For the second year in a row the former NUT policy officer performs well in our Power List, but has been pipped to the number one slot this time. He’s here not just in his capacity as a very executive chair of the Office for Students, having a much more hands-on role in shaping the growth and direction of England’s new regulator than HEFCE chairs of yore. As a writer and thinker about the “science” of policy delivery, processes drawing on his ideas now touch every aspect of the sector. Baskets of metrics, official and unofficial rankings, the correct functioning of the market and the mantra of choice seem to underpin nearly everything going on right now – though not all of these can be traced back to OfS, most of these bear the imprints of ideas put forward in his books “Instruction to Deliver” and refined in “How to Run a Government…”.
It’s not all been plain sailing though. Barber’s role in the Toby Young debacle (broadly, he was happy to argue and vouch for his joining the OfS board to the extent that checks that should have been performed were not) was uncharacteristically thoughtless, and he could and should have pushed back further on the No.10-directed highly political exclusion of NUS-linked students on the OfS board. After decades of making politics work behind the scenes these looked like missteps.
But it is no exaggeration to say that Barber’s concepts and ideas have underpinned everything we have learned about the way our new regulator will work. From access and participation, to quality assurance, even through to the way OfS measures its own performance – rankings, measures, and metrics are everywhere. A world of risk-led regulation. It feels commonplace because it is commonplace, so profound has been the influence of one man with a penchant for graphs and trajectories, and the ear of the elected.
But we need to keep a close eye on the independence of OfS under his watch. Early in his career in government he asked nonplussed permanent secretaries to draw up a “chain of delivery” – mapping how an idea would move from the brain of the minister to the experience of the service user with minimal friction along the way. It means there is a risk, however, in OfS being seen to be too quick to bend to ministers’ whims – as Ofsted has under DfE ministers for Labour, the Coalition and the Tories. HEFCE played an underappreciated role in moderating some of the dafter ideas emerging from Whitehall – if Barber wants to maintain a strong Power List ranking for a third year, we’d probably need to see some more visible signs of push back against the worst excesses of government interference in higher education.