On 24 June, I was delighted to take up my role as the CEO of GuildHE and I’m looking forward to working with members and the sector as the organisation moves into its next chapter.
So last week, my team and I met with members to discuss what we would want to see in a new government. Our only constraint for this thought exercise was that the ask should be cost neutral; it should be free for the government to implement.
Here are some of those ideas which we will work with the next government on to shore up the sector and support our diverse higher education institutions.
Financial sustainability
An incoming government should adjust the SLC payment schedule to ease cash flow for institutions, specifically moving the May payment to April. It should also reprofile the three annual payment ratios to deliver a third of the total amount in each payment. For smaller institutions or those without the ability to cross-subsidise or diversify income to the extent of large, multi-faculty universities, such changes to how public funding is delivered would provide immediate financial relief to those managing institutional budgets. While requiring some financial exposure in the short-term, this is a cost-neutral move (longer-term) and one that will become ever more pressing should a more modular-based approach to enrolment and funding be realised through implementation of the LLE.
Related to this, a taskforce focused on the sector’s financial sustainability should be convened, chaired by OfS’s Director of Resource and Finance. Chris Husbands offered the most recent of several thought pieces reflecting on the challenges and how we might plot different paths forward, but some action is now required to coalesce thinking for different types of institutions. Maintaining small, specialist and practice-based institutions is critical to building innovation and providing choice in the sector.
The taskforce can facilitate cross-sector discussions on new operating models while also ensuring views beyond the sector are included to introduce innovation and new thinking. The diversity of HE providers in our system is one of the things that makes it world-leading, but as we articulate in our pre-election manifesto, failure to embrace a strategy for resourcing that diversity is akin to sleepwalking into a weaker sector.
Reducing regulatory overlap and burden
GuildHE has written many times about the regulatory challenges faced by our members in particular. One cost-neutral improvement would be scrapping the expectation in OFS’s registration condition B4 that institutions must retain assessed work for 5 years after the end date of a course. This expectation introduces a significant burden for smaller institutions with more limited resources and assumes that all assessed work is written. In many of our member institutions, assessments are performances, work placements or portfolios.
A ministerial data taskforce should also be reinstated to inform holistic thinking across teaching, research, knowledge exchange and skills, and to identify where improvements or greater cooperation across sector bodies and regulators could reduce burden. If we want to work effectively across tertiary education, this work is vital. The current regulatory overlap costs institutions money, stifles innovation and stops many of our members from engaging due to the complexity and additional resources required.
Sustaining a diverse sector
A new government should make clear its commitment to avoiding disorderly market exits. Thankfully, we have some sense that a Labour government would be more concerned about this than the current one. This could be achieved by opening a window at HMT to provide repayable grants to institutions to ensure smooth transitions to closure or merger for those facing insolvency, or could take the form of a more formal administration regime as exists for further education and sixth form colleges.
This would not increase the likelihood of provider failure, but would steady the market itself by providing assurances to students when making decisions about their courses. It may also formalise a process of dialogue before insolvency is imminent, which would offer the added benefit of underlining a stronger communications relationship between HE providers and government than exists presently.
Because GuildHE represents providers of all sizes, with some as small as a few hundred students, we know well the unique challenges faced by our smaller institutions. Small and medium-sized institutions are more susceptible to financial volatility with less absorptive capacity than larger ones. For this reason, we ask that the incoming government state publicly that the UK is open and interested in international students, and commit to introducing no new student visa restrictions.
Diversity isn’t only reflected in having a wide range of provider types, sizes, and specialisms. It’s also reflected in provision types. We ask an incoming government to remove the 80 per cent fee cap on accelerated fees. Doing so will save HMT money as students who take those degrees draw down two years of maintenance funding rather than three.
We also ask the new government to recognise the successful work institutions are already doing to deliver professional and technical qualifications. This will go some way to dismantling the artificial divide between academic and vocational education and open the door to fruitful dialogue about how our diverse set of providers can support a new government’s ambitions to improve the educational offer for young people and supply the economy with the higher-level skills needed to propel the UK into a period of strong growth and prosperity.
Wanna be startin’ somethin’
This is, as a starting point, our list of implementable actions for a new government that would do two things: provide some immediate relief to the sector, and more importantly, signal a shift in the relationship between the HE sector and government from one noted by (at worst) antagonism and (at best) ambivalence to one of stronger cooperation and support.
We’ll use this list in conversations with senior civil servants and the incoming government. I also share them here to give a sense of GuildHE’s interests going forward. We will work, as we always have, in the interests of our members, but we will be growing our public voice. We will be developing and sharing clear policy positions which reflect and underpin our core values and interests. And we will continue to work collaboratively with other sector bodies to increase the volume of our collective voice to deliver positive change for our members, our students, and broader society.
But this won’t just be about asking government to do things.
Our members are perfectly placed and ready to help the incoming government deliver its ambitions for economic growth and improved public services. Our recent Jigsaw report highlighted just how impactful our members are, while our Local and Regional Policy Manifesto argued that involving our universities, colleges and institutes in the development and implementation of regional planning strategies is key to unlocking local growth and regeneration.
We welcome the start of discussions shortly, and I look forward to working with colleagues across the sector to strengthen our messaging to government in order to bring about the positive changes we want to see.
