The annual Universities UK conference serves many purposes but one of these is a public dialogue about the state of the nation when it comes to higher education.
And this year’s conference confirms that “social licence” – a term whose origins lie outside HE but that has developed currency in HE outside the UK in the last decade, as Michael Salmon explains here – has now achieved full official cut-through in the UK as a guiding principle for situating universities in wider society.
The core argument runs as follows: despite the many well-evidenced ways that universities serve useful and valued social ends, public appreciation of their value cannot be taken for granted – and nor can the belief that what has produced that value in the past will automatically do so in the future.
Universities UK’s Future Universities project is explicitly intended to secure universities’ social licence for the future, positioning universities as critical to the country’s long term success. Each strand of the project – jobs, communities, students, innovation – tests the degree to which universities’ thinking and practice needs to evolve to meet contemporary public expectations of the sector. And the project as a whole aims to signal to government the sector’s preparedness to change and adapt, to be what the country needs it to be – and emphasise that it can be trusted to adapt from within rather than change being imposed from without.
As Universities UK president Malcolm Press expressed it in his conference speech:
Universities operate with what might be called a social licence: the trust and consent of the public to exercise considerable autonomy, educate future generations and receive amounts of substantial tax payer money. This licence cannot be taken for granted. It is sustained only through the value of what we provide, the outcomes we achieve, and the way that we behave.
Taking the notion of social licence at face value, there are two key corollaries. One is that institutions that put that collective social licence at risk should expect to meet cold shoulders from the rest of the sector. Here’s how Press put it:
A values-based membership organisation must support its members, but it must also be prepared to challenge them. Solidarity cannot mean silence when practices damage students, communities or confidence in universities as a whole.
It’s not quite “keep your nose clean or we’ll kick you out of our club” but it’s a shot across the bows of any institution that’s courting risk, most likely to be around international recruitment and external partnerships, that could blow up if not carefully handled.
The second is that the case for political attention and sustainable funding rests on a public value and impact argument – higher education only commands political support to the extent it delivers value, not on its own terms. But if the government does not deliver that political support and sustainable funding settlement, that public value and impact is put at risk.
That’s why the sector is pressing the government to lock in indexation of fees (which has been promised but for which there is no schedule for delivery) and to look again at the planned international levy. It is why Universities UK has announced its plans to develop a broader range of measures that can capture the value that universities deliver (first mooted in the 2024 Blueprint for change). It’s also why Press called for a “long term partnership framework” with government – by implication, if the sector does its bit, government ought to step up and play its part.
Warmish words
To listen to skills minister Jacqui Smith and newly appointed science minister Chris McDonald talk, you’d think the government bought fully into the premise. The Prime Minister, Smith reported, wants to “empower” universities to be part of place-based growth. The target of two-thirds participation in higher education (of all kinds) remains in place in the post-Starmer era. International students are welcome in the UK. The government has put higher education on a firmer financial footing (to be enacted “when parliamentary time allows”) and set out in its post-16 white paper a direction of travel for the sector (just in case we were in any doubt about whether that white paper still applies in the new world order).
Smith also announced that to help universities and colleges make informed decisions around regional higher education and skills provision the government plans to develop a market monitoring tool to capture data on gaps in education supply and demand, available provision, and research strengths. McDonald showed the sector his formidable credentials as an engineer and industry partner to universities, reassured on his commitment to discovery-led research, and spoke about the Prime Minister’s agenda to “put science in the service of industry” – especially through ensuring discoveries made in the UK realise benefit in the UK economy rather than elsewhere.
None of this is hostile, and much of it is useful, but it’s not the honest confrontation with political and economic realities that could form the basis of a partnership framework. We don’t expect deep analysis or policy detail from ministers in set-piece speeches, but you might reasonably expect a minister familiar with the challenges universities are wrestling with to show some appreciation of the contours of the problem.
The skills minister might, without any loss of government credibility, have acknowledged that devolution arrangements are patchy and require time to mature, that the market for modular provision needs help to grow, that expansion of technical and apprenticeship forms of higher education are bounded by employer capacity, and that priorities will need to be set in places on the basis of resource scarcity.
The closest the sector got to a real offer of dialogue around a shared challenge was McDonald arguing that the research grant application system is a “value-destroying activity” for research and researchers and soliciting views on how to reduce bureaucracy in the interests of getting research funded more quickly. Nothing to sneeze at, unless you love research bureaucracy, but not really touching the sides of the larger shifts in research funding that institution heads are anticipating.
A vacancy on the other side of the table
Complaining about politicians doing politics is obviously a bit of a mug’s game, but it speaks directly to the limits of “social licence” as an organising principle for the sector’s thinking about its future. Social licence is ambiguous depending on the scale of the imagined community whose licence you are trying to secure. What is driving the national conversation about value is rather different to the local context – nationally it’s about net migration, graduate returns and to some extent issues around free speech and student protest. These issues are university-specific manifestations of a larger crisis of confidence in politics, the economy and the security of future generations, rather than anything any single university can control, though the sector is right to offer its services in helping to address them.
Meanwhile, locally, social licence is a function of relationships of trust. Erosion of that licence, as one conference speaker put it, could be indicated by a lower willingness to invest in shared work, or loss of local support and championing. However, many universities would point out that local partners are more eager than ever to work with their university, because of wider financial pressures across the public and third sectors. The pinch comes when universities have to make choices about where they can invest in partnerships and – as one vice chancellor observed – make painful job cuts that affect local employment and resonate negatively in communities. Ultimately it does come down to funding and financial sustainability.
And this is where it all starts to unwind. Universities are seeking to reconfigure themselves and adapt to a different resource landscape. They are exploring how to lock into their places in more innovative and strategic ways, and trying to manage expectations. They can do more to measure what matters and do what counts most. They can begin to stress-test long standing assumptions about what higher education needs to be and how it should work – I’ve noticed with some amusement that higher education appears to be entering its “provocation” era and actively soliciting the expression of ideas that can challenge the status quo (a good example being Post-18 Project director John Blake’s presentation to vice chancellors last week).
In all of this work a partnership framework with government would be tactically and strategically useful to the sector, securing government backing and, arguably, political cover, for necessary change. Channelling reform of the sector through policy and political leadership would give it a greater sense of democratic legitimacy rather than individual institutions making piecemeal decisions, albeit in good faith. But partnership takes bandwidth, continuous engagement, and the willingness to put credibility and resource commitments on the table to deliver a common purpose. And despite the warm words, this government still doesn’t look like it’s ready to take that step with the higher education sector.
