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Tag: English
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Innovation and skills in the English devolution white paper
Devolution is a central plank of the government’s growth agenda. Providing places with the tools and resources to address local problems in ways that make sense on the ground is a means to unleash potential – and to end what English devolution minister Jim McMahon is happy to call the “top-down micromanaging” approach of ringfencing funds and centralising decision making.
The launch of the English devolution white paper is the first step on that journey. Strategic authorities, led (for preference) by elected mayors, will cover the entirety of England. Integrated settlements will provide powers covering transport, infrastructure, housing, public services – and, of particular interest to the higher education sector, skills and innovation.
A big part of the work of the white paper is in consolidating and standardising what had become an unruly system. Sitting above unitary, county, and district councils, a layer of strategic authorities will take on the services that larger areas need to thrive:
Our goal is simple. Universal coverage in England of Strategic Authorities – which should be a number of councils working together, covering areas that people recognise and work in. Many places already have Combined Authorities that serve this role.
The forthcoming English Devolution Bill will enshrine this concept in law. We get a computer game-like hierarchy of how strategic authorities will level up (so to speak): foundation strategic authorities (which do not – yet – have a mayor), followed by mayoral strategic authorities, which can then “unlock” designation as established mayoral strategic authorities through fulfilling various criteria. This will grant integrated funding settlements and other treats such as the ability to pilot new kinds of devolution.
Already eligible for this top designation are Greater Manchester, Liverpool City Region, the North East, South Yorkshire, West Midlands, and West Yorkshire. There’s an aspiration for something similar to apply to London as well, but some legislative fiddling will be needed due to the capital’s “unique circumstances.”
Innovation
If you’ve got your head around the different levels of hierarchy, there’s actually quite a lot in the white paper for research and innovation, dependent on an area’s level of devolution.
In language echoing the industrial strategy green paper, we are told that a strong local network of public and private institutions focused on R&D, innovation, and the diffusion of ideas “is one of the factors which sets highly productive local economies apart.” A big part of this is closer join-up between UKRI and local government.
Working our way up the devolution ladder, all strategic authorities (including foundation level) will be able to draw on UKRI data on the location of R&D investments, to better allow them to “understand publicly supported innovation activity in their region and how to best take advantage of it.”
Those mayoral strategic authorities will additionally work with Innovate UK to produce joint plans, to shape long-term innovation strategies and investments in places. UKRI will also be extending its regional partnerships and “network of embedded points of contact” with mayoral strategic authorities.
And then coming up to the pinnacle of devolution, those established mayoral strategic authorities – to remind you: Greater Manchester, Liverpool City Region, the North East, South Yorkshire, West Midlands, and West Yorkshire, and possibly London – will get actual devolved research funding, in the form of a future regional innovation funding programme allowing local leaders to develop “bespoke innovation support offers for their regions.”
This draws somewhat on the spirit of the Regional Innovation Fund, though this was allocated to individual higher education institutions – what’s on offer here sounds like a pot of money controlled by mayors. Its format is also to be based on lessons learned from the Innovation Accelerator pilot, which was funding by levelling up money.
Plus, established mayoralties will get an annual meeting with the science minister, more regular engagement with senior staff at UKRI, and the chance to be consulted on the development of relevant DSIT and UKRI strategies.
All in all, it’s a decent start down the road of a more significantly devolved research landscape. Important to note, however, that the actual funding on offer to established mayors is contingent on next year’s spending review, and so we’re talking about 2026–27 onwards here. And we might also observe that the House of Commons science committee’s inquiry into regional R&D, announced last week, has clearly been set up with an eye to influencing how this all comes together.
At least to begin with, there will also be a not insignificant gap between what’s on offer to the most established sites of devolution – some funds to spend as desired, a seat at the strategy table – and what those “foundation” strategic authorities receive, which will be little more than a bit of regional R&D data. There’s potential for imbalance between regions here. Foundation-level authorities are described as a “stepping stone” to later acquiring a mayor, but it could be a long and drawn-out process.
Skills and more
On skills, strategic authorities will retain ownership of the Adult Skills Fund (with ringfencing removed from bootcamp and free course pots to allow for flexibility), take on joint ownership of Local Skills Improvement Plans alongside employer representative bodies, and work with employers to take on responsibility for promoting 16-19 pathways. In future, strategic authorities will have a “substantial role” in careers and employment support design outside of the existing Jobcentre Plus network, as the Get Britain Working white paper gestured towards.
You’ll have spotted that this does not immediately extend to higher education, except to the extent that universities and colleges already get involved with adult skills provision. However the centre of gravity is such that any provider with an avowed interest in the local area will end up developing close relationships with strategic authorities. It isn’t just on skills or innovation – many universities work with local government on issues that affect students (and staff!) such as housing, infrastructure, and transport, and will have a strong interest in working with strategic authorities with new and wider powers to act.
Administrative geography corner
If you are labouring under the impression that dividing England up into administrative chunks is a fairly straightforward task, may we introduce you to possibly the single finest document ever published by the Office for National Statistics: the Hierarchical Representation of UK Geographies.
Pedants may also note that the existing geography of LSIPs, which was controversially allowed to evolve into being outside of the established local authority boundaries, does not map cleanly to current or proposed local authorities – something that a future iteration of plans may need to consider. Likewise, the scope of university core recruitment areas or civic aspirations may not map to either.
What we’d have loved to have shown you is a map showing which of the new strategic authorities your campus might be in. Sadly the boundaries of the “current map of English devolution” included in the white paper do not cleanly map to England’s many contradictory systems of administrative geography. Some of the devolved areas depicted are almost LSIP regions, one (Surrey) is a non-metropolitan ceremonial county, and one – Devon, including Torbay but not under any circumstances Plymouth – is just plain mad.
As soon as we get an answer and some boundaries from ONS, we’ll let you know. In the meantime, here’s the map from the white paper:
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Institutional constraints to higher education datafication: an English case study
by Rachel Brooks
‘Intractable’ datafication?
Over recent years, both policymakers and university leaders have extolled the virtues of moving to a more metricised higher education sector: statistics about student satisfaction with their degree programme are held to improve the decision-making processes of prospective students, while data analytics are purported to help the shift to more personalised learning, for example. Moreover, academic studies have contended that datafication has become an ‘intractable’ part of higher education institutions (HEIs) across the world.
Nevertheless, our research (conducted in ten English HEIs, funded by TASO) – of data use with respect to widening participation to undergraduate ‘sandwich’ courses (where students spend a year on a work placement, typically during the third year of a four-year degree programme) – indicates that, despite the strong claims about the advantages of making more and better use of data, in this particular area of activity at least, significant constraints operate, limiting the advantages that can accrue through datafication.
Little evidence of widespread data use
Our interviewees were those responsible for sandwich course provision in their HEI. While most thought that data could offer useful insights into the effectiveness of their area of activity, there was little evidence of ‘intractable’ data use. This was for three main reasons. First, in some cases, interviewees explained that no relevant data were collected – in relation to access to sandwich courses and/or the outcomes of such courses. Second, in some HEIs, relevant data were collected but not analysed. Such evidence tends to support the contention that ‘data lakes’ are emerging, as HEIs collect more and more data that often remain untapped. Third, in other cases, appropriate data were collected and analysed, but in a very limited manner. For example, one interviewee explained how data were collected and analysed in relation to the participation of students from under-represented ethnic groups, but not with respect to any other widening participation categories. This limited form of datafication, in which only some social characteristics were datafied, was not, therefore, able to inform any action with respect to the participation of widening participation students generally. Indeed, across all ten HEIs, there was only one example of where data were used in a systematic fashion to help analyse who was accessing sandwich courses within the institution, and the extent to which they were representative of the wider student population.
Constraints on data use
Lack of institutional capacity
In explaining this absence of data use, the most commonly identified constraint was the lack of institutional capacity to collect and/or analyse appropriate data. For example, one interviewee commented that they did not have a very good data system for placements – ‘we are still quite Excel- based’. Excel spreadsheets were viewed as limited as they could not be easily shared or updated, and data were relatively hard to manipulate. This, according to the interviewee, made collection of appropriate data laborious, and systematic analysis of the data difficult. Interviewees also pointed to the limited time staff had available to analyse data that the institution had collected.
Prioritisation of ‘externally-facing’ data
Several interviewees described how ‘externally-facing data’ – i.e. that required by regulatory bodies and/or that fed into national and international league tables – was commonly prioritised, leaving little time for information officers to devote to generating and/or analysing data for internal purposes. One interviewee, for example, was unclear about what data, if any, were collected about equity gaps but believed that they were generally only pulled together for high-level reports ‘such as for the TEF’.
Institutional cultures
A further barrier to using data to analyse access to and outcomes of sandwich courses was perceived to be the wider culture of the institution, including its attitude to risk. An interviewee explained that the data collected in their institution was limited to two main variables – subject of study and fee status (home or international) – because of ‘ongoing cautiousness at the university about how some of that data is used and how it’s shared with different teams’.
In addition, many participants outlined the struggles they had faced in gaining access to relevant data, and in influencing decisions about what should be collected and what analyses should be run. Several spoke of having to ‘request’ particular analyses to be run (which could be turned down), leading to a fairly ad hoc and inefficient way of proceeding, and illustrating the relative lack of agency accorded to staff – typically occupying mid-level organisational roles – in accessing and manipulating data.
Reflections
Examining a discrete set of activities within the UK higher education sector – those relating to sandwich courses – provides a useful lens to examine quotidian practices with respect to the availability and use of data. Despite the strong emphasis on data by government bodies and HEI senior management teams, as well as the claims made about the ‘intractability’ of HEI data use in the academic literature, our research suggests that datafication is perhaps not as widespread as some have claimed. Indeed, it indicates that some areas of activity – even those linked to high profile political and institutional priorities (in this case, employability and widening participation) – have remained largely untouched by ‘intractable’ datafication, with relevant data either not being collected or, where it is collected, not being made available to staff working in pertinent areas.
As a consequence, the extent to which students from widening participation backgrounds were accessing sandwich courses – and then succeeding on them – relative to their peers typically remained invisible. While the majority of our interviewees were able to speculate on the extent of any under-representation and/or poor experience, this was typically on the basis of anecdotal evidence and their own ‘sense’ of how inequalities were played out in this area. Although reflecting on professional experience is obviously important, many inequalities may not be visible to staff (for example, if a student chooses not to talk about their neurodiversity or first-in-family status), even if they have regular contact with those eligible to take a sandwich course. Moreover, given the status often accorded to quantitative data within the senior management teams of universities, the lack of any statistical reporting about inequalities by social characteristic, as they pertain to sandwich courses, makes it highly likely that such issues will struggle to gain the attention of senior leaders. The barriers to the effective use of metrics highlighted above may thus have a direct impact on HEIs’ capacity to recognise and address inequalities.
The research on which this blog is based was carried out with Jill Timms (University of Surrey) and is discussed in more detail in this article Institutional constraints to higher education datafication: an English case study | Higher Education
Rachel Brooks is Professor of Higher Education at the University of Oxford and current President of the British Sociological Association. She has conducted a wide range of research on the sociology of higher education; her most recent book is Constructing the Higher Education Student: perspectives from across Europe, published (open access) with Policy Press.
