing risks ranging from students losing access to their academic records to PGRs whose work is tied to a particular supervisor finding transfer “difficult or impossible.”

    Perhaps the government simply wanted to steer clear of any negative news as it seeks to pat itself on the back for putting higher education on a “firm financial footing”, by way of keeping tuition fees at the same level in real terms (as long as inflation forecasts do not prove to be underestimates) while piling on additional costs to universities in areas including national insurance, pensions and a future fee levy. But – especially given that the white paper rounded up almost every policy initiative that is currently underway elsewhere in government, OfS and UKRI – it does feel, rather, that the idea of making legislative change to pre-empt issues around “market exit” has disappeared from the government’s to-do list.

    Pros and cons

    The education committee’s ongoing inquiry into higher education funding, which has the risks around insolvency as one of its central concerns, is shedding some light on the issues involved, both in the written evidence that has come the committee’s way and the first hearing which took place on Tuesday this week.

    Neil Smyth of lawyers Mills & Reeve told the committee that the fundamental answer to the question of what happens to an insolvent university which is not incorporated as a company – a large slice of the sector – is that “no-one quite knows”. He emphasised that there is debate about what the law entails, noting:

    At the moment, it is believed that the only insolvency process that would be available for a royal chartered entity or non-corporate entity would be to be wound up by the court as an unregistered company. That is a terminal process, it is a shutdown process, it is not a process that allows you to continue to trade.

    This uncertainty complicates what advice can be given to university governors about their responsibilities and liabilities – and also makes it difficult to see how student protection can be regulated for in such a situation. Mills & Reeve’s evidence to the committee adds that the unclear dispensations for unsecured creditors has, in their experience, led to something of a “land grab” among creditors:

    Key creditors, including pension providers, have sought to improve their position by demanding legal mortgages over land as these confer the contractual remedy of fixed charge receivership. This leads to highly expensive and time-consuming legal due diligence at just the point where the HEI can ill-afford those costs.

    Smyth, as he has previously argued on Wonkhe, told the committee that the advantages of some kind of restructuring regime being introduced included clarity for governors, confidence for lenders, and – as exists in the relatively new further education special administration regime – the potential for legal protections for students’ academic interests. That said, he warned that he couldn’t see a university coming out intact from such a process, given that student demand would inevitably collapse once the institution went into administration.

    However, Universities UK – represented at the committee hearing by chief executive Vivienne Stern – has moved away from advocating for a special administration regime. As the representative body’s evidence to the committee puts it:

    Universities UK’s current view is that it would be preferable to work with government, regulators and other sector bodies to clarify how existing arrangements can apply to higher education institutions, supported by stronger contingency planning at institutional level, and at the level of government, regulators and funders.

    The consequences of a large scale institutional failure would be so significant that policy effort should be primarily focussed on averting this outcome, rather than on mitigating its impact after the event.

    Stern highlighted the risk that a formal administrative process could be drawn out and expensive, and might even make it more likely that an institution collapses once entry into regime had taken place.

    The committee’s report will make a recommendation – it could be that Universities UK’s line of thinking has already swayed the government away from such a move. Committee chair Helen Hayes hinted that the committee will conclude that formal systems are needed, via her question to the effect of what would happen if there were a slew of insolvencies in short succession which compromised governmental and regulatory capacity to thrash out suitable arrangements behind the scenes.

    Fuzzy logic

    Keeping the threat of market exit – and the massive and unpopular clean-up job that would accompany it – hanging over the government’s head rather than handing off responsibility to a predetermined legal and fiduciary process is, sad to say, probably one of the few trump cards the sector still has to play around advocating for greater government investment.

    The lessons from FE, where a special administration regime has been in place for a few years now, are that the government seems reluctant to let things go as far as formal processes. In higher education, while it would depend on geography and circumstances, the smart money is probably still on Labour stepping in before push came to shove in a similar way to how the SNP felt forced to in Dundee.

    But there won’t be a Labour government forever. Future ministers who were relaxed (on paper) about universities going bankrupt would almost certainly be less keen to have to step in and make the final decisions in the places affected – while perhaps not being so worried if it ended up being purely a matter for the courts and the banks – and so keeping things fuzzy might end up being a sensible long-term strategy for the sector with an eye beyond 2029.

    That said, the apparent move away from government interest in legislating for a higher education insolvency regime doesn’t really explain why the white paper was quite so silent on other mitigating actions and the whole question of student protection (especially given its inclination towards “consolidation”). Is it really betting the house on the magical healing properties of holding tuition fees stable in real terms?

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  • The white paper opens the door, but we need to ensure everyone gets in

    The white paper opens the door, but we need to ensure everyone gets in

    After months of anticipation, the post-16 education and skills white paper has finally landed.

    For many across the sector, the wait has been worth it. There are bold commitments on funding, skills pathways and structural reform. But for those of us focused on widening participation there are the green shoots of ideas but very little detail and the group of students who are at most risk to lack of equality of access – care experienced and estranged students – are barely even mentioned. The paper feels more like a promising prologue than a full chapter.

    There are areas of positive progress. The previously trailed increase in maintenance support, which will help students better manage rising living costs – a critical issue for those without family safety nets.

    Plus the report commits to “provide extra support for care leavers, some of the most vulnerable in our society, who will automatically become eligible to receive the maximum rate of loan.” We would want to see these extended to estranged students as well as care experienced young people as we know many report financial hardship without the support of parents to top up income. Data from the Student Academic Experience Survey showed us that both care experienced and estranged students work a statistically significantly higher number of hours per week – 11.3 and 11.1 hours respectively – than 8.8 hours non-care experienced students at 8.8 hours.

    But we must await further detail to see whether this makes any material difference for care leavers (and hopefully estranged students) – given that they’re currently already eligible for the maximum maintenance loan, and this maximum doesn’t cover anywhere near enough to support their living expenses, as recent work on minimum income standards has shown.

    A richer picture

    The promise of better information for applicants, combining UCAS data with graduate outcomes and completion rates, is an important move toward transparency and fairer choice. The work that UUK, Sutton Trust and UCAS have already started in this space is welcome but ensuring consistency will be key. This is especially important to consider when we know from UCAS research that 60 per cent of surveyed applicants said “they did not receive guidance at school around applying to higher education, specific to their status as a care-experienced student.”

    We’re also encouraged by the focus on regional disparities and disadvantage cold-spots, especially in coastal and low-participation areas. These are often the places where care experienced and estranged students are most at risk of being left behind.

    But while these commitments signal progress, there’s still much to be drawn out around widening participation. Care experienced and estranged students remain largely invisible in mainstream policy design. They’re not always captured in data. They’re rarely the headline. But they matter (which is why we welcomed HESA’s planned exploration of the issues involved in publishing data on this group of students more regularly). These students face some of the steepest barriers to access, retention and success.

    There are pockets of excellent practice and growing awareness of this group of students that is driving change in some areas. The commitment by Russell Group universities to develop a consistent offer of support is welcomed as is seeing more FE and HE institutions achieving the NNECL Quality Mark. These examples demonstrate that progress is achievable when there is institutional will and leadership – but there is still such little evidence about what works.

    At the Unite Foundation, we were pleased to see recognition that accommodation is a key issue. For care experienced and estranged students, having somewhere safe and stable to live is not just a nice-to-have – it’s a fundamental prerequisite for participation in education. If we’re serious about widening participation, then addressing the barrier of housing insecurity must be central to the conversation. And yet, the white paper is light on detail about how government will support access to accommodation. This is a missed opportunity.

    The Unite Foundation’s own scholarship programme remains the only intervention to meet OfS Level 2 standards for impact on retention, progression, and completion for this group. It’s a powerful testament to what targeted, sustained support can achieve – but it also highlights how little evidence we have about what works.

    The journey continues

    So while the white paper offers a welcome direction of travel, it’s not the final destination. I’m pleased to be joining the national access and participation task and finish group, chaired by access and participation champion Kathryn Mitchell, to work within government to ensure that we’re embedding care experienced and estranged students at the heart of this work as the detail starts to emerge.

    If we’re serious about change we need more than just warm words. We need system-wide commitments that embed equity in funding, housing, student support and success metrics. We need to listen to students and design policy that reflects their lived realities.

    The wrapping paper is off. Now it’s time to see what’s inside – and to make sure care experienced and estranged students aren’t left out of the picture.

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  • What is in the post-16 education and skills white paper for higher education?

    What is in the post-16 education and skills white paper for higher education?

    The government’s post-16 education and skills white paper is jointly fronted by the Department for Education, Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, and Department for Work and Pensions – and is accordingly ambitious in scope.

    Spanning proposals to address the number of NEET young people to widening access to postgraduate study, the plans break down into three key areas: joining up skills and employment throughout the system including through Skills England and funding reform; reforms in the further education/college sector; and reforms in the higher education sector. It’s the last of these we are concerned with here.

    The headlines

    Introducing the white paper in the House of Commons, Secretary of State for Education Bridget Phillipson announced the critical information many have been waiting for: a commitment to increase tuition fees and maintenance loans by predicted inflation for the next two years, and to legislate to make the fee increase automatic in future.

    The white paper arrives against the backdrop of the government’s new target for two-thirds under-25 participation in higher-level learning, but that target itself is fundamentally about the stuff the government has been talking about from the beginning: tackling skills shortages to support growth; and offering more, and broader, opportunities for post-16 education and training.

    Within all of that higher education emerges as a critical “strategic asset” – but nevertheless in need of reform, summed up as follows:

    Our ambition is to have a more sustainable, more specialised and more efficient sector, better aligned with the needs of the economy.

    In practice, if the government were to have its way (and that’s a big if) the outcome would be a fair bit of sector consolidation, with a more stratified sector incorporating fewer highly research-active institutions, operating within a regional ecosystem in which different types of institutions coordinate around an education offer that remains competitive in terms of subject and qualification choice, but attentive to regional skills needs.

    What’s missing, arguably, is the heavy policy lifting to make that real. As the text of the white paper suggests:

    The changes outlined here mark the beginning of a journey. We want to continue working with the sector to consider how best we can support greater specialisation in the future.

    Critically, what is not included here is anything on the pointier end of financial sustainability ie management of institutional insolvency or a special administration regime – the working assumption is that autonomous institutions will be able to identify opportunities to innovate, whether individually or in collaboration. That may be true, but while the risks of specialisation outweigh the prospective rewards, the government can encourage all it wants, but institutions will most likely continue to recruit to the courses that they believe there is a market for.

    What there does appear to be is a generalised vote of confidence in the Office for Students (OfS) – no proposals to tear up the Higher Education and Research Act here. In fact, when the parliamentary schedule allows, OfS is set to get more powers, particularly to crack down on low quality – and will now become the regulator for all provision at level 4 and above. Critically, OfS’ definition of quality will be given teeth both in the form of permission – or otherwise – to increase fees or issue restrictions on growth in student numbers.

    All together now

    In terms of strategic ambition, there are five objectives for the sector: economic growth, a high quality experience, national capability via specific research and skills development, regional impact, and an increase in international standing. International, these translate into global standing, nationally to government goals on growth, security and skills, regionally to meeting skills needs through collaboration, and at provider level, to specialisation and efficiency.

    Providers are challenged to:

    specialise in areas of strength within a more collaborative system, with clearer roles for teaching- and research-intensive institutions with areas of specialist advantage, and stronger access and participation.

    The argument is that too many providers are trying to sustain too broad a base of offering to the same student demographics rather than focusing on their core strengths. From the outset, however, it is clarified that higher education providers are autonomous and “it is not for government to impose these changes.” So institutions will be encouraged to innovate, to specialise and to collaborate rather than obliged to, with OfS tasked with working out what might help.

    The sting in the tail, however, is that the government intends to use research funding to drive some of this differentiation in the form of a “more strategic distribution of research activity,” which essentially means concentrating research funding which will have the knock-on impact that those who lose out will be obliged to revise their business models.

    In theory this could mean greater efficiency in the research system with better cost recovery, and more sharing of grants, facilities, and equipment. The idea here is because of the close relationship between research and teaching specialisation in one will drive specialisation in the other. And, just to be sure, providers are asked to align incentives for academics for research excellence and teaching excellence and to diversify recognition for research performance to include mentoring, peer review, commercialisation activities and public engagement.

    Sustainable footing

    That commitment to inflationary fee and maintenance loan rises – baked in for the first two years, with the intent to make it automatic in the longer term via legislation when parliamentary time allows – covers all provision with the exception of classroom-based foundation years – these will stick at £5,670 through 2026–27 and 2027–28 at least.

    There’s a big caveat – future fee uplifts will be conditional on providers achieving a “higher quality threshold” via the OfS’ quality regime. This isn’t spelled out, but it is reasonable to assume given the recent consultation that this might be new TEF silver and gold.

    The long-standing debate on full cost recovery appears to be tilting in support of costs, which the paper recognises “may result in funding a lower volume of research but at a more sustainable level.” The ask for providers here is effective collaboration and shared resources (again), and a commitment to to cost grants accurately. There’s a wider interest in improving research grant cost recovery alongside this – mostly stuff we already know about (equipment funded at 80 per cent of costs, a higher capital equipment threshold, confirmation that matched funding from providers is not required for UKRI) but there’s also wider research into costs (including on the sustainability of PhD programmes) underway.

    Dual support will remain (QR funding will stay), but there will be a modification of what the government expects in return – the idea for research generally is to stick to three priorities: curiosity-driven, delivering government priorities (missions, the industrial strategy), and targeted commercialisation and scale up support. There’s more on streamlining bureaucracy, including improvements to the way the Transparent Approach to Costing (TRAC) is used for assurance.

    A single line says the government will seek to “better understand concerns” about the Teacher’s Pension Scheme, which is used in providers formerly in local government control and where costs are rising well beyond the capacity of institutions to address them (which the government already knows).

    But again, there’s pro for the quid, in the form of expectations of higher education institutions to deliver efficiency.

    We knew that government was worried about HE governance and its general capability to deliver strategic change and sustainable operating models, and so the white paper confirms, with signals that OfS will consult on strengthening its condition of registration on governance, and endorsement of the current Committee of University Chairs governance review, which will strengthen its (voluntary) Code of Governance.

    There’s a note of thanks to the UUK Efficiency and Transformation Taskforce, endorsement of plans to develop an efficiency maturity model, and a wish to see more visibility for good collaboration practice (hats off to N8 and the Midlands Innovation partnership).

    In turn, the government will help make the Student Loans Company more efficient, foster closer relationships between OfS and UKRI on regulation and the delivery of the broader strategic aims of government, and strengthen OfS financial monitoring of the sector. OfS will be delivering a reformed regulatory framework that is focused on “driving out pockets of poor performance.”

    Access and student experience

    Much of the section on access and participation is taken up with reiterating student finance arrangement – LLE, targeted grants – but there is also a basket of other ideas and proposals, including reform to OfS’ approach to access and participation to be (even) more risk-based, consideration of patterns of PhD participation and access to postgraduate study, and notes on student accommodation, harassment, the extension of the mental health taskforce for another year with a new student support champion, and the existing funding to tackle antisemitism.

    Higher education cold spots and contextual admissions will be the main topics of conversation at a task and finish group to be chaired by University of Derby vice chancellor Kathryn Mitchell bringing together sector experts, charities, OfS, and UCAS.

    There is a recap of the details of the Lifelong Learning Entitlement, with an emphasis that available provision will expand beyond the priority areas in future. As has been widely acknowledged, this removes the distinction between full and part-time study – it will be possible to study multiple courses and modules at the same time. And there is a reminder that even if you have used up your (four year full-time) allocation, there will still be money available for priority courses.

    On that, there are some indications about the relationship between the LLE and the Growth and Skills Levy – the former will allow students to draw down loans to take modular courses at level 4 or above, particularly in FE colleges, while the latter will allow employer funding for “short courses.” Curiously, the only mention of apprenticeships is in relation to a new form of short course provision dubbed “apprenticeship units” designed to tackle critical skills shortages, tacit confirmation, perhaps, that the apprenticeship model may be too unwieldy and too challenging to scale to deliver on those critical areas at the pace required.

    Finally – first announced in 2010 – there is movement on creating an Alternative Student Finance scheme for those who are unable or unwilling to participate in the main scheme (primarily those individuals who consider themselves subject to Sharia law), which will launch “as soon as possible” after the introduction of the Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE) in January 2027.

    About growth

    The strategic priorities grant (which is the bits of OfS funding that currently include the stuff on high-cost subjects) will be reformed – as highlighted in the last grant letter to OfS, and with the groundwork on data collection achieved via the reforms to HESES.

    Those of a certain vintage will recall the ability for students to leave their degree with a certificate (L4) after year one and a diploma (L5) after year two – there’s a consultation pending on making student support for traditional (level 6) degrees conditional on doing something similar. A part of the hope here is allowing transferability between providers, though there is nothing on facilitating this kind of transfer (something that English higher education has traditionally struggled with). This comes alongside the established focus on levels 4 and 5 in higher technical qualifications (HTQs) – the twist here is that OfS will be able to bestow HTQ awarding powers in the same way it does degree awarding powers (or, cynically, foundation degree awarding powers) – with the designation process for HTQ courses becoming more flexible.

    Providers get “clearer expectations” around involvement in Local Skills Improvement Plans (LSIPs), which will cover technical skills needs between levels 4 and 8. This will be supported by a market-monitoring function within Skills England which will spot gaps between supply and demand nationally and locally.

    There’s a restatement of some research announcements in this bit – the protection of overall funding, access to horizon europe, and the protection of curiosity-driven research (UKRI gets a strategic objective year), work with public sector research establishments, and the increase to the maximum stipend.

    On commercialisation and scale-up, some UKRI funding will pivot towards government priorities (as in the industrial strategy) and a rethink of the way innovation funding is used to drive growth. And universities are encouraged to develop civic plans that align with their strengths and priorities.

    Finally in this section we get some lines on international standing – again this is mostly restatement of stuff like the Global Talent Visa reforms, but adding a hint of a refresh to the International Education Strategy. Recruitment must be sustainable and not put providers at undue risk, and there will be tighter enforcement of visa approvals via strengthening requirements on universities.

    Quality

    Teaching quality remains a core agenda, with the paper noting that:

    Among students who found their university experience worse than they had expected, teaching quality was among the most commonly cited reasons. Improving transparency about course quality is essential.

    The government will “consider options” to increase the capacity of OfS to conduct quality investigations, with the hoped-for outcome being that it can respond more rapidly to identified risks. Again, when parliamentary time allows, OfS will gain additional powers to intervene in cases of low quality, including imposing limitations on student numbers.

    The plans consulted on last year, which would make larger franchise providers register with OfS in order to access funding, will go ahead – while OfS will prioritise franchise investigations ahead of getting strengthened statutory powers to intervene “decisively” on this issue including stronger powers of entry, and the ability to make interim sanctions. And there’s more to come on tackling abuse of the system by recruitment agents – sharpening up access to student finance, and reinforced investigative powers for OfS.

    White papers traditionally include a section on improving applicant information, and this one is no different: the government welcomes the offer rates and historic grades on UCAS, and wants to add graduate outcomes information and completion rates from Discover Uni to what is on offer there.

    The time-honoured system of external examiners – where academics from elsewhere assure the quality and standards of provision at a provider – is up for debate, with an evidence base being built on the “effectiveness or otherwise” of this approach to feed into an OfS programme of reform that will also include employer views as part of a wider look at degree awarding powers.

    And there’s a progress 8 style measure (basically something akin to learning gain) in the offing, with the government and OfS working together on this.

    Finally in this section, a section on freedom of speech on campus summarises the changes made to the measures in the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, adding a note on the tension between these duties and a right not to be threatened, harassed, or intimidated.

    What happens now

    There’s a lot to digest in this white paper, with a lot of the proposals themselves requiring extensive action and further development – and we’ve not even covered the broader post-16 skills plans here, such as the new V levels. What’s missing though is a defined legislative agenda or timescale – indeed, this is not a traditional white paper in that it is not presented for public consultation at all. In that sense it is closer to what the Labour manifesto originally promised, which was a comprehensive post-16 education strategy, and it’s probably in that vein it should be read.

    With that in mind, it’s probably best to view the overall direction of travel as locked in – assuming this government can stick around long enough to realise some of its ambitions in practice. But there is still a great deal of work to be done to put flesh on the bones of these various proposals – and while some of these plans may go against the traditional sector grain, figuring out how to make them work in practice offers an opportunity to look again at what bits of higher education are critical to preserve – and what hitherto sacred cows can safely be allowed to slide into obscurity.

    Join the authors and the rest of Team Wonkhe at the Festival of Higher Education on 11-12 November in London where we’ll be digesting the government’s agenda for HE alongside a multitude of sector experts and commentators. Find out more and book your ticket here. 

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  • A joined up post-16 system requires system-level thinking combined with local action

    A joined up post-16 system requires system-level thinking combined with local action

    There have been so many conversations and speculations and recommendations aired about the forthcoming post-16 skills and education white paper that you’d be forgiven for thinking it already had been published months ago.

    But no, it’s expected this week some time – possibly as early as Monday – and so for everyone’s sanity it’s worth rehearsing some of the framing drivers and intentions behind it, clearing the deck before the thing finally arrives and we start digesting the policy detail.

    The policy ambition is clear: a coherent and coordinated post-16 “tertiary” sector in England, that offers viable pathways to young people and adult learners through the various levels of education and into employment, contributing to economic growth through providing the skilled individuals the country needs.

    The political challenge is also real: with Reform snapping at Labour’s heels, the belief that the UK can “grow its own” skills, and offer opportunity and the prospect of economic security to its young people across the country must become embedded in the national psyche if the government is to see off the threat.

    The politics and policy combine in the Prime Minister’s announcement at Labour Party Conference of an eye-catching new target for two thirds of young people to participate in some form of higher-level learning. That positions next week’s white paper as a longer term systemic shift rather than, say, a strategy for tackling youth unemployment in this parliament – though it’s clear there is also an ambition for the two to go hand in hand, with skills policy now sitting across both DfE and DWP.

    Insert tab a into slot b

    The aspiration to achieve a more joined up and functioning system is laudable – in the best of all possible worlds steering a middle course between the worst excesses and predatory behaviours of the free market, and an overly controlling hand from Whitehall. But the more you try to unpick what’s happening right now, the more you see how fragmented the current “system” is, with incentives and accountabilities all over the place. That’s why you can have brilliant FE and HE institutions delivering life-changing education opportunities, at the same time as the system as a whole seems to be grinding its gears.

    Last week, a report from the Association of Colleges and Universities UK Delivering a joined-up post-16 skills system showcased some of the really great regional collaborations already in place between FE colleges and universities, and also set out some of the barriers to collaboration including financial pressures causing different providers to chase the same students in the same subjects rather than strategically differentiating their offer; and different regulatory and student finance systems for different kinds of learners and qualifications creating complexity in the system.

    But it’s not only about the willingness and capability of different kinds of provider to coordinate with each other. It’s about the perennial urge of policymakers to tinker with qualifications and set up new kinds of provider creating additional complexity – and the complicating role of private training and HE provision operating “close to market” which can have a distorting effect on what “public” institutions are able to offer. It’s about the lack of join-up even within government departments, never mind across them. It’s also about the pervasiveness of the cultural dichotomy (and hierarchy) between perceptions of white-collar/professional and blue-collar/manual work, and the ill-informed class distinctions and capability-based assumptions underpinning them.

    Some of this fragmentation can be addressed through system-wide harmonisation – such as the intent through the Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE) to implement one system of funding for all level 4–6 courses, and bringing all courses in that group under the regulatory purview of the Office for Students. AoC and UUK have also identified a number of areas where potential overlaps could be resolved through system-wide coordination: between OfS, Skills England, and mayoral strategic authorities; between the LLE and the Growth and Skills Levy; and between local skills improvement plans and the (national) industrial strategy. It would be odd indeed if the white paper did not make provision for this kind of coordination.

    But even with efforts to coordinate and harmonise, in any system there is naturally occurring variation – in how employers in different industries are thinking about, reporting, and investing in skills, and at what levels, in the expectations and tolerance of different prospective students for study load, learning environment, scale of the costs of learning, and support needs, and in the relationship between a place, its economy and its people. The implications of those variations are best understood by the people who are closest to the problem.

    The future is emergent

    Complex systems have emergent properties, ie the stuff that happens because lots of actors responded to the world as they saw it but that could not necessarily have been predicted. Policy is always generating unforeseen outcomes. And it doesn’t matter how many data wonks and uber-brains you have in the Civil Service, they’ll still not be able to plot every possible outcome as any given policy intervention works its way through the system.

    So for a system to work you need good quality feedback loops in which insight arrives in a timely way on the desks of responsible actors who have the capability, opportunity and motivation to adapt in light of them. In the post-16 system that’s about education and civic leaders being really good at listening to their students, their communities and to employers – and investing in quality in civic leadership (and identifying and ejecting bad apples) should be one of the ways that a post-16 skills system can be made to work.

    But good leaders need to be afforded the opportunity to decide what their response will be to the specifics of the needs they have identified and be trusted, to some degree, to act in the public interest. So from a Whitehall perspective the question the white paper needs to answer is not only how the different bits of the system ought to join up, but whether the people who are instrumental in making it work themselves have the skills, information and flexibility to take action when it inevitably doesn’t.

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  • We know the detail. But what’s the story?

    We know the detail. But what’s the story?

    If you’ve heard Jacqui Smith interviewed since she became minister, you’ll know that she’s been saying that the Skills and Post-16 White Paper has been nearly ready for quite some time.

    It may well be the case that most of the contents of the paper have been pretty much locked in for a good while, with others added to the work in progress as the need became apparent.

    And it isn’t just a Department for Education thing. Every part of government will have had an input, both during the formal “write round” that has just concluded and earlier in policy development. The launch will be in the government’s grid – lines will be agreed across Number 10 and the Cabinet Office.

    And there will be a story to tell. Which is where we find our problem.

    Big P

    The most common criticism leveled against Keir Starmer, by his own party more than anyone, is his inability to sell a big picture. Starmer, like many attracted to public policy and public service, is into details, implementation, and delivery. If five to ten years ago our politics was dominated by grand narratives (Brexit, the whole Boris Johnson thing, Liz Truss’ persecution complex), Sunak and Starmer both came to power with more than a whiff of “the grown ups are back in the room”. Delivery rules, ideology drools.

    There’s any amount of polling that suggests much of the frustration among voters is due to things just not working as well or as smoothly as they should. From getting an appointment with a GP, to getting support for a child struggling at school, to getting a dangerous pothole fixed it can feel like the UK is riven with structures and processes on the point of collapsing.

    A part of this is underinvestment – since 2010 funding for local government (which is responsible for the potholes and the pupil support) has collapsed, while growing funding for the NHS (which is responsible for the GP) has not covered increases in demand and has been blunted by numerous top-down reorganisations.

    But a part of this is an inability to do the hard yards on delivery, something which Starmer and Labour are keen to fix. Admirable intentions, but it is much harder to explain to people that we are at the start of a long, complex, and difficult process of renewal than to make absurd promises, stir up xenophobia, and have people believe that these days you can get arrested and put in jail just for saying you are English.

    Even delivery needs a story. Tony Blair, for all his myriad faults as a human being, was your archetypal get-you-one-that-does-both. But that is a rare skillset. The rest of us flounder making dull but important stuff sound interesting and inspiring.

    And so the story begins

    The opportunity mission in the Labour election manifesto highlighted a focus on improving the life chances of children, right the way through from pre-school to entering the workforce. In government, the formal measure of the success for this area of work is the proportion of young people in education or employment-with-training, and the number achieving higher level qualifications.

    Sounds like a set of indicators in need of a target? It doesn’t take a huge strategic leap to read across from this to the Prime Minister’s announcement at conference: a target of around 60 per cent (or two thirds, it all depends which announcement you read) of young people in higher education or a “gold standard” apprenticeship.

    That’s not a target that, if read strictly by the numbers, has much to do with “widening access” as traditionally described: there’s no sub-targets for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. For that we look at Bridget Phillipson’s preview of the decision to reintroduce targeted grants (ignoring for the moment the plan to fund them via an international student fee levy).

    But this is unlikely to be the only intervention that is aimed directly at widening access. We know now that V levels – a BTEC-esque option that will sit between very academic A levels and apprenticeship-like T levels – will add another option to the choices offered aged 16, hopefully keeping more people in education for longer.

    Even though the opportunity mission focuses on young people, we also know that the government is concerned with what we might call “adult skills”. Over in the economic growth mission is where find all the stuff about Skills England and training providers. What we don’t find – even though it by rights should be there – is the Lifelong Learning Entitlement, a Boris Johnson policy of letting adult learners access student loan style finance which ended up accidentally re-writing the entire basis of student loan finance.

    Another Johnson-era policy that plays in here are the Local Skills Improvement Plans (LSIPs), which help local employers ensure that their prospective employees are given the opportunity to develop the skills they need. Supposedly Skills England adds the national perspective on these local plans, helping to design identified skills needs into wider initiatives like apprenticeship standards and qualification design.

    Universities and higher education don’t exactly jump off the page of either of these missions. Accordingly, policy interventions in the sector have been minimal. The inflationary fee increase was a simple matter of letting existing information work in the way it was originally intended. The changes to implementation of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act was simply a matter of removing the actually insane components of an otherwise largely pointless piece of legislation.

    Vote reform

    But there was another early intervention – a letter from Secretary of State Bridget Phillipson that has become known as the “HE reform” agenda (not to be confused with the “HE reform” consultation from 2022, that almost established student number controls based on minimum eligibility requirements). It was a series of asks for the sector, perceived as a quid pro quo for the return of the inflationary fee increase.

    In essence this had five components. Let’s use the minister’s exact words:

    • Play a stronger role in expanding access and improving outcomes for disadvantaged students
    • Make a stronger contribution to economic growth
    • Play a greater civic role in their communities
    • Raise the bar further on teaching standards, to maintain and improve our world-leading reputation and drive out poor practice
    • Underpinning all of this needs to sit a sustained efficiency and reform programme

    What’s interesting here is the absence of targets. Phillipson wants a stronger role, a stronger contribution, a greater role, a raising of the bar – but how far and how high, and how will she know when she has what she wants? It is a fair guess that we are due some numbers on these aspirations.

    The other thing to pull out here is the relationship between the regulator and the government. In England, most of these HE reform requests involves work that sits under the Office for Students (I’m happy to accept written submissions suggesting that Research England has oversight on elements of economic growth and the civic role).

    A pattern that I’ve recently been noticing is that OfS and DfE to not appear to be moving in sync at the moment – a DfE consultation on franchise arrangements appeared shortly before a largely unconnected OfS consultation on the same topic, OfS appeared to be startled by the appearance of its own guidance letter, and the biggest thing OfS has done recently – the mega-consultation on quality – appears to have blindsided DfE.

    So achieving the HE reform objectives (however loosely specified) also involves regulatory reform. And that regulatory reform appears to be closely tied to the Behan review.

    Quality Behan-cement

    Towards the end of the last government it was open season on reviewing the Office for Students. The Department for Education conducted a (largely unhelpful) legislative review of the way HERA was working in 2022, which spurred the House of Lords Industry and Regulators committee to foreground some of the more egregious failings of the OfS. The Behan review, which built on the findings of both, was one of the periodic reviews of regulators that usually pass without notice – what was notable was that the review author proceeded to take over as interim chair after the sad loss of James Wharton from public life.

    Behan’s review was focused on making regulation work better – focusing on efficacy, accountability, governance, and efficiency. It is the source – for example – of the plans to bring together the Teaching Excellence Framework and the B3 conditions of registration into a single quality assurance system. This modified and expanded TEF will, in future, feed into the eligibility of providers to access certain funds and opportunities – in particular the ability to offer Lifelong Learning Entitlement modules.

    Much of Behan was predicated on changes to primary legislation – the contradictions and confusion within HERA was getting in the way of a streamlined regulatory approach. We’ve been over some of the possibilities of tidying up legislation on the site before – it’s niche stuff unlikely to raise pulses outside of Wonkhe’s most devoted readership. And it would be a brave government that promoted a glossy higher education and skills bill devoid entirely of policy – imagine, given the mess the sector is in, trying to front out legislative proposals that basically amount to letting the OfS board choose the chief executive rather than the secretary of state?

    The question of regulation has also hit the headlines with an onslaught of problems with franchising. Currently students can be registered at one provider and taught elsewhere, with the quality of that teaching (and the outcomes experienced by those students) falling outside of the OfS’ ambit. There are both OfS and DfE proposals designed to address this issue – a DfE consultation required that teaching partners over a certain size needing to be registered with OfS, and an OfS consultation called for new conditions of registration for registering partners.

    The frustration is palpable – with DfE recently called out by the courts for riding roughshod over due process in order to censure Oxford Business College, and the National Audit Office calling on OfS, DfE, and the Student Loans Company to get their act together in addressing instances of student loan fraud. The regulatory toolkit is simply not up to the job.

    Fun with funding

    OfS, meanwhile, has very much been thinking about funding – a quietly radical change to the collection rules for HESES (the means by which we get the student number information that underpins most of the remaining direct OfS grants), adding in some very detailed information on subjects, prefigures a forthcoming consultation on how it uses the money (just under £2bn) it still allocates for high-cost subjects and student premiums.

    Any subject based approach, when it appears, will surely be informed by the government’s own list of priority subjects – found (again) within the eligibility rules for the LLE, and ported across to the eligibility of some students from deprived backgrounds for new maintenance grants. For all the talk of a data-driven Skills England, and detailed information on precise employer demands, the list is broad. We’re broadly in STEM world, plus architecture (but not landscape gardening), nursing and allied health, and economics. And not medicine.

    Meanwhile, university finances have reached the stage where the only reliable source of income is via recruiting international students. This approach took a knock with changes to dependent visas for most students, but now the government has decided that it wants a slice via a levy – which will be used (in part) to support these new maintenance grants.

    With both provider and student finances at breaking point (genuine financial hardship, attrition, job losses, course cuts), there doesn’t appear to be any appetite for a meaningful rethink of funding in either case. Despite everyone yelling about nothing else since the pandemic, it appears to be the one thing that is definitely off the table in the short to medium term.

    Pieces of paper

    A white paper is a consultation – it is a selection box of policies and plans pulled together to present the next chapter of the government’s narratives on opportunities, skills, and the economy. It will certainly contain measures designed to address the knotty technical and implementation issues described above, but it also requires an element of vision.

    On one level, there is clearly a – very broad – skills vision. The language of opportunity, and of parity of respect for academic and vocational routes, is a rich and resonant one. It is no coincidence that every UK government for the past decade as used a version of this narrative, and it has been duplicated (with a few tweaks) across the ideological spectrum precisely because it is so powerful. However, an increasingly prominent component of this story has been positioned as a critique of the current state of affairs, and the plight of our universities and wider higher education sector. Despite the diversity of the sector, it is specifically universities – and a particular, largely inaccurate popular perception of universities – that are being seen as a problem on the way to a skills-led solution rather than an underfunded and struggling keystone.

    While the policies over every party have elements of this counter-narrative too – the Labour variant is perhaps kinder than the alternatives (see, for example, Badenoch). But it is not a full-throated defence of the sector. It is not simple or straightforward to draw together the various things Labour has done in the higher education space and tell a convincing story that includes a theory of change and a desired end state.

    So, while it is fairly straightforward to parse the hints and directions of travel that the past 18 months have brought into a series of likely next steps, the fact that none of these steps do much to inspire suggests that this can’t be the whole story. If it was, we’d be looking at a series of uncontroversial pieces of secondary legislation and some changes to the regulatory framework.

    The format of a white paper demands a little more.

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  • The possibilities for radical collaboration in HE go far beyond mergers

    The possibilities for radical collaboration in HE go far beyond mergers

    2024-25 has been quite a year for collaboration in higher education. A year on from the election of the Labour government two things are pretty clear: there will be no significant injection of public funds into the sector in the current parliament; and the guiding lens for this government’s post-16 education policy will be regional.

    Instead of a highly competitive national higher education market the current policy landscape speaks to finding more ways to pool resources between institutions – so much so that Universities UK announced the formation of its taskforce on efficiency and transformation with the announcement of a “new era of collaboration” in higher education.

    Early in the year as the reality of the fiscal situation became clearer the sector saw a renewal of interest in coordinated efficiency models, including shared services, joint procurement, and up to and including mergers and acquisitions. There was only one problem: anyone who had experience of these kinds of initiatives, whether in higher education or another sector, would quickly warn that they require a great deal of upfront investment of time and energy, and the intended efficiency savings rarely materialise in the short term.

    No institution whose sole objective was to save money would look to collaboration as the best solution. But when we have explored themes of collaboration with the sector – through our radical efficiency article series with KPMG UK and our Connect More report with Mills & Reeve – we have found that despite the competitive pressures on the sector there is an appetite to explore where greater coordination between institutions could enhance value for students, employers, research funders and communities and regions.

    Play by play

    That sense of strategic potential for new ways of realising value is the starting point for a new publication from KPMG UK and Mills & Reeve. Titled Radical collaboration: a playbook, the report sets out the strategic context and considerations for boards and executives considering the range of options for structural collaboration, and the legal implications for the different kinds of possible models for structural collaboration.

    “If structural collaboration is framed as a short term fix for immediate financial sustainability then it’s the wrong answer to a bad question,” says Justine Andrew, partner at KPMG UK, and one of the authors of the playbook. “I think this is the moment, looking at the medium to long term, to say ‘is there a more joined-up way of fulfilling the purposes of what universities are for which is delivering world class teaching and research with impact in our places?’”

    It is often assumed that “structural collaboration” is a euphemism for merger – which itself is a euphemism for acquisition of one education provider by another. But this is far from accurate. One of the intents of the playbook is to explore the breadth of possible collaborations available to higher education providers on a spectrum from the softer to harder forms, including contractual alliance models, federation, group structures, and even the concept of a “multi-university trust.”

    “The multi-university trust is a concept that doesn’t exist yet,” says Poppy Short, partner at Mills & Reeve, and playbook author. “But in the school sector we have multi-academy trusts where all the institutions combine into one charitable company but the legacy institutions operate out of a separate academic division within that corporate vehicle, with some localised autonomy and branding. I think we will see one or more of those in higher education in the not too distant future.”

    Better the hurdle you know

    A further, highly practical, intent of the playbook is to help institutions to navigate some of the initial barriers to thinking through those different possibilities. Where higher education providers have merged – something that, while not especially common in higher education, is hardly beyond the bounds of accepted practice – they have been surprised to discover a lack of formal guidance that sets out the legal and regulatory requirements to help two organisations become one. There is even a degree of murkiness about the extent to which organisations are allowed to start conversations about collaboration under competition law – something which, under pressure from the sector, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has said it will look into.

    To tackle this lack of guidance, for each of the collaborative entities explored the playbook sets out the corporate structure and governance, and the implications for brand identity, management of finances and delivery of services, and the impact on staff and students, including a real-world example where one exists. The playbook then sets out a worked example of a hypothetical scenario of a group of providers in a place working through options for structural collaboration, thinking through what the strategic drivers and risks for individual institutions might be, and the legal, financial and regulatory implications for a new corporate group entity.

    “We really hope the playbook can move the conversation from the theoretical into a really practical one,” says Justine. “We’re using the fictional example of a place called Newtown that has a diverse range of FE and HE providers, and looking through a regional lens, if I’m a student, if I’m an employer, if I’m a combined authority, an industrial partner is the way that the sector I’m interfacing with set up the best for me from a curriculum, a research, a delivery point of view. So we’re not only thinking through the impact on the institutions themselves but flipping the lens a bit and asking whether, from the end user point of view, there is a better way of doing this.”

    Why wait for government

    Traditionally, the sector might have looked to the government to set out an agenda or framework where policy gaps are identified – but it’s also fair to say that few in the sector want the government to start putting pressure on institutions to work together or combine forces when the strategic rationale for doing so is undercooked. Far better for the impetus to come from institutions themselves, underpinned by a shared idea of the kinds of value that can be created through collaboration and a common commitment to achieving those ends.

    That doesn’t mean there is no role for government, not least in reducing the barriers to collaboration and potentially setting out some kind of brokerage framework or regulatory support service to encourage and support exploration of options. There are also some obvious tweaks to be made to the tax system to, at the very least, ensure structural collaborations do not incur a tax penalty.

    “I think the Department for Education is in listening mode,” says Poppy. “I think they are looking for the sector to come forward with ideas, for these conversations to start happening, and for the asks to fall out of that. Obviously there are funding challenges but there are other asks as well, such as could the department broker conversations with the CMA or give some additional regulatory guidance? Also it would be helpful to work on joining up the different forms of education provision across FE and HE so you’re not constantly finding hurdles – just as you get over one issue in your sector, you’re in another sector. I think there are many things the department could do to help universities navigate their way through some of the decision-making and planning and considering what their options are.”

    None of this looks like the kind of funding investment in transformation the sector might hope to see, but it’s worth noting that in some cases a benefit of scale can be to unlock opportunities for private investment. The playbook works through the circumstances under which private investment could be a sensible option and points to some existing public/private partnerships already in place in the sector.

    Radical collaboration may not be the answer for all or even most higher education institutions in England. But both the sector and government have to answer the fundamental policy question of how to organise the post-16 education sector in such a way as to support the provision of the kinds of diversity of qualifications, subjects and modes of delivery that will enable the largest possible numbers to benefit from the opportunity to enhance their life chances.

    If there is a chance that broader and deeper structural collaborations across further and higher education can help to deliver that agenda, then at the very least boards and executive teams have to give those options meaningful consideration – and this playbook just radically lowered the bar to starting that process.

    This article is published in association with KPMG UK and Mills & Reeve. You can view and download Radical collaboration: a playbook here.

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