England’s civic universities cannot rely on voluntarism

In his recent Wonkhe article, Abel Nyamapfene argued that governing bodies taking hard financial decisions need to be able to tell the difference between reducing institutional cost and weakening a place’s educational future.

He uses the planned closure of the University of Essex’s Southend campus to ask boards to be honest about the civic costs, funding gaps and responsibilities that follow from financially driven choices. It is hard to disagree. But how should this happen?

Some years ago, a piece of work took me back through several years of one university’s council and senate minutes. In that period its governing bodies had considered an overseas campus, a second London campus, a large international research programme, and a literary festival an hour’s drive away. Its role in the development of the place immediately outside its own gates did not come up once.

I have no reason to think that institution was unusual, and perhaps today its minutes read differently. But the question it left me with has not gone away. Why is anticipatory civic planning in England something universities may do rather than something they must do?

Part of the answer is that “place” has been steadily removed from the documents governors are actually bound by and never put back.

How place fell out of the constitution

The original civic universities were founded with local purpose plainly visible in their founding arrangements.

They were set up to serve their cities, support local industry, and advance learning in place. Across the twentieth century, as funding and accountability shifted to national bodies, that language thinned. What survived successive rounds of constitutional modernisation was the object every governor recognises: to advance education, learning, and research for the public benefit. Admirable, and entirely placeless.

The polytechnics were the closest thing England had to structurally civic higher education. They were owned by local authorities, overseen through local education committees, and expected to answer to local labour markets and local demand for access. That model was dismantled in two steps. The Education Reform Act 1988 took the polytechnics and the larger colleges out of local government control and recreated them as independent higher education corporations. The Further and Higher Education Act 1992 then ended the binary divide and allowed them to take university title and their own degree awarding powers. The first step removed the local accountability. The second confirmed that university status came with a national frame of reference and no local one.

The third episode reinforced this in an even more striking way. From the late 1990s a wave of institutions emerged, among them Lincoln, Suffolk, Cumbria, Bolton, Worcester, University of the Highlands and Islands, Winchester, and Chichester, largely to fill local gaps: cold spots in participation, regional skills shortages, thin innovation ecosystems, rural and coastal under-provision. These universities are civic in origin. Very little of that origin shows up in how they are constituted. The founding purpose lived in the business case and the funding bid, not in the governing documents that bind the board.

Voluntary civicism in a national system

Nyamapfene is right that universities should plan in anticipation with local partners, and many do. Civic university agreements, committed leadership teams, anchor institution collaboration, and successive rounds of government expectation have all pushed institutions to refresh local roles.

That rediscovery is voluntary. It may be strategic, tactical, or simply opportunistic. What it is not is constitutional. It is an addition to a system in which a provider’s formal obligations run upwards to regulators and funders, inwards to the academy and administration, rather than automatically outwards to place.

Governors are not required to demand civic performance from their executives, because nothing in the documents they are legally bound to uphold tells them to. Until that changes, anticipatory planning will stay inconsistent, fragile and dependent on who happens to be in post and at worst invisible to the board.

Two remedies

Andy Burnham’s government could pick this up as part of its Rewiring the state approach to devolution and place-informed policy. One route is fairly straightforward. The second is much more challenging, for places and for the sector alike.

The first remedy would be to put place into the governance principles. The straightforward reform is already close to hand. Under the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, every registered provider in England must uphold the public interest governance principles set by the Office for Students.

So, just add place to those principles. It could be modest and modern – a duty to contribute to local economic, social, and cultural wellbeing; to collaborate with local public services; to support regional skills and innovation ecosystems.

Once place is in the governing documents, governors must require civic performance, hold their executives to account for it, and satisfy themselves that the institution is planning proactively with local partners. This is the implicit lever in Nyamapfene’s argument, and it is the one that would change behaviour almost immediately. It commits nobody to a particular level of spending. It commits them to looking.

The second remedy could be much more radical: catch up with everybody else.

England is the outlier. Scotland treats universities as public assets with public missions, through national access expectations and the terms attached to public money. Wales has gone further and legislated, building a civic mission duty into its tertiary education framework.

Look beyond the UK and England looks stranger still. The United States has its land grant and state public universities. Canada has provincial university acts. New Zealand and South Africa carry civic requirements in legislation. Much of continental Europe sits closer to the Welsh or Scottish model than the English one, on a spectrum from hard in Finland to soft in Italy, or mediated through federal and regional structures as in Germany and Spain.

If mayors are to hold real responsibility for skills, economic growth, and public service reform, and universities are among the largest employers, landowners, skills providers and innovation drivers in their areas, the absence of any formal relationship between the two is a gap in Rewiring the state rather than a detail of it. Give English mayors powers comparable to those of Scottish and Welsh ministers and universities would be civic by design rather than by choice.

Nyamapfene asks governing bodies to be honest about the civic consequences of their decisions. I would go one step further. They should be required to be. Until then we are asking boards to weigh something their own constitutions never tell them to look at.