The Office for Students (OfS) has published the results from a survey (from April 2025) on students’ perceptions of their providers’ response to financial challenges.
WonkHE have done their usual excellent analysis of the polling and is well worth a read.
83 per cent of those polled thought that cost-cutting measures had changed the experience they felt they’d been promised – often through larger class sizes than expected, greater use of online learning, or reduced access to academic resources and student support.
Some of my own thoughts on this.
The survey was actually done last April, so the impact of more recent responses to financial sustainability won’t have influenced the results. Even so, it demonstrates that cost-cutting is impacting on the student experience and this is reducing student satisfaction.
Interesting to read that greater use of online learning is still seen as a negative, the impact of remote online learning during covid is still having an impact. We have to remember that the majority of students been surveyed weren’t actually at university at the height of the covid lockdowns, so their experiences of school and college are having a longitudinal impact on their feelings about online learning.
Changes noted by students included increased class sizes, and my recent post on Nottingham and their changes to student staff ratios shows that this is not going away anytime soon.
What this report and analysis is showing is that student satisfaction is being impacted by the financial situation in higher education. Though fees are set to rise, this is only going to reflect inflation, so costs in real terms is going to stay the same. We might not see so much cost reduction in the future, but we need to reflect that we not going to see much increase in real spending either.
What will this mean, well with fees still set to rise and actual costs of going to university, falling graduate incomes, does this mean that the benefit of attending university becomes less attractive to prospective students in the future?
Before I finished for the festive break there was a report in the Times Higher Education on the current situation at Nottingham University.
Staff at the University of Nottingham fear that planned course closures and changes to staff-student ratios could damage the university’s international standing and create “impossible” workloads.
The university is planning to consolidate the number of faculties from five to three and reduce the number of courses that are delivered at the university by suspending recruitment on 42 courses. Of course the challenge in suspending recruitment is that restarting recruitment might be challenging, and probably impossible to do quickly.
The University of Nottingham is not alone in facing a financial crisis and equally is not alone in cutting courses and reducing staff numbers.
What is also consistent for most universities in this predicament is that they are facing it alone. Though there has been ample talk about collaboration and sharing, it is one of those things that is probably easy to talk about and more difficult to actually do. Part of the challenge is how universities are inconsistent in their approaches to managing themselves, which then makes it even more challenging to work together or collaborate.
Making those changes to be more aligned, is probably not even on the agenda, as the next crisis loads on the existing crisis. Sitting outside the turmoil, you might think it is easy to offer solutions, the reality is that there is so much unknowns in that crisis, that any solution may become the next problem.
We need to remind ourselves that collaboration and sharing within higher education isn’t the problem we need to solve, it is in fact a solution (and not the only solution) to a (probably not well defined) problem. We need to be clear about the problem, define that problem, and then we can start thinking about possible solutions, one of which may be collaboration and sharing.
As I mentioned in one of my week notes I read a well researched report and an article on Generation Alpha and how I am not really a fan of generational generalisations. I said how I am not sure how useful they are.
I was though reminded of the whole digital natives debate, which still seems to bear its ugly head every so often. Prensky’s premise was the idea that if you were old you were only a digital immigrant and the young people were digital natives. As young people were born into a digital world then they were digital natives. Whereas everyone else was born into a non-digital world and therefore digital was new to them and not something that they had always known.
According to the Prensky definition, 60% of UK academic staff in UK universities are pure digital natives. You could even argue that the figure is closer to 80%…
So, using the term to describe students isn’t helpful as the definition by definition in theory applies to virtually everyone who is part of the university.
Giving a generation a name is one thing, but what people then conjectured was that as they had this name, digital native, they would be able to handle a range of digital tools, services and environments. They would be in a better position to handle online environments then the so called immigrants.
This conjecture is rather flawed and makes a lot of assumptions about behaviours, skills and experience, based on what is really just a label.
Making labels to describe generations is one thing, making assumptions about how individuals will be able to do things (or not do things) just because they are part of that generation is just wrong.
Over the years technology changes as does society. They both influence each other, both positively and negatively. Behaviours change as technology both enables and enhances. The other aspect of technology is that it is constantly evolving and changing, as new technologies arrive, others become redundant or less useful.
As a society technology and digital has become more embedded into our lives, the concept of post-digital echoes the sentiment that as technology becomes part of our everyday lives, the less we see it as technology.
Thinking about this I am reminded of two aspects of my work over the the years.
When I started working at Gloucestershire College in 2006 I did a few new staff induction sessions about the use of IT in the college. I remember asking new staff, who had an email account, many didn’t. It wasn’t part of their life, they didn’t need one, obviously some did. I then handed over the inductions to another member of staff. Later in 2013 I was asked to cover one of the staff induction sessions, and it was very apparent that a lot had moved on. Now, it was pointless asking the question about email, so I asked what was the last thing they bought online. Everyone in the room was shopping online, some were even buying shoes online, which still to this day I find incredulous.
Another thing I did was help develop and deliver the Jisc Digital Leaders Programme. In the early days we did some mapping of our digital self using the concept of Visitors and Residents.
At the time I liked how the mapping exercise makes you consider how you are using various tools and what needs to happen to change that map, how do you become more resident when using a tool such as Bluesky. Or how do you start using a tool which is currently not on your map, such as a professional blog?
The mapping changes as new tools are introduced, old ones retire and your role and behaviours change.
When a couple of years ago I did a similar mapping exercise again, I started to realised how embedded digital and services were into everyday life. The value of mapping your digital self had become less valuable and so much more was embedded into how we communicate and collaborate.
As I said earlier, as a society technology and digital has become more embedded into our lives, the concept of post-digital echoes the sentiment that as technology becomes part of our everyday lives, the less we see it as technology. At the end of the day we are probably all digital now, living in a post-digital world.
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.
news and views on e-learning, TEL and learning stuff in general…
