I was on leave for most of this week, so no weeknote this week.
Category Archives: weeknotes
Weeknote #280 – 12th July 2024
I was on leave for most of this week, so no weeknote this week.
We have a new government – Weeknote #279 – 5th July 2024
This week saw the defeat of the Conservatives and a new Labour government.
Though the expectation is that there will be no new money for higher education, I think we can expect to see some reforms. Personally I am expecting major reforms for the Office for Students.
Took some leave this week as I had a fair amount of leave to take before the year end at the end of July.
Had various meetings and discussions about a report we have commissioned and the planning and processes we will use.
Weeknote #278 – 28th June 2024
<<awaiting content>>
Weeknote #277 – 21st June 2024
<<awaiting content>>
Marking – Weeknote #276 – 14th June 2024
I spent most of the week working from home, it is exam time for some in the house, so I was around to provide lifts to early revision sessions, or to ensure functionality in case of delayed buses. I did plan to go into the office one day, but even though it was June, the weather forecast was for heavy rain and strong winds. My reasoning for going to the office was that I had a series of later afternoon meetings, so I would then have somewhere quieter to participate in them. In the end, two of those three (and the most participative) were cancelled, or not needed.
I actually like going to work in the office, the change in space, place, and routine, makes a difference to how I feel, or even my wellbeing.
I have been working on a concept Intelligent Campus Maturity Tool. Based on the Further Education elevation tool Jisc produced, the idea is that you can use the tool to assess your progress in building your smart campus. I have already identified the key themes and sub-themes; I am now working on competency statements for those different sub-themes. I am planning to run a workshop in the autumn to test out the tool with the community.
At the beginning of the week I was marking and moderating some bids for a tender we had out on the opportunities for collective, collaborative, and inter-institutional activity.
A couple of meetings were cancelled which gave me some time back.
I am currently taking a leadership course at Jisc, and this week I completed some more work on this.
Had a volunteering day on Friday. Jisc provides staff with three volunteering days a year. I use mine to support the administration of running a Cub Pack. This involves planning the programme, badge administration, risk assessments, and communicating with other organisations.
Time back – Weeknote #275 – 7th June 2024
I spent most of the week working from home, it is exam time for some in the house, so I was around to provide lifts to early revision sessions, or to ensure functionality in case of delayed buses. I had intended to work in the office at least one day this week, but I was also expecting a call from the garage about my car, and it would have been easier to pick it up travelling from home, than from the office.
I am currently taking a leadership course at Jisc, and this week I completed some more units from the Institute of Leadership. I have extensive management and leadership experience, running teams of various sizes, complexity and geographically distributed. I have planned, designed, and delivered shared services for consortia and complex organisations. I have also managed multi-million pound budgets and projects. In addition I have delivered management and leadership training, both at Jisc, to universities, and was a Management and Business Studies lecturer back in the 1990s.
Having said all that there is still room to both learn new things and to update existing knowledge. I also want to affirm my understanding of leadership as well. The course has been useful for these things.
Had a couple of internal meetings this week, they were scheduled for longer than they actually took. Though it’s nice to have time back, it would be even better if we had that time back before the meeting took place. Planning meetings takes time for the person planning the meeting but can save a lot more time for those participating in that meeting. Do they even need to be in that meeting?
I have written about meetings over my Technology Stuff blog. Back in 2021 I reflected on an article by Atlassian on making meetings better, useful and interesting.
Running effective meetings isn’t simply a matter of doing the obvious things like sharing the agenda and starting on time. While those things are important, they’re just table stakes. The real key to running a great meeting is organizing and running them with a human touch – not like some corporate management automaton.
I also wrote about how “Meetings are a waste of time”
The perspective we can solve engagement issues by having meetings, and so we need to improve the online meetings, misses the key problem, which is the lack of engagement. This is a leadership and management challenge not just about improving online meetings. People have a personal responsibility to engage with corporate communication, give them choice, make it easier, but to think you solve it by having a meeting, is a similar thinking that people read all their e-mail.
I enjoyed reading this HEPI article on future scenarios for Higher Education.
The author, Professor Sir Chris Husbands, is the former vice-chancellor at Sheffield Hallam University. He develops four plausible scenarios for the future of English higher education and looks at what they could mean for students, universities and government.
Scenario 1 considers what happens on the current funding trajectory.
Scenario 2 looks at what a higher education sector fully funded for high participation, research and innovation might look like.
Scenario 3 explores the implications of a tertiary system.
Scenario 4 considers what a more differentiated system might look like.
I have written some scenarios up as future visions as prompts for discussion. The HEPI visions are much more near-future (and probably more realistic) than my visions. However my future visions are not supposed to be accurate predictions of the future, more as discussion pieces to prompt thinking about how higher education can change.
Found this article on Wonkhe interesting on the future financial sustainability of higher education: Why I wouldn’t bet against a fee rise after the election.
It’s long been assumed that whatever the outcome of the coming general election, fees would remain stuck in the freezer for the time being. We’ve pored over Public First polling that has neatly demonstrated how unpopular raising fees would be and concluded that no political party could feasibly contemplate this. But the ground is now shifting beneath our feet and I think a modest but significant fee rise looks more likely than ever.
I think that may happen, as a last resort if there are real possibilities of universities failing, as well as declining international student recruitment, then the (next) government may need to raise fees to ensure that universities survive financially.
I continued to do some researching and then writing June Intelligent Campus newsletter. This is posted over on the Jiscmail mailing list for the Intelligent Campus.
I have been working on an Intelligent Campus Maturity Tool, this has required me to map out competency statements that institutions would require to assess their current state of readiness in relation to smart and intelligent campus.
Wrote a section for our board report on the work I have been doing.
I planned, prepared and then cancelled my Senior Education and Student Experience group meeting. I have now been asked to attend UUK Round Table on the same date.
When it’s three o’clock in New York, it’s still 1938 in London – Weeknote #274 – 31st May 2024
Shorter week this week with the Bank Holiday. Decided to work in our London office this week and do some more field research into the Intelligent Campus.
Wrote a blog post on attendance after reading a Guardian article on the subject.
It would appear that the remote teaching during covid is continuing to have an impact on attendance at in-person teaching. Alongside the cost of living crisis, rising costs, the need to work, and interestingly a perception by students that attendance at in-person sessions was unlikely to benefit their learning and their grades.
I had to answer some clarification questions in relation to Invitation to tender we have out.
Undertook some preparation for Senior Education and Student Experience group meeting. I am probably going to repeat the session we did in March.
Continued with some leadership training I am doing.
Have been creating and writing out IC monthly newsletter for June.
Listened to the THE Podcast, specifically the interview with Mark Thompson, professor of digital economy at the University of Exeter.
In this interview, conducted at the Digital Universities UK event at Exeter, Thompson shares his concern that the sector is drifting away from its true north of research, teaching and impact (he uses Jeff Bezos’ idea of “day one”), citing statistics that less than 40 per cent of university staff are academics. He suggests reasons for this and talks about the need for leadership at institutional and government level and the prisoner’s dilemma of whole-sector transformation.
It was an interesting interview, and there is a related article.
UK universities should rip up a lot of their “back-end nonsense”, tackle managerial bloat and stop shelling out for different versions of the same technology to allow them to return to their core missions and heavily invest in academic jobs, according to an influential professor who has helped to pioneer a new approach to digital infrastructure in the public sector.
This echoes much of my work in this space. I am not sure the sector could achieve the 20% saving, but I do think there is room for savings.
Calling it – Weeknote #273 – 24th May 2024
On Thursday the prime minister announced that there will be a general election on the 4th July. We can expect lots of policy ideas and manifesto commitments being pushed out over the next six weeks. Will the higher education sector be top of the list, somehow I doubt it.
I planned out some blog posts I want to write in relation to the areas I am working on. Now I just need to write them…
I spent some time preparing for a briefing I was giving at the end of the week. This was on the optimisation work I have been doing this year.
Concerns about the financial viability of higher education continues with some ex-ministers warning UK universities will go bust without higher fees or funding
Vice-chancellors and former ministers are warning that the cash crisis facing universities is so serious that the next government will have to urgently raise tuition fees or increase funding to avoid bankruptcies within two years.
Even with a general election coming soon, it is unlikely that we will see increased funding for universities.
Wonkhe reported that despite the recommendations of the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) report the government is still looking to reduce the number of international students coming to the UK.
The sector’s eyes are on the Prime Minister this week as, following the conclusion of the independent Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) that the Graduate route for international students should remain intact, there’s no indication the government plans to take the advice it asked for. All the latest signals from Number 10 suggest that Rishi Sunak is looking for ways to restrict international students further, potentially using a “best and brightest” formula to do so, despite the prospective damage to the economy and to universities, and the fundamental incoherence of the concept.
I am pretty sure that none of the international students coming to the UK arrive in small boats. Another situation where the political rhetoric doesn’t match reality.
Polly Toynbee in the Guardian notes that
But living within the incomes they can attract, universities may reconsider how they are organised: some will question why degrees need three years with such short terms, why vice-chancellors’ salaries, some higher than £500,000, are much higher than their European neighbours, why university teaching careers are so hard on beginners and why sixth-formers get so much more teaching time than university students at far lower cost.
Another perspective on why universities should be looking at their operating model, changing or optimising what they do, and becoming more efficient.
I started thinking about my objectives for next year. I say next year, our planning year runs from 1st August to 31st July, so there is a couple of months left to think about this.a
There may be mergers ahead – Weeknote #272 – 17th May 2024
The news this week was dominated by the financial crisis that the university sector is facing in the UK.
Wonkhe said in their daily briefing
An increasing number of universities in England face a material risk of closure unless they significantly cut costs or merge. The Office for Students (OfS) 2024 financial sustainability report discusses a heavy reliance on international students due to declining domestic student fee income, and a “worst-case scenario” predicts that four out of five institutions will be in deficit by 2027 without changes.
With over optimistic views by universities about student numbers (domestic and international) the sector is facing a real financial challenge and with no real solutions in sight. There is no easy solution to this.
The OfS report was quite clear about the pressures facing the university sector.
Continuing decline in the real-terms value of income from UK undergraduates combined with inflationary and economic pressures on operating costs and the costs of developing buildings and facilities, as well as increasing employer contributions to some pension schemes.
They added the following key points in their report.
- A recent apparent reduction in UK and international applications after years of strong growth, especially from international students.
- A higher education financial model that has become reliant on fee income from international students, with a particular vulnerability where recruitment is predominantly from a single country.
- The affordability of necessary estate maintenance and development and the significant cost of investment needed to reduce carbon emissions as part of providers’ commitments to achieve net zero.
- Cost of living difficulties for students and staff, which challenge both student recruitment and the support needed by students during their time in higher education.
The report set out that universities may need to think differently to respond to the challenges they face.
Changes to a provider’s operating model can be a healthy response to financial challenge. The sector as a whole has been in a relatively strong financial position for much of the past decade and has expanded its delivery to more UK and non-UK students. The financial challenges it is facing now could be a catalyst to drive positive change and innovation. Actions being taken by providers can result in more efficient operation, and could have benefits for students, including improved value for money.
This very much echoes the work I have been doing at Jisc on optimising operations and looking at collaboration and shared services.
The report also acknowledges that there may be mergers ahead.
We also expect that we might see some changes to the size and shape of the sector, for example, through mergers and acquisitions or increase specialisation.
As part of my work I wrote a vision about mergers and the formation of large university groups, but with the individual partners within that group retaining their local identity.
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.
This is a model we have seen in the Further Education sector, with large college groups and individual campuses having a separate brand and identity.
As well as facing financial challenges, the sector is also facing an unhappy cohort of students who are making more complaints.
Students complaints to the Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIA) in England and Wales rose to 3,137 in 2023, the ombuds’ annual report reveals. This was a ten per cent increase from 2022, and OIA recommendations led to more than £580,000 paid out in financial compensation, in addition to almost £640,000 in settlements. Some 21 per cent of complaints were adjudged to be justified (two per cent) or partly justified (seven per cent) or were settled in favour of the student.
Wonkhe reflects on a year of complaints received by the Office of the Independent Adjudicator.
I was in the office for a couple of days this week, but reflected I’ve not been out and about for a while. I was expecting to go out and do some visits and workshops in May, but these never materialised. I‘ve also not attended any recent events, I think I might have to do some travelling over the next few weeks.
I attended our regular catch up meeting with the OfS this week in our Bristol office, and we updated each other which what is happening and what this may mean.
Wrote a short thought piece on academic staff using ChatGPT for student feedback.
We know that students are using tools such as ChatGPT to support their assessment work. It looks like some staff are also using the tool to provide feedback.
I have started a leadership development programme at Jisc. I am very much in the position in my career, where it is much less about what do I need to do to advance my career, but more about having achieved my career aspiration, what can I do for Jisc. I have extensive management and leadership experience, running teams of various sizes, complexity and geographically distributed. I have planned, designed, and delivered shared services for consortia and complex organisations. I have managed multi-million pound budgets and projects.
So, I am not attending the programme to learn how to be a leader, but there is something about refreshing and updating your knowledge in this space. Also, it will be good to work with colleagues across the organisation as well.