Have universities got the capacity and cash to respond to the government’s agenda?

Pressed on some of the missing detail in Bridget Phillipson’s big announcement on maintenance grants, Smith confessed that the government:

…is, I think it would be fair to say, at an early stage of development of the maintenance grants policy. I don’t think you’ll be surprised to know that we would have announced more had we been able to – ie higher amounts and broader and greater breadth. But bringing back maintenance grants is a really important basis on which you build.

So not quite “dreamed up in the hotel bar on Monday”, but not far off – and something totemic that Phillipson was able to do during her bid for the deputy leadership without needing more money from No.11.

If anything, the popularity of the announcement amongst the faithful here should mean that some more meat can be put on the bones between now and the Autumn Statement.

In her main speech to The future of higher education and skills, together fringe (hosted by The Policy Institute at King’s College London and the Education and Training Foundation), Smith took the opportunity to tee up the impending Skills White Paper, which we understand really is imminent this time.

Much of that re-trod now familiar themes – although the clarity on offer in Smith’s description of who the reforms should deliver for was useful:

• The young person who never thought that university was for them, and take a level four qualification in a university college partnership and steps into a good job.
• The mid career worker takes two LLE modules and moves into a higher paid role in a growing sector.
• A local employer who has been advertising the same vacancy for months finally finds that skilled person and could bid for new contracts.
• A region that has seen too many of its young people leave suddenly finds that it can train, keep and attract talent, because its colleges and universities are working together to be engines of growth.
• And when all of that happens, we grow the economy, we rise productivity, we develop the good jobs and lifelong opportunities for people that I suspect all of us are in this room to deliver. That’s the challenge. It’s also the opportunity.

There may be more to come – but unsurprisingly the existing basket of the Lifelong Learning Entitlement, Skills England and the Growth and Skills Levy look like they’ll be the centrepiece vehicles through which those challenges and opportunities will be met.

To be fair, the funding elephant in the room wasn’t ignored:

We do understand that the pressures are real. Many universities are facing acute financial strain, and we’ve been honest about that, and I hope, practical. We’re working closely with the Office of students to prioritize stability and to protect students in the wider public interest. We took the decision this year to increase the maximum tuition fee, and we will have more to say about ongoing financial stability for the higher education sector, but that is only the start.

The best guess floating around is a commitment to at least index-link the main UG fee limit – but that may well not be enough to prevent the removal of capacity in the sorts of localities that Smith was urging universities to turn their attention to:

How can universities in particular lead on relevance? Map your portfolio to sector and regional demand. How can we develop that flexibility necessary to build modular pathways to ensure that we are delivering those level four and five skills, to create step on, step off routes that let people learn? And thirdly, how can you be anchors for place, responding to local priorities and needs, working with partners locally?

How can you open doors and help people to walk through them by strengthening outreach in schools, partnerships and adult return routes? How can you treat partnership as a core capability, and reach out beyond higher education to the whole range of other partners that will be important for this work?

It all reflected an ongoing theme – a sense that, at least for the time being, central government neither has the bandwidth, money or intent to actively steer the sector towards the solutions it wants. Whether the mechanisms coming in the White Paper will be enough to incentivise remains the open question.

We at least got some mood music on collaboration rather than competition – music that also seemed to speak to the constant nudging that UKRI has been doing on research concentration:

It is a big shift from a shift to partnership, a shift to collaboration, from a focus on competition. And you know, Patrick Vallance and I have thought about and have talked about it and will have more to say about what we think that means for the nature of the HE sector – where I think we should, 1) recognize diversity, 2) celebrate that and not expect every institution to be delivering exactly the same, and 3) encourage institutions to think about their specialisms and focus on them.

I was planning our SUs study tour this weekend, and came across a city in Belgium where students can build their Bachelor’s from modules from the four universities in the city. Sadly, I suspect that’s not quite what’s coming in the White Paper.

Smith had been responding to a question on student number controls and the threat of subject deserts as students are sucked up the league tables – but it’s clear that she doesn’t want to look like an enemy of opportunity and choice:

I do believe that students should have a choice about what they study and why they study it, informed by better and more transparent information about what they’re going to be getting when they get to university and what they’re likely to be able to achieve.

Maybe that will mean warning students like these that they might end up living in “housing up to an hour away” – although even then, it’s again not clear that better IAG will do enough to shift the incentives in the way Smith would like to see.

My sense generally is that the capacity to respond to policy agendas is pretty much always dependent on there being enough money and time around to take the risks. The problem for universities is that there’s not a lot of either down the back of the sofa – and two decades of cut-throat competition will be a hard habit to kick.