More sharp suits than a Burton’s window

It was, more generally, the overwhelming volume of producer interest.

In other words, it was really hard to find the voices of patients, consumers, children, renters and so on and so on at the myriad panels and receptions.

Rather, there were hundreds of people in charge of things speaking for them, all having replaced “we are central to levelling up” with “we are central to X mission” in a fairly shallow way.

For Labour to seek a better and more stable relationship with producers is fine – having everything run directly by the state is neither desirable nor on the agenda.

But the quid quo pro should surely be much stronger regulation over the way the user interest is represented within those bodies, companies, organisations and so on.

Enter the regulator

The good news is that we have a whole office for the student interest, now chaired by someone whose review of the regulator said that “regulation in the interests of and protection of students is critical”, and whose access director said over the summer said that its “understanding and communication” of the student interest had “not always been strong enough or consistent enough”.

So maybe it was a surprise – or, thinking about, maybe not – to hear on Monday at a HEPI fringe that when phone banking VCs over financial sustainability, it’s “not been asking the right questions”, and risks overlooking the “enormous impact” that cuts are having across the sector.

Sussex VC Sasha Roseneil told the assembled audience that when officials are asking if finances were “getting worse”, they tend to be “overly focused” on questions of liquidity and whether universities will be able to prove they are “going concerns” to their auditors:

They are not asking what you are having to do at the moment, how are you managing, what is the impact of the enormous cuts to capital programmes, courses, programmes and departments.

Maybe ministers thought that telling OfS to refocus on financial sustainability would result in something a bit more sophisticated than “keep on cutting while we ignore the impacts”, but this is after all a regultor where not even a whole closure of a course counts as a “reportable event”.

And anyway, even if OfS did start chatting about what it’s doing to the student experience, politely, VCs may not always be the best people to ask.

Ethos and choice

Labour doesn’t have a stellar record in this space. Back in the early noughties, Brownites – always closer to the unions – tended to stress the need for an “ethos of public service” amongst staff and managers.

Blairites instead tended to adapt marketisation to suggest that “choice” would put power in the hands of patients, parents and so on – removing it from professionals who they said represented the producer interest.

Neither of the approaches really seemed to do the trick – and notably, neither of the approaches stressed the sort of co-determination or participation models more frequently seen around Europe. Paternalism v Choice never got around to driving up Voice.

Today, the party may not feel as conflicted, but it does feel just as confused – as Keir Starmer remixes the Brownite “ethos” stuff into messaging on “public service”, while the likes of Wes Streeting rail against “producer interest” when laying the ground for NHS reform.

The Mayor of Sunderland

I was thinking about all of this when I ducked out of party conference to attend an event at the University of Sunderland – where I was reflecting on how the extent to which universities are expected to take responsibility for pretty much every aspect of students’ lives these days.

At one point Sunderland VC David Bell lamented that it sometimes feels like he’s expected to be the Mayor of students – although I did point out that unlike the modern metro mayor, they can neither vote him out nor vote him in.

Despite having almost no legislation in this space, we tend to assume that UK higher education is good at this sort of stuff – quality assurance norms have long promoted student voice, and our students’ unions tend to be both comparatively well funded and enjoy constructive access to managers.

But away from the good times in the big places, that “unwritten constitution” thing that characterises the autonomy and diversity of UK HE soon gets swept away under pressure.

There’s a lot of poor value, hand-picked, less-awkward “student voice” initiatives around – although some seem to be sensibly shuttering these in favour of a much more sensible strategic conversation with the SU.

In England, I’d bet OfS has never (ever) had a conversation with a provider about its loose principle of governing bodies ensuring that “all students have opportunities to engage with the governance of the provider” to allow for a “range of perspectives to have influence”.

Some of the TEF “student” submissions in smaller, private providers were so obviously ventriloquised as to cause me to spit my drink out last Christmas.

And the idea that students are seriously influencing their provision out in the long tail of the register – especially in business-focussed franchised provision – is laughable.

I’m not convinced it’s a problem that’s confined to the edges of the sector, though.

What’s clear talking to SU people around the country is that as soon as cuts come, unwritten norms that surround committees, communication and partnership get swept away in favour of confidentiality and scaring the wits out of the one student governor.

Regulation seems to do it too – multiple SUs tell me that the “consultation” they are being told they’ll experience over implementing the new harassment duty will manifest via a committee membership when a paper is approved, or “once we’ve had an internal discussion”.

A democratic deficit

I think it’s a problem. Students obviously have an interest in influencing the decisions that are made about where their money goes. And in a “principles-based” regulatory system, they have a clear interest in how a given bit of regulation is interpreted, implemented and communicated.

But it’s even more of an issue in a system where so much of students’ lives is expected to be coordinated by or provided by a university. Students in systems where health services, leisure facilities, employment opportunities or housing are governed by other organisations almost always have other organisations’ structures in which they can participate.

In a university, the idea that the student interest over all of these “all inclusive” student experiences can be communicated through the winners of an election in March is bad enough. It’s worse when those winners are shut out of the decisions being taken behind closed doors.

In Germany, Mitbestimmungsgesetz (the Codetermination Act) of 1976 mandates that employees in larger companies have representation on supervisory boards and in decision-making processes. It’s reflected in the way that students are required to be engaged in decision making at all levels too.

In the Netherlands, the Higher Education and Research Act (WHW) requires all institutions to have participatory bodies that include both students and staff in their governance – “medezeggenschap” (co-determination or participation) reflects a broader cultural value placed on inclusivity and shared responsibility in decision-making.

Students enjoy rights of co-determination, participation and often veto across both Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. And because structures like senate, board, faculty, departmental and even programme bodies tend to be mandated in law, students tend to have guaranteed seats at the table in Southern Europe too.

And of particular interest – to me anyway – is that in Austria, the law mandates that students make up at least 25 per cent of the members of curriculum committees – ensuring their voices are heard when decisions about course content, assessment methods, academic requirements and which elective options to run.

Just as OfS seems to have struggled with defining and then promoting the student interest, new Westminster universities minister Jacqui Smith may struggle when defining the student interest beyond undergraduate maintenance and whatever her inherited Mental Health Taskforce comes up with.

If, at some stage in her ministerial career, she needs and gets a slot for legislation, she could do worse than afford to the students of England the rights afforded to them pretty much everywhere else.