Bridget Phillipson has set out the government’s priorities for HE reform

The Secretary of State for Education is talking softly but she’s also carrying a moderately big stick.

A circular letter issued from the desk of Bridget Phillipson to heads of institution in England on Monday 4 November confirmed the inflationary undergraduate fee and student maintenance increase announced in Parliament that same day, and the reduction to classroom-based foundation year fees included in the Budget.

Phillipson praised the sector in the warmest terms:

The institutions which you lead make a vital contribution, as education and research institutions, to our economy, to society, and to industry and innovation. They contribute to productivity growth; play a crucial civic role in their communities; and have a key role to play in enhancing the UK’s reputation across the globe. I also passionately believe in education for education’s sake: a more educated society is happier, healthier, more cohesive, and socially and culturally richer.

Lovely stuff. But she also warned that with additional investment “wide-scale reform in the higher education sector” will be expected. Full plans for reform are expected “by next summer” – indicating alignment with the upcoming Spending Review – and as a corollary it appears that any prospect of a large-scale independent review of HE is pretty much off the table.

In the meantime the Secretary of State has set out the government’s headline priorities for reform of higher education, focusing on access, economic growth, civic and regional engagement, quality, and efficiency. All of these are sketched out in broad terms, leaving plenty of room for development and refinement between now and the summer.

Start planning now

Before then, higher education institutions will have multiple opportunities to engage with the relevant government departments and their ministers and to shape the evolution of thinking. There will be a hundred high level round tables, a thousand one to one meetings with civil servants, consultations from the regulator, and think pieces galore.

The thing about the government’s priorities for HE is that at a high level they are impossible to disagree with, and every single one constitutes a complex and challenging problem that there are no easy routes to solving. Which means that in spending energy on this agenda the sector should think now about how it is going to focus less on broad policy ideas and principles, and more on the difficult bits of defining shared success criteria and an implementation framework.

Understanding in as fine-grained detail as possible how the sector works at present in relation to its various missions and objectives, how it could work differently, and how the impact of that change can be measured, will be the most useful and important work that can be done in the next year. While the headlines remain sketchy at this stage there’s nothing especially startling about any of them – it’s practically an invitation to the sector to get started on working out what it thinks the government should tell it to do.

Having that evidence-based view of what is possible within the current funding envelope is also tactically important to manage government expectations – the sector is right to signal that it can reform and be more efficient, but government and civil servants need to understand the processes and trade offs that will be involved and be well informed about how government will need to deploy resource or policy change to achieve the impact it wants, or the limits of what can be achieved without those measures.

The priorities and their implementation

Play a stronger role in expanding access and improving outcomes for disadvantaged students, including doing “more to create a culture of lifelong learning and provide more flexible models to help everyone access higher education.”

The implementation of the Lifelong Learning Entitlement is obviously driving some of the planned reform here, but the weakness of that policy agenda was always in the narrowness of its ambition, which seemed to assume that changes to funding structures would deliver the wider objective of a flexible, accessible system of post-18 education. While we should not underestimate the scale of the effort involved in the task of making those technical changes to funding systems, there is a dearth of associated thinking about curriculum, credit, and student and employer expectations of and engagement with the post-18 system.

Given these changes indicate significant and fundamental reforms it is very much time for the end of vague language about flexibility and expansion and start to think about establishing some meaningful success criteria mapped against a time horizon for impact. In the longer term this could – and probably should – be about broad HE participation goals but it should also in the very near term be about understanding and further developing a pipeline of demand for flexible HE opportunities, and looking with a policy lens at the curriculum/skills interface and the extent to which credit is a currency that can be deployed meaningfully to facilitate transfer and stackability in a more flexible system.

While diversification of options can be a meaningful route to expanding access, there is also within the general “access” category an opportunity to look in a serious way at where flexibility can be built at a smaller scale into the full-time model to accommodate students’ paid work, caring commitments, and the general complexity of their lives. This is an issue that institutions are already working on through measures like shifting to block provision and blended learning options, and one that in many ways speaks more meaningfully to the question of access and participation than a model that depends on highly motivated and well-informed individuals or their employers to navigate a deconstructed HE offer.

Make a stronger contribution to economic growth – Phillipson acknowledges the existing contribution, but argues that there needs to be closer alignment to skills needs and economic growth plans for education and research respectively, in line with the industrial strategy.

Here, again, working up some success criteria or progress measures could help to bottom out what we already know about universities’ contribution to growth (at institutional and/or at system level) and the available points of intervention to influence this. Skills England is expected to have a coordinating role in linking up education and qualification provision with skills needs; some of its early jobs will almost certainly have to be working through the data challenges involved in mapping the terrain, setting priorities for which skills needs require its particular attention, and opening up dialogue with providers in FE and HE about how provision that meets those needs can be caused to exist if current systems are not producing that kind of provision organically.

This section also signals that there will be a “refreshed International Education Strategy” – which may end up being a bit less far-reaching than the holistic “global strategy for HE” proposed by Universities UK. Nevertheless a refreshed strategy would offer the prospect of a new compact with government on international education, with shared objectives for success that probably should go beyond topline recruitment numbers or export income as the old one did, to think about international student outcomes and impact as well.

Play a greater civic role in their communities, locally and regionally, with universities civic and regional roles forming “a core part of a renewed vision for the sector” and contributing directly to local and regional development.

There’s a bit of word salad here, with the notion that universities should work in partnership with local policymakers and employers “to shape and deliver the economic and social change that is needed across skills, research and innovation.” Parsing that out and reading between the lines, it sounds like what the government has in mind when it thinks about universities’ civic engagement is about taking a problem or challenge-led approach to civic engagement, starting with the economic and social issues of an area or region rather than, say, the institution’s history, the quality of its relationships and partnerships, or the various good works it is already doing.

Clearly the sector already has a great story to tell on civic engagement, with the development of civic university agreements and civic charters, as well as a long tail of community-facing projects and partnership activity. The challenge for civic engagement and the “service” mission is that it’s not externally funded, so can quite often depend on goodwill and enthusiasm to keep afloat – resources whose supply reduces as institutional funding gets tighter.

Assuming the government has no intention of creating a new third mission funding stream (though there are some ideas floating around about how this could be done), paradoxically, the agenda could well be more about regretfully stopping doing some things and setting some quite focused priorities according to a shared, possibly cross-regional assessment of intended impact, than about growing the volume of institutional civic engagement activity.

Raise the bar further on teaching standards – because there are “pockets of provision where standards are unacceptably low, which means that some students are being held back by poor outcomes” The Office for Students’ work on quality will take “a more rigorous approach to improving quality and supporting improvement.”

This slightly odd formulation may owe more to hasty drafting than a finely-tuned distinction between direct regulatory intervention and creating an environment in which quality enhancement can flourish, but it could also signal a conceptual framework for further evolution of the quality system, one that allows for both the boots on the ground where there are signals of risks to quality and standards, and a more benign convening of good practice and support for enhancement, perhaps even bringing the sector back in line with European standards.

A key takeaway here is that the government has accepted the argument on student outcomes, which means that re-litigating the validity of the B3 measures isn’t on the cards. Institutions are already working on building theoretical models that seek to understand in more depth the link between demographics/social background, learning experiences, and student outcomes, aided/prompted by the creation of TASO, by the new APP risk register and the invitation through TEF to articulate an approach to education gain. Supporting and elevating this work would absolutely align with the government’s desire for rigour in quality assessment, and would create a robust framework for identifying areas for improvement.

The elephant in the room on quality is money – students having enough of it to be able to engage in their learning, and higher education institutions having enough of it to resource the learning adequately. It might be a stretch to imagine talking about this openly, but advancing an evidence-based view of what counts as essential on the input side in different learning contexts would be a useful start. There also needs to be acceptance from government that in the absence of a more generous maintenance settlement, a policy agenda that looks for other ways to relieve financial pressure on students who can’t draw on the Bank of Mum and Dad and that doesn’t depend on universities ongoing ability to disburse hardship funds, could be required.

A sustained efficiency and reform programme, with “a fundamental re-examination of business models and much less wasteful spending” and “far greater collaboration across the sector to drive efficiency.”

While many will bridle at the implication that the sector is wasteful, a generous read of the Secretary of State’s view is that there is a degree of deadweight involved in sticking to traditional ways of doing things, albeit there are often significant costs and complexities in changing those things.

The sector is already exploring the potential for more systematic collaboration – for example in this recent report from Jisc and KPMG on opportunities for sharing digital systems. Universities UK has pledged to facilitate a programme of transformation focused on shared facilities and services. The challenge here will be about the pace of change and the government’s willingness to act as an enabler and facilitator. The Jisc/KPMG report highlighted a need for independent third parties to convene discussions – government might not be the right actor to do the legwork, but it should be prepared to support the right person or organisation to do so, with modest funding and policy change where necessary to grease the wheels.

At the conclusion of the letter Phillipson suggests that the government’s priority areas are “shared objectives” with the sector – and while there may be a degree of cavilling over the details and worries about finance, the Westminster government’s sense of what higher education does in the world does seem to be broadly in step with the sector’s conception of itself.

In this context, the devil will absolutely be in the proverbial detail. Rather than the ideological argument over the principles of consumerism and marketisation that the government went through with the sector in the last round of HE reform, this government faces a much more technical job of working through policy agendas that create space for higher education institutions to establish new ways of working, set pragmatic priorities, execute them, evaluate the impact, and further evolve. While there’s absolutely space for talking more about that fresh and exciting vision for HE, not least because that’s what will keep everyone on track when things get difficult, the proof of the vision will be in the delivery.