One of the first things people seem to notice about working in higher education is that it’s bristling with acronyms.
To even begin to get a sense of where all the various regulatory and funding bodies, sector organisations, professional associations and data instruments sit in relation to each other you first have to decode all the mysterious capital letters. But even if you’ve dutifully learned all the various names off by rote, you might not be much further forward in deciphering what it all means.
Higher education institutions, whatever their size, are doing multiple large jobs at the same time: teaching thousands of students, running research enterprises worth into the hundreds of millions, acting as civic and economic anchors for their cities and regions, employing thousands of people, holding public money, public trust and public expectation. The cultural power of higher education institutions remains substantial, along with the public impact those institutions have.
What has historically made it all work is that in any part of any institution you’ll find people who are specialists at what they do. That might be academic research and teaching, but it could also be admissions, finance, governance, communications, or student services – or much else, including managing the bureaucracy that stitches it all together. For the most part those people learned their craft by already having a skillset in a broad area, and learning how to apply it, not only in the HE context, but in their very specific institutional context. Deep expertise will always be at the core of higher education but effective institutions and a thriving sector require breadth as well depth.
T-shaped people
Without wanting to belabour the general volatility of the HE landscape in which funding, regulation, and the overall social contact with the public all seem to be in flux, we think what’s missing is a way of sticking it all together to see the bigger picture.
Policy and regulatory decisions land differently in different parts of an institution, and all parts need to have a sense of what’s driving that decision in the first place and how it’s likely to play out. Students’ tolerance for, or ability to absorb the oddities of historic institutional silos is low, and falling. Good decision-making when the future is uncertain requires industry context as well as domain knowledge. And there simply isn’t time to wait for newcomers to the institution to work out what levers they can pull to make things happen over the course of an annual academic cycle.
Developing that deeper understanding of how all the parts work together to make the whole, is what Making Sense of Higher Education is designed to do. It’s for people early in their career who know they want to make an impact and that they can’t do it just by spinning their particular cog. It’s for people who have arrived in the sector from elsewhere – lay governors, industry specialists – who need enough of an overview of how the machine works to be able to execute their function within it. It’s for students’ union officers and staff who are expected to go toe to toe with counterparts with twenty-plus years of sector experience under their belts. And it’s for those experts who’ve reached the top of their game professionally in their specialist area but hanker to take on more responsibility outside it.
What all of these people share is a pragmatic need: enough working knowledge of the wider sector to do their actual job better, ask sharper questions, see where things are connected, and contribute confidently in conversations that aren’t only about their own patch.
There isn’t really a single place to get that. Higher education is great at inducting people into institutions and much less good at inducting them into the sector that the institution sits inside. Reading widely helps but takes years. Conferences offer fragments. Most of what people end up knowing, they learn slowly and unevenly, by being in the room often enough.
What’s more, a great deal of the stuff that shapes critical activity in the sector – the quality system or research funding system; the politics of immigration; the regulatory system – remains opaque to bystanders. To influence higher education discourse and policy you don’t need a deep understanding or expertise, but you do need a functional threshold knowledge of the actors in the political and regulatory system, what their roles are, and the obligations and constraints they are under in executing their functions.
Join us
Mapping and explaining all of this requires independence of any single institution or organisation, deep knowledge of the sector and strong working relationships across it. As a neutral platform, staffed entirely with irredeemably curious nerds who spend their lives trying to make sense of the weird and wonderful world of HE – we think you can trust us to deliver the goods.
Making Sense of Higher Education is ten live online modules, one hour each of core content, plus an optional extra 30 minutes for Q&A and discussion, running every three weeks from October 2026 to April 2027. Public value. Funding and finance. Teaching and learning. Student experience and outcomes. Research. Internationalisation. Strategy and transformation. Data. People and culture. Leadership and governance.
Each session takes its subject from first principles through current sector dynamics to language and frameworks participants can use straight away. The key is not that you find out more about the thing you’re interested in – it’s the other nine modules that will get your head spinning with connections, ideas and follow-up conversations.
The programme is delivered by Team Wonkhe with special guests across the series. Recordings, slides and recommended reading are shared with the cohort after every session, and there is a peer community running before, during and after each module so people can compare notes and stay in touch. We look forward to seeing you there.
Join us for a free introductory session – Making sense of Making Sense – on Wednesday 16 September 2026 at midday, open to anyone thinking about booking or already booked. Early bird booking is open until 31 July, with 10 per cent off the full programme and further group discounts available. Full module descriptions, dates and presenters are on the Wonkhe events page here.
