How to fail, with Universities UK

Typically when the new academic year begins “failure” is not front of mind for a higher education sector preoccupied with the business of fresh starts as a new wave of students arrives to begin their courses in September.

But the possibility or threat of failure infused this year’s annual gathering of vice chancellors at Universities UK conference – established in the sombre tone set by UUK president and St Andrews Principal Sally Mapstone when she warned in her opening remarks:

There is now a clear choice. We can allow our distinguished, globally competitive, higher education system to slide into decline. Or we can act together, as institutions, and with government, to ensure that higher education is able to deliver for the nation into the 2030s.

Skills minister Jacqui Smith the previous day had told vice chancellors that:

I hadn’t been in the job an hour before people were outlining for me the real financial peril that the sector faces.

And added:

We are carefully considering all options to deliver a more robust higher education sector, working on it now, but this isn’t something that’s going to happen overnight. It will take time to get it right, and we’re doing it – as I started by outlining – in an era of enormously difficult and tough fiscal choices that we need to make.

For those operating behind the scenes of the conference the high-minded reflections issued from the stage and the desk of the minister were given a more farcical twist as the journalists in attendance shook every tree available in hopes of pinning down one of the several universities that are rumoured to be on the brink of insolvency.

But while individual institutional “failure” is a clear and present concern, the analysis driving government thinking on higher education funding must also contend with various different accounts of how the sector arrived in its current state – because understanding the problem is a vital precursor to addressing it.

There’s an account that lays the failure at the door of the coalition government, by setting up a funding system that incentivised market-led growth, and competition between providers, and by framing the whole unit of a resource in terms of a “fee” that would deprive the government of levers to smooth out the anomalies created by market demand, and make it politically very challenging to increase that unit of resource sustainably in the future.

The Scottish version of this is the other extreme: by failing to establish a cost-sharing model for funding Scottish higher education the Scottish Nationalist government has left itself and the sector vulnerable to ongoing wider pressures on public finances. In either case the fix is about national funding policy – indexation of fees to inflation, increases in public funding, or in Scotland’s case, possibly biting the bullet on a greater share of the costs being passed on to graduates.

But there’s also an account that points to failures of leadership and governance within universities themselves: at minimum a failure to anticipate and prepare for a time when £9,250 would not deliver the resource required to sustain the model of higher education as currently constituted, and to pursue meaningful efficiencies in delivery; on a larger scale a failure to ensure that the model itself remained sufficiently well regarded so as to continue to attract public support and further resource.

In this framing, an injection of public money simply disappears into a black hole of university budgets, and it’s only a matter of time before we’re back here again. This is why there is policy talk of a “transformation fund” of some kind – an injection of financing that would not simply top up funding to universities to carry on as before but insist that there be changes to core operating models.

Failure informs success

For a sector that has grown accustomed to prefacing any discussion of itself with the words “world-leading” a conversation about failure is hard to stomach but it has become increasingly necessary. At Universities UK conference Sally Mapstone called for an increase in government investment to meet the full costs of teaching and research, but acknowledged:

greater effectiveness and efficiency in delivery is necessary for our universities to thrive in the next decade. We have to choose to reform. To do things differently. To prioritise some things and deprioritise others.Our operating models need to evolve to become more effective and efficient.

I’ve posited two competing narratives of failure here for the sake of the argument and illustrate the contours of the policy challenge, but I do think it’s important to acknowledge factors like Brexit, Covid, and the politics of immigration that have largely not been of universities’ making, that are well outside their control, and that have contributed in various ways to the sector’s current circumstances. Not least because it’s also really important to acknowledge that failure is a simple fact of life and doesn’t necessarily have to be about fault, or blame, or shame.

As the iconic Elizabeth Day teaches in her popular “how to fail” podcast, it is worth dwelling and reflecting on failures because they are complicated. It would be easy to point the finger at blinkered politicians, supine vice chancellors or, indeed, “neoliberalism”, and move on. But on the assumption that the current situation has happened despite most of the main actors doing their very best with the information they had in the environment they were operating in, there is a real need to actually understand why things go wrong and what can be done in the future to make things better.

Inevitably the analysis of failure itself takes place from a particular standpoint. What I observed at Universities UK was a lot of positive chatter vibing off some of the key themes emerging from the new Labour government in Westminster – skills, collaboration, devolution, innovation, growth – but very much in the sense of “we need to do more on these” rather than in-depth analysis of what the barriers are that have constrained activity in the past or what the enablers are that might amplify it in the future.

To some extent a simple change of government exposes the limitations of the system that has been produced by a different set of national priorities. But simply blaming the Tories won’t cut it. For the Labour government and universities to achieve the productive working partnership that both sides have emphatically and repeatedly said they want, there will need to be openness to a deeper assessment of how and why universities “work” and the interactions between policy, regulation, and institutions. This would make it much more likely that the government will see some quo for any quid it might be minded to invest.

So in the spirit of “how to fail” here are three “failures” of the current system that warrant a deeper understanding if they are to be converted into opportunities and, ultimately, growth.

The link between skills, innovation, and the value of a university education

The new government and universities are inheriting a policy landscape in which “skills” is semi or wholly detached from “innovation” – led by separate departments, targeted at different stakeholder groups and generally lacking in joined-up-ness. The opportunity offered by the new Skills England body is to think a bit more creatively about the interrelationship between these areas. At the baseline skills gaps and deficiencies in the labour market exist at the higher level – witness the managerial capability issues that are thought to be a significant factor in Britain’s lagging productivity.

But the bigger picture here is about understanding and explaining why it matters in skills terms that university teaching is research informed, what that does for the skills landscape, and how that translates into innovation capability in individuals and regions. To my mind this goes beyond a communication challenge; it’s not a given that having active researchers do teaching has any bearing on whether curricula and pedagogy create knowledge producers or innovative thinkers. There needs to be a level of intentionality of design of courses and a meaningful connection to regional innovation ecosystems – there are certainly places where this is happening in interesting ways and we need to understand how those relationships work and what it takes to make them flourish.

This shouldn’t be an especially hard case to make if the tenor of the “in conversation” with Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology Peter Kyle at Universities UK conference is a useful guide. While at this stage only a few months in and with a one year spending review in train government has little to say on its specific plans for science and research, it’s clear that there is a lot of thinking going on about how this government’s mission-led approach to governing opens up opportunities for a more strategic policy agenda that looks for the connections and synergies between agendas. Universities are very well positioned to occupy the under-explored policy space where “skills” aligns with “research”.

A worry, though, is that the sector makes claims for the value of research-informed teaching that lean too hard on a traditional, elite-coded understanding of “what a university is” – there were several moments last week when I heard vice chancellors refer disparagingly to “mere teaching colleges.” While it is certainly true that if you want your taught students exposed to knowledge in development it helps to have them be taught at research-active institutions I’m not convinced it’s the only way to achieve those ends nor that the case for a (very expensive) research-informed teaching model is obvious to policymakers. And being sniffy about teaching-led higher education provision is probably not the way for the sector to endear itself to a government that wants to actively encourage closer relationships between further and higher education institutions.

Collaboration and systems analysis

One of the well-trodden arguments about the limitation of how competition works is that it prioritises the success of individual component parts (HE institutions) over the success of the system as a whole. And the consequence we see is that some institutions are in serious financial trouble, along with some whole subject areas at risk of decline, and a lack of innovation at system level in modes of provision where the market is not sufficiently developed to make the risks worth it.

Collaboration and coordination are not necessarily the panacea for these ills but it’s increasingly taken as a given that where there are wider public benefits or risks in play and a competitive market can neither maximise the benefits nor mitigate the risks, then a more collaborative, coordinated approach could comfortably coexist with competition. The planned English Devolution Bill is expected to codify a regional map of England and establish structures for regional governance where none currently exist. There will also likely be a push to give greater influence over economic planning and industrial strategy to the regions.

The thinking here can’t just be that local actors – education providers, local authorities, business leaders – need to talk to each other more. Most universities will say with good authority that they have reasonably good relationships in their region. “Collaboration” isn’t a good in itself; it is a means to achieve desirable shared ends. And no institution, however public spirited, is going to waste scarce resources on maintaining a relationship that doesn’t deliver something.

The job that needs to be done is, in a sense, being prepared to be open-minded about the system-level objectives in play beyond specific institutional interests (opportunity, skills, innovation, growth), evidence-led in understanding the gaps that exist in the ecosystem, and then absolutely ruthless about understanding and then committing to the structures, relationships, and ways of working that deliver impactful partnership to address those gaps. The danger is that universities feel obliged to play the game of demonstrating engagement – showing up in the room but remaining non-committal – rather than being prepared to take on the crunchy issues that inevitably arise when different stakeholders attempt to build common purpose.

Scaling student experience inclusively

The final failure is about, broadly, the student experience, and what the government might want it to look like. Thus far Labour have made vague and positive noises about “quality” and “access” which are absolutely the things you talk about when you are still in the process of getting to grips with the nuances of how the policy and regulatory landscape interact with students’ lives.

Put bluntly, nobody has yet answered the question of how you scale and sustain the model of a full-fat student experience, with authentic pedagogies, meaningful co- and extra-curricular opportunities for all, and high quality careers and welfare services, on a declining unit of resource and an increasingly paltry student maintenance loan, in an economic downturn when families are less able to bridge the costs of participation. Nested in here is a challenge about digital transformation and a clear-eyed assessment of the extent to which technology can streamline some elements of the learning experience sufficiently so as to target resource towards enabling the more meaningful encounters with people.

While the full-time/full-fat model remains so culturally dominant as well as being the focus of the funding system it will remain very tricky indeed to “sell” alternative versions of higher education to prospective students, however desirable in principle that might be. Labour will need in its development of post-16 policy to decide whether it is comfortable with a model that, despite rhetoric on paying nothing upfront, still in reality depends on students’ investment during the course to realise its benefits.

Assuming that it is unlikely to be seen as desirable, the alternative – scaling back the offer for all or most students – is also fairly unpalatable. Diversifying the offer only works if there is a sense of parity in the various versions of what is offered. Universities, arguably, while consistently making the case for additional student maintenance funding, have not been especially vocal about the real impact of student financial inequality – not least because under the last government there was not the trust that anything would be done that didn’t make the whole issue universities’ problem and a further charge against the sector. A change of government opens up the possibility of a more nuanced conversation, in which universities can be honest about the investment in students that will be needed if the benefits of university education are to be realised equitably.

In a funding environment in which there are no easy answers, the preparedness on both sides to look at these issues with pragmatic eyes, acknowledging where there has been policy and institutional failure, but committing to understand and learn from those failures, could be the real test of the prospect of repairing the relationship between universities and government.