Usually at this time I would publish a blog post of the top ten posts of the previous twelve months. However WordPress have stopped doing free stats for blogs that show adverts. So I don’t have detailed stats about the top posts.
In 2025 I published 63 blog posts. In 2024 I posted 70 posts on the blog. In 2023 I wrote 89 posts on the blog. There were 92 posts in 2022, 113 blog posts in 2021. In 2020 I had written 94 blog posts. In 2019 I had written 52 blog posts which was up from 2018 when I only wrote 17 blog posts.
Blog traffic in 2025 was double what it was in 2024.
I found this WonkHE article on insolvency interesting and the current state of thinking at government and by others on what would happen if a university was to fail.
“…were an organisation to enter into compulsory liquidation, we believe that insolvency legislation permits continued trading during that period of compulsory liquidation. It would mean, therefore, that we would be able, as I have described, to support students, to support research and the important capacity of that provider during the period of liquidation, and to make sure particularly that students had the opportunity to be supported through a teach-out of their course, to be supported to move elsewhere, and to have their records and their achievements protected.”
I did think this from Mills & Reeve was interesting as well.
“The vast majority of entities operating as HEIs are not able to go into an insolvency process, save possibly for liquidation. This is because they are mostly incorporated by Royal Charter or are HECs, and are not therefore companies under the insolvency legislation.”
There was news a few weeks back that there were some universities on the verge of bankruptcy. We still really don’t know what will happen if an HEI fails. The smaller failures in higher education we have seen before have been private companies.
From a digital and technology perspective, could a failed institution continue to maintain a secure and stable infrastructure for example? You can well imagine professional services staff leaving, both as the organisation was wound down, but also as they moved to new and more secure jobs.
We know that the OfS perspective in England is to protect the needs of the student, hence the talk of “teach-out” and supporting students move to other providers. I do think that the actual process will depend a lot on the geographical location of the failed provider. For example, a provider in a large metropolitan area offers students more options, whereas a sole provider in a larger rural part of the country, there are less options.
I do think though that a better option is to avoid reacting and being more proactive in avoiding insolvency. This does mean thinking very differently about the way the university as a business is managed and transforming the operating model to something that is a lot more sustainable. Of course the challenge with that is though there are lots of similarities between higher education institutions, there are enough substantial differences, meaning there isn’t one model with fits all.
Over the last few weeks I have been looking at data models. This made me reminisce about the work I did back in the day with the Western Colleges Consortium. We had seven different college student record systems sending us student data which was then uploaded to a shared VLE.
This was twenty five years ago, so though I am reminiscing, I this was some time ago, so I don’t remember all the details and I am probably misremembering some of this. The essence of what we did was that each night, each student record system would run a routine which would create an XML file of the student details, this would then be sent via secure FTP to our server which would collate all seven XML files into a single XML file and upload the student data to the VLE. It would both create new users, delete redundant users, and update where necessary.
What was key I think was that, though the student record systems had quite a lot of detail about the student, we didn’t need that information for the shared VLE. This was about accessing a system, we didn’t need ti know their date of birth, address and so on.
There were some challenges I remember in providing a course identification so that when the user was created on the VLE they would then have access to their courses only on the VLE.
It was certainly considered quite innovative at the time, and myself and others did a number of presentations about what we did.
Back then we didn’t have single sign on, so students would have to have another password in addition to the one they used to log into the college computers. Interoperability was something new to me back then and it was an interesting time in which I realised the many technical challenges in building an interoperable learning environment. One challenge for us was that the technical development in this area was very much focused on the single institution model and ensuring the institutional systems could talk (interoperate) with each other. The concept of a multi-institutional model was a step too far.
In the end the Western Colleges Consortium became defunct. The main reasons were college mergers, the seven became four, this made the financial model unsustainable. The shared platform wasn’t meeting the needs of the students and the requirements of the consortium. Finally, the compromises of collaboration were decided to be a barrier to further VLE usage and take up.
Today the core internal interoperability challenges appear to have been solved. Attending the 1EdTech conference in Delft earlier this year demonstrated to me how mature these educational standards have become.
With the changes in technology and the requirements of student mobility today (think LLE) means that the interoperability requirements have just gone up another level, as has the need for deeper collaboration. What does this mean, well that’s another blog post.
In a conversation with a colleague last month they mentioned the potential impact of AI on estate data, something they thought I might be interested in, in relation to my long history with the intelligent campus.
At the recent HE Transformation Expo in Birmingham I was talking to my fellow presenters and they also mentioned this.
An artificial intelligence project, developed by experts at Oxford Brookes University, is helping one of Oxfordshire’s most prestigious tourist attractions enhance its customer service and visitor experience.
As I read through the article it reminded me much of what I have written on the smart campus and intelligent campus landscape and potential.
The system uses data from digital sensors located around the Blenheim Estate that monitor everything from footfall and ticket sales to retail and catering sales.
In the original guide to the intelligent campus, I wrote about intelligent catering.
Certain times are likely to result in high demand at campus cafes and food outlets, such as lunchtime, but within those times there is flexibility to respond in different ways, or indeed encourage students to arrive at a different time. By using timetabling or event data, increased flow of people to the cafes could be predicted, and real time information on actual location and flow can reinforce and clarify the expected demand.
In the article on Blenheim Palace it says:
“Analysis of the data, using AI, enables managers at Blenheim Palace to make better predictions about footfall. They know, for example, that in two-days-time they can expect a certain number of visitors and plan their staff and catering accordingly.”
I also wrote about people flows and footfall in one of the many use cases we published.
Pedestrian flow could affect the time for journeys between classes, waiting times at cafes or sudden changes in how busy the library is. Location trackers such as used by mobile phones can provide data on flow, and also people counters, such as using video systems, can be placed around campus to collect data on the numbers of people in that location at any time. Such data can have a number of applications, including combining with other contexts to improve services.
In the article they talk about how they created an app.
They also developed an app called What’s Open When (WOW) that tells the operations team at Blenheim Palace in real-time which parts of the Palace and Estate are open, where it is busy and where it is quieter.
Does this kind of technology have an application for the university estate? It’s almost reassuring that this kind of thing is happening, it actually helps with the evidence base to support universities in thinking more creatively about the use of their estate.
When I started the intelligent campus work back in 2016 I wrote this on the now defunct Intelligent Campus blog.
We need to know and understand what you see for the future of university and college campuses. Tell us what you think about how universities and colleges can exploit the potential of the internet of things and artificial intelligence.
Over the last nine years I have seen many developments in this space and I have seen many practical applications of the developments in technology and artificial intelligence in enhancing the campus experience for students.
Is it just me that finds the analogy of a supertanker in higher education annoying.
The story goes that changing things in higher education is like turning a supertanker.
Reality it is fun fact very easy to stop and turn a supertanker. If it wasn’t we wouldn’t be using them. Think about a supertanker is in port it needs to turn to get out of the port and will have to eventually stop when it arrives at its destination.
We use the analogy because where it is difficult for a supertanker to turn or stop is in an emergency. When the supertanker faces something unexpected then yes it can be challenging and difficult to turn or stop in time.
The reality is that when a supertanker moves, it is following a well defined process, outlined in a plan, along a pre-determined route. If higher education was a supertanker, it would be a highly efficient thing meeting all its objectives on time and to budget.
What does this mean for higher education?
If we say higher education is like a supertanker, what we seem to be saying is that as a sector we lack any kind of coherent plan, so when faced with a constant series of challenges we are unable to respond to them.
We should stop waiting for the disaster or the emergency and plan for the future in advance. A well planned route, an understanding of the potential hazard and adequate contingency planning to mitigate emergencies and disasters. If higher education is a supertanker then it is a well designed efficient thing which gets the job done. But only if they have a plan, a route, and good processes.
Maybe in the future, it will be a positive thing so say higher education is like a supertanker.
Over the last few years I have been looking at collaboration and sharing. Though my experience in this area goes back decades.
In 2001 I was employed as Director of the Western Colleges Consortium, this was a collaboration of seven FE colleges in what was originally the county of Avon. This consortium shared a common VLE, and my role was to run the shared service and where possible expand what we could do.
The original concept behind the consortium was in the main to shared lessons about using a VLE, but also to save money.
As the colleges’ experience with the VLE concept expanded there was a demand to expand what each college wanted to do with the VLE, and unsurprisingly branding was one of the key requirements. They weren’t wiling to compromise in their use of a shared environment and as a result they went down their own path. There wasn’t anything wrong with this decision (well apart from the fact that my role became somewhat redundant), we knew when the consortium was setup that whatever we did would have to be a compromise, we would need to sacrifice some key features and requirements, in order to take advantage of the affordances of a shared environment (in the main affordability).
In later roles when looking at procuring services through outsourcing it was clear that whatever was on offer was never going to be perfect, what we would get would be a compromise. Of course, if we decided to go down the road of doing it ourselves, then we wouldn’t need to compromise, but we would need to factor in the (real) costs of doing it by ourselves.
We now live in an environment where financial sustainability is very likely the item on the top of the agenda within higher education, and looking to where savings could be made. The use of shared services is often touted as a potential way to save costs, as outlined recently in reports I have been involved in from Jisc, KPMG, and UUK. Thought when discussing shared services with representatives from the sector, it becomes apparent that some are not willing to compromise on the service within the institution. The reality is that sometimes what you want isn’t affordable and you have to compromise somewhere along the way. Collaboration is a compromise, but a comprise that is affordable in the current financial climate.
Could a university department secede from their university and become independent? This was the idea behind a vision piece I wrote last year. I recently published a couple of vision pieces on the blog, one on the The University Group™ and another on The Specialist University Centre. This vision about secession is similar to the specialist centre, but goes further.
Created by experts to inspire (and possibly scare) us into thinking about what a preferable future for higher education might look like.
Though the concept of economies of scale means that the concept of a large university, spreading costs and overheads across a range of provision was seen by many as a cost effective solution, the growing impact of reduced funding, fixed student fees; saw university departments being forced to cut costs. There was a spread of discontent that this was having a negative impact on the student experience and the quality of the research being undertaken. There was also a strong feeling across staff and management of many departments of these decisions being done to them and they having no say in the decision making process.
University departments already had some element of autonomy, so it wasn’t too long before some departments decided to secede from the university and form their own “university” to take back control. These departments wanted to have more power over the recruitment of students and staff. They were able to outsource administrative and professional services to subsidiary service companies that delivered services to a large number of these autonomous departments. With the wealth of empty office space across major cities, it was relatively easy to procure space, combined with online provision, and hybrid home working, the costs of running a department of a university, divorced from the university itself, could be minimised. The use of shared services across these small independent universities enabled them to focus on research, learning and teaching. With no large overheads being top sliced from the income, they could invest more in learning and teaching. Some departments even decided that teaching was a distraction and focused on research alone.
Learning and teaching was often a blend of physical in-person provision combined with online delivery and resources. The use of online and digital resources meant that library provision was entirely online. Even then the use of print on demand, meant those students who wanted physical books and journals could have them delivered overnight.
For many prospective students, these new independent departmental universities were a real attraction, allowing them to fit their studies easily into their work life balance. Going to university wasn’t always an option for all prospective students, the focused and specialised provision of these providers was meeting a real demand.
Once a few high profile departments had done this, it wasn’t long before there was an avalanche of universities finding themselves breaking up. In some cases legislation was enabled that allowed those departments to retain not just their staff, but also their departmental buildings and campuses. Legislation was passed enabling these departments became small independent universities. They started to market themselves, mainly using online tools and services.
The ease at which cloud services could be obtained and the increase in the availability of independent professional services, and service companies, resulted in keeping administration costs to a minimum.
The break-up of the large universities into smaller departmental universities, also detached many university functions and services. There was no longer a need to centralise student accommodation, often halls of residences would be either sold off as they were no longer needed, or effectively privatised. University catering was closed off, and national chains took over the spaces.
Student support became a service that was bought in as and when required.
Some university campuses which consisted only of independent subject departments, the university administration became more of caretaker and administrator for these departments, akin to the science parks of their day.
I had planned to publish this, as the first of my vision pieces, following the UUK Annual Conference last week, but my timetable was scuppered with the announcement of the “first” university super merger between the University of Greenwich and the University of Kent. So I did publish a vision piece on The University Group™.
So, what was going to be that first vision? Well last week was the UUK Annual Conference and I was able to attend as I had worked on strand 2 of the UUK Transformation & Efficiency Taskforce. On the second day, the then science secretary Peter Kyle was speaking and calling for increasing specialisation and collaboration in higher education.
There are “too many universities competing for the same pool of students”, according to science secretary Peter Kyle. Speaking to reporters at Universities UK conference, Kyle argued that said volume of universities was coming at the “expense of playing to their relative strengths or truly specialising to become the go-to authority in their field rather than a bit player in many.”
I was reminded of this piece of work I wrote last February, which never got further than my hard drive (well cloud storage) on the specialist university.
Created by experts to inspire (and possibly scare) us into thinking about what a preferable future for higher education might look like.
What might it mean for the operations of a university if the focus of the student experience became more specialised? How would and how could the sector respond to change in how students accessed higher education. What would this mean for individual institutions?
Though there have been many specialist higher education institutions, they have generally being outnumbered by the more traditional general university offering a portfolio of courses across multiple subjects.
Universities currently offer a broad range of programs and modules for graduates and postgraduates what we could see happening in future as university specialising in one or two particular areas, and then having all the students in the area attend that specific university, so you no longer would have the university of a particular city; you would have the university of business university of law, the university of biology, the university of aeronautical engineering.
The cost of providing some subjects became prohibitive and many universities recognising that economies of scale would be more cost-effective took the decision to specialise in a few core areas. They decided to specialise and provide high-quality, specialised education locations in their chosen, subject field and research. However though they narrowed down their breadth of delivery, they were able to use technology to widen their offer to the whole of the UK and in some cases internationally as well.
As the reputation of these institutions grew, those universities who had decided to retain a broad curriculum, found that both domestic and international student recruitment was falling, and it was becoming more difficult to recruit and retain staff.
The specialist institutions soon outnumbered the traditional university by student numbers. These institutions were large enough to provide their own student services, professional services and even multiple campus hubs across the UK.
In addition to these large specialist institutions, there was also a large number of small institutions focusing on very specialist curriculum and research areas. However they did not have the capacity or capability to deliver the student and professional services they required. As a result they bought in these services from service companies, or in some cases they collaborated with other specialist institutions to deliver shared services in a range of areas. This enabled the specialist institutions to focus on teaching and research. They used third parties for professional services such as IT, HR, payroll, student records and others.
There was also collaboration in other areas, especially in student facing services such as the library, student support, healthcare, and academic support.
Some specialist institutions also partnered with relevant industry partners, with the industry partner providing the business support for the university.
With the recent announcement of the “first” university super merger between the University of Greenwich and the University of Kent, I was reminded of this piece of work I wrote last February, which never got further than my hard drive (well cloud storage). I did write about writing them in a weeknote back then.
Anyhow, here is the vision I wrote about a future University Group, something that KPMG wrote about in their Radical Collaboration document for the UUK Transformation & Efficiency Taskforce and can be seen in the Greenwich and Kent merger.
Created by experts to inspire (and possibly scare) us into thinking about what a preferable future for higher education might look like.
All universities have their own personality, appeal, and brand. However not all universities need their own HR departments, or IT teams.
The first large university groups appeared following mergers forced by the regulator after financial pressures could have caused at least one higher education institution to fail.
The new group recognised that though in theory they should have a new name, they also realised that the existing names were brands in their own right. As a result they formed The University Group™ but the individual university names were kept. Staff were employed by The University Group™ but students attended a named university. It was so successful that some smaller institutions asked to join the group but retain their identity. What was important to the group was that management and staff recognised that they were employed by The University Group™ and not the named university in which they worked (though some teaching staff worked across the group), from a student experience perspective the student was a student of the named university. They would be awarded their degree from that named university and would to all intents and purposes be a graduate of that named university.
Support for the administrative and support functions was provided by group services. There was a single HR department for example, a single catering supplier for the group, IT services was provided by the group. Some group staff were based at each university campus to provide on-site support, but many professional services staff worked in a hybrid manner based in. regional hubs. This again reduced costs, through economics of scale, reduced office space. For those universities based in high cost city centres, reducing the amount of space for professional services, either increased teaching space capacity or reducing the university estate to further save costs.
The success of that first group in reducing costs and increasing student numbers encouraged others to not only reflect on joining the group, but for the regular to force through mergers across the country. We then started to see the first metropolitan universities appear, as well as the first regional groups.
Some universities decided to jump before they were pushed and so when a group of geographically dispersed universities merged to form a new super university group but retaining their individual identities the tide turned for the unique independent single university.
It wasn’t too long before the number of higher education organisations could be counted on the fingers of two hands, though the number of named universities actually increased, as the university groups de-regionalised some of their brands into local brands.
The university groups had better bargaining power and more influence in some markets. This also helped reduce costs across various services. With just a few higher education organisations the market for some specialised learning technologies was too small and many edtech businesses either dissolved or moved into other markets.
I have been thinking about the challenges of higher education institutions having a silo mentality and the potential impact of this on collaboration and sharing.
Ask any higher education institution leader about the organisational challenges they’re grappling with, and they’ll start talking about silos.
As one respondent said in our research in the Collaboration for a sustainable future report said “my institution doesn’t even collaborate with itself.” Part of that has to be having a silo mentality.
What this means is that across an organisation, different departments work to their own specific strategy and needs. Sometimes silos are referred to as “cylinders of excellence”. You can have outstanding and excellent departments, but though often we think of the phrase first coined by the philosopher Aristotle, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. With cylinders of excellence, the whole can be a lot less than the sum of the parts.
From personal experience, having high performing teams, means that they are achieving their objectives, but unless those objectives are aligned or contribute to the organisational whole then, the overall impact on the organisation might be negligible or even negative.
Collaboration internally means alignment, it means common goals, thinking of the whole rather than the one. Internal strategies and objectives need to be connected to other internal strategies and objectives to ensure alignment and maximum impact.
Part of this is breaking down silos. Though as anyone knows breaking down silos is hard. We often think of grain silos, metal cylinders that are close together, they should be easy to break, shouldn’t they? I always now think of higher education silos as missile silos, embedded into reinforced concrete and dispersed across a wide area.
I wonder if silo working is another word for non-strategic working? People often complain about silo working and the resulting challenges that can arise. I think part of the reason why there are problems with duplication, conflict, and lack of communication, across silo working, is teams are working to their own objectives and aren’t necessarily working towards common objectives.
Breaking down silo working, isn’t just about saying, we need to break down the silos but is so much more about thinking strategically about what your organisation is trying to achieve. Recognising that even if your department is successful in achieving your strategic goals, doesn’t mean that the university is being successful.
In the current economic climate the sector is facing real challenges. Strategically you may want to have an outstanding student experience, world class research, and a global impact, but the reality is you might need to keep the lights on first. If you take the “usual” strategic objectives that most universities have, as stated, an outstanding student experience, world class research, and a global impact, as a given. Then the strategic objectives of the organisation can be focused on survival, resilience, and change. Part of that change has to be breaking down the internal silo mentality. Of course, easier said than done.
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