Jo Johnson: “I still believe that student choice must be the main organising principle for higher education”

It’s traditional in the ministerial foreword to a higher education white paper to pay tribute to the critical importance of the sector, before launching into all the ways you want to change it.

The 2016 white paper Success as a knowledge economy is no exception – though rereading it ten years on the language used by Jo Johnson, Conservative minister of state for universities and science/research and innovation from 2015 to 2018, is striking in the extent to which it endorses higher education on its own terms:

Our universities rank among our most valuable national assets, underpinning both a strong economy and a flourishing society. Powerhouses of intellectual and social capital, they create the knowledge, capability and expertise that drive competitiveness and nurture the values that sustain our open democracy…The skills that great higher education provides – the ability to think critically and to assess and present evidence – last a lifetime and will be increasingly in demand as the number and proportion of high-skilled jobs rises.

Success as a knowledge economy offered a generational settlement for higher education in England, with an agenda that included creating the Office for Students (OfS), UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), and the new Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). In retrospect, with Brexit, Covid and a demographic boom in school and college leavers all in the rear-view mirror, early 2016 appears a high point for the sector’s political capital and perceived public value. That settlement, codified in the Higher Education and Research Act of 2017, remains fragile, with universities under considerable financial strain, an uneasy relationship between the regulator and providers, regular calls for crackdowns on poor quality, and continued questioning of the value of the higher education proposition.

So what happened? Was it the architecture of the system that was at fault, its execution, or simply a series of unanticipated political events and economic shocks? A decade on from the white paper that ultimately changed the shape of the English sector, I sat down for a call with Jo Johnson to understand how thinking at the time shaped what came next.

The mess we inherited

Johnson wasn’t making policy in a vacuum – he inherited from the coalition government of 2010–2015 a fee regime, with uncapped student numbers, but without a regulatory framework to match it. For the Conservative government, securing value for money for students and the taxpayer in light of that new system was the critical issue for higher education.

The government in which Johnson held his ministerial office took pride in the fact that it had opened up higher education opportunity. “Lifting student number controls was one of the most important social mobility reforms of the last generation,” Johnson argues. “It ended the artificial rationing system, in which opportunity was constrained by Treasury controls, not student potential.”

But there was also an imperative to manage the implications, especially when the overall cost of the system via the student loan book turned out larger than anticipated, because the vast majority of institutions put their fee threshold at the highest possible level.

“Fundamentally we wanted to ensure that in an environment in which students were bearing a much greater share of the cost of their higher education and the risks associated with it there was a regulatory regime that put student and taxpayer interest at the centre of what it did,” says Johnson. “HEFCE had many strengths but it primarily had a role of ensuring that funding was carved up sensibly between existing providers, and it didn’t have student interest and taxpayer interest as part of its core identity in the way that the OfS later would. That was one key objective of the white paper, and the right one.”

“I don’t accept,” he adds, “the argument that because the sector is under financial pressure now, lifting number controls or introducing greater competition was therefore a mistake. The funding squeeze is overwhelmingly the result of the real-terms erosion of the unit of resource and the dependence that created on international student income. You shouldn’t confuse a failure to maintain the funding settlement with a failure of the principle that students should have choice and institutions should have to compete for them.”

The second key policy agenda was quality, with the advent of a new Teaching Excellence Framework, and an encouragement of new HE providers, with the aim that the combination of system innovation, public accountability for teaching quality, and student choice would incentivise providers to focus on enhancing their education offer and drive up quality.

Johnson counts the very survival of TEF as a policy instrument as a win. “The sector hates accountability before it learns to live with it. It’s remarkable to think of the kind of opposition the TEF faced at its inception. TEF was seen as absurd, preposterous, outrageous, an insult – but ten years on the principle that teaching quality should be visible and comparable is part of the landscape. If we abolished the TEF, we’d still have to reinvent it.”

Given the sector is currently in yet another round of wrangling about what the next iteration of TEF should look like, would Johnson say the policy had delivered? “The original problem that the white paper and TEF were trying to address was very real, which was teaching lacking the same policy weight as research,” says Johnson. “REF and research performance shaped rankings and prestige, while teaching was very much playing second fiddle. We said at the outset that TEF was imperfect, that you had to get at quality by proxies and that we were open to iterating it – now TEF has been through multiple iterations and has endured because students, taxpayers and government still need some way of asking whether students are being taught well, supported, retained to completion and helped to get good outcomes. No serious system can avoid that question.”

Levers of innovation

The area where Johnson considers the 2016 white paper to have fallen short is system innovation – Johnson names a number of newer providers, including the Dyson Institute (where Johnson is a board member), the London Interdisciplinary School, and NMITE, but observes that these are small in number and in scale, and have not seemed to have a material impact on the wider sector in terms of being a spur to innovation elsewhere.

Was “new providers” the right kind of concept of innovation? “New entrants can be a particularly important source of innovation – that’s been the pattern across industry. Innovation and openness to high quality new entrants go hand in hand and we mustn’t separate out those two parts of the picture.” And the corporate form of those new entrants is, in his view, irrelevant: “I have never thought that ‘for-profit’, ‘not-for-profit’, old university or new provider tells you very much about quality. The regulator should care about what students receive and the outcomes they achieve, not protect one institutional form against another.”

On the other hand, if he had his time again, Johnson would put greater focus on building the architecture for innovation within incumbents as well. “I would put much more emphasis on credit transfer, lifelong learning, and modular provision than we did. The system we built – though I tried to promote two year degrees – is still far too attached to the full time three year model. The next decade has to be about flexible routes through tertiary education.It’s a shame it’s off to such a slow start.”

One of the issues that subsequent governments and ministers have inherited from the system that Johnson built is relatively weak policy levers to shape the system towards a different kind of offer, whether more flexible, more actively coordinated, or more innovative. The Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE) model for student finance, its underpinning provision for students to access modular learning, and finessing the Strategic Priorities Grant will make some difference, but the most likely outcome is marginal shifts rather than widespread new provision. The arguably more long-term pernicious effect is that higher education seems to have lost some of its political cachet as offering something substantial for an ambitious minister to sink their teeth into – an odd outcome for a sector that is so widely considered as being strategically critical for the economic health of the nation.

Johnson does not accept the argument that he should be considered the last of the great reforming HE ministers. “The government, inevitably still has a huge influence on the sector,” he argues. “I think it should encourage the OfS to create a regulatory environment that supports innovation and new models of provision. LLE is a good example. It is starting to hove into view but it feels like it’s lacking a champion. To take off as an initiative and fulfil its potential it needs a minister to get up and make it their thing. LLE has the potential to be an answer to the sector’s challenges around relevance in the age of AI, providing adult learners with the opportunity to reskill in the face of labour market disruption. It’s a policy whose time has come – but to work it needs a minister who is prepared to get up there and address some of its remaining flaws, to lean in and make sure the sector is picking it up and executing it.”

State vs market

And so we arrive at the perennial talking point – the right balance of state-led and market forces in shaping higher education.

Johnson and his predecessor David Willetts are often viewed as advocates of “marketisation” in higher education – it would probably be more accurate to view their reforms as being in favour of making higher education a more effective market that better serves its consumers. That’s the lens through which Johnson views the HERA architecture – “HE is a regulated market, not the Wild West” – in which student choice and competition act as a natural check on the tendency of systems to become “complacent and ossified” – but also, stronger regulation in theory hedges against the excesses of a more open market. “The choice was never between markets and regulation. HERA deliberately did both: it opened the system to competition while creating a much stronger regulator. If you allow more providers and more student choice, you need tougher quality assurance, not less.”

But competition only works, in Johnson’s view, when students have access to good information and there are consequences for failures of quality – and he doesn’t necessarily consider either to be the case right now. And while you can argue about the consequences of market failures, for Johnson, the alternative is simply much worse: “I still believe that student choice must be the main organising principle for higher education rather than command and control direction of what is delivered where. The way that institutions have been able to develop new programmes in response to data and AI technology would be much harder in an environment where regulatory approval was needed for new programmes, and the regulator was issuing quotas. I hope that in finding answers to the omnicrisis facing HE right now we don’t move back to that centralised process.”

Johnson is absolutely clear that student choice should be seen as a red line: “The answer to the current crisis is not to put the student interest and choice back in the box. It is to make the reforms work better: sharper on quality, more proportionate in regulation, more open to innovation. HERA was a product of its time, but its central insight remains right: a mass higher education system funded through income-contingent loans needs informed student choice, strong quality regulation, diverse provision and accountability for outcomes. There is plenty to improve, but the answer isn’t to go back to a more closed, centrally controlled system.”

The notion of detailed guidance on higher education provision being distributed from Whitehall or from OfS, unappetising as it is, is perhaps a bit of a red herring. Outside the extremes, critics of market forces in higher education are more likely to argue that there is no plausible way of achieving the mechanisms that would deliver a functioning market system – particularly close alignment between aggregate student choices and labour market needs, and the possibility of provider market exit that was sufficiently frictionless and low-risk, never mind students being well informed and able to exercise their rights as consumers.

Market advocates could reasonably retort that whatever the designated national priorities of the moment (or what they might become in one, three or ten years’ time), there’s no point in trying to force students to study something if it’s not what they fancy, and the scale of incentives the state would need to put in place to effect any substantive change in student choice would cost far more than just making sure most degrees mostly deliver a decent set of skills that employers can work with.

The abstract counterpoint of state versus market is, I think, increasingly unhelpful as a way of trying to understand both what is happening in higher education, and what should be done about it. Some of what we’re seeing right now – the erosion of some subject provision, the rise of franchising, turbulence in international recruitment, student cost of living pressures – none are solely attributable to market forces or, indeed, to state failures. The framing policy analysis, whether of state or market, is often oddly dehumanised, with actors responding to data stimuli and incentives, rather than purpose and values. Andy Burnham’s theory of the state and emphasis on devolution in some ways seeks to bring that sense of shared purpose, relationship, and identity back into political decision-making through harnessing citizens’ attachment to their region and their place.

Johnson believes that there is still a deal to be done with government, if the sector (and, to an extent, OfS) are prepared to grasp the nettle: “The sector should not argue for a return to the past or wish to bring back HEFCE. It should make a forward-looking case for universities as engines of social mobility, skills, research, innovation and economic growth. The bargain should be: universities get sustainable funding and political support, but students and taxpayers get greater transparency, better teaching, positive outcomes, and confidence that poor provision will be ruthlessly extirpated.”

Talking to Jo Johnson I’m reminded that – with some exceptions – policymakers generally have good and humane intentions.

Ministers may bear some accountability for the way that their reforms unfold in practice, and perhaps for consequences that could have been foreseen at the time – but Covid and hyperinflation can hardly be listed among those. A decade on from the 2016 white paper that brought in a set of reforms that are now bearing the weight of criticism for their perceived failure to deliver a stable and flourishing HE sector it’s unarguable that opportunity, quality, and innovation remain touchstone ideas in our higher education system. It will be the next generation’s job to find ways to reimagine them for the times we live in now.