Tag Archives: collaboration

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Competition Time

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Last month the CMA (Competition and Markets Authority) published guidance on collaboration in higher education. This clarity about collaboration within the sector has to be welcomed. The law has not been changed, but the clarification can provide reassurance to the sector that looking to work together, sharing services and resources, as well as more formal collaboration is potentially possible. 

When the sector conversation started on collaboration there was some loud voices saying that we couldn’t collaborate because of the legal implications of competition law. The government and sector bodies were pushing the opportunities about working together and some parts of the sector were pushing back, talking about competition and the law. I wrote about this in a week note from February last year.

So, much so, that a discussion was had with the CMA and then the resulting guidance from them was published.

Part of me though does wonder, if the apprehension about collaboration was using the CMA and competition law as an excuse for not looking at collaboration rather than an actual reason not to collaborate. Will the new guidance mitigate that excuse now.

Was the rhetoric from the sector about Competition Law more about using it as an excuse to avoid the discussion and need to collaborate.

Now the guidance has been published, or will we now find that there is another reason why HE can’t collaborate?

Is it because they don’t want to collaborate?

Is it because they don’t know how to collaborate?

I think it’s a bit of both.

I was reminded of my experiences back in the 2000s when I was introducing technology into learning and teaching.

Often staff would tell me why they couldn’t or wouldn’t use learning technologies.

Where is the evidence etc???

When then presented with the evidence, it was then another reason, and then another reason…

Sometimes you had to listen, other times you need to dig a little deeper to understand why a person (or an organisation) doesn’t want to do something. The reason they give, may not be the actual reason why they aren’t going to do that thing.

The reality was, more my problem, I was presenting the introduction of learning technologies as a problem to be solved, the reality was technology was actually a solution, what I hadn’t done, was identified the problem. Learning technologies are a solution to problems, not the problem that needs to be solved.

market stall

We need to move away from excuses and obstacles, and move towards opportunities and solutions.

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. I recently wrote about bridge building in helping understanding about problems and solutions.

Back in the day when I was designing aspects of the Digital Leadership programme I recognised that helping people to understand the differences between problems and solutions I would use a bridge building analogy.

If we are to work towards solving the solutions to the many challenges the higher education sector is facing then we need to stop just thinking about the problems with potential solutions, but focus on making those solutions work.

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Bridge Building

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wooden bridge
Image by Elizabeth from Pixabay

One question that sometimes comes up, is do we know how to collaborate?

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.

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.

wooden bridge
Image by hmauck from Pixabay

Back in the day when I was designing aspects of the Digital Leadership programme I recognised that helping people to understand the differences between problems and solutions I would use a bridge building analogy.

If you imagine a river, you know where you are and you have fair idea about where you want to be. The problem is how do you get from one side of the river to other. The solution is to build a bridge. The bridge in itself is not the problem you need to solve, it is the solution to the actual problem of crossing the river.

One of the challenges is that often people don’t know how to build a bridge. Then the focus energy and resources are pushed into bridge building. Sometimes it becomes all about bridge building and less about crossing the river.

In many ways I see collaboration as the bridge. We know that the sector is facing challenges, one solution is to build a bridge (collaboration) but the bridge itself isn’t the problem.

Generally what most communities do when they need a bridge, they get experts in to build that bridge. It’s pretty much the same with collaboration, why not get expert help, to help with the collaboration and then that allows greater focus on the actual problems that collaboration is trying to solve.

Generally once you’ve built a bridge, you use it to cross the river and then move on.

So are you building bridges, or are you still thinking about how to construct one?

weeknotes

Positioning Interoperability – Weeknote #361 – 30th January 2026

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This week I made it to the Bristol office to work and meet with colleagues. I had a chance meeting with a member of the OpenAthens team which was useful and we sat down and had a discussion about trust and identity. I do like going to the office, and have decided I will try and get in more than I have been going. I think the wet weather probably puts me off. The other aspect is that if I have a lot of online meetings, then actually going into the office is makes that more challenging, as I would need to book a meeting room, and on some days, when the office is busy, there are fewer meeting rooms available.

I wrote an article on Erasmus+ for the internal comms team, which did draw on the article I wrote for this blog back in December.

I did write three blog posts this week. The first was on students’ perceptions of their providers’ response to financial challenges.

What this report and analysis is showing is that student satisfaction is being impacted by the financial situation in higher education.

The second was on the news from the University of Nottingham about their course closures and staff student ratios.

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. 

The two stories are somewhat linked. The financial crisis impacting on the higher education sector is not just about numbers and figures, it is about people. As well as the impact on staff and redundancy, we are also seeing the negative impact on the student experience and student satisfaction. Alas, this can be a somewhat downward spiral if we see student numbers drop. Having said that the news from UCAS this week was 338,940 UK 18-year-olds have applied for university – a record high and 4.8 per cent more than the 323,360 that applied in 2025. That increase though is driven by demographics, the number of 18 year olds in 2026 is largest for 35 years. Probably better to look at the application rate as a percentage of that demographic, and then the figure has remained relatively static at 40.7%, it was 40.6% in 2025. There was a peak of 42.8% in 2022. What we can say then is the rise in applications is down to population growth.

Going forward if applications stay around the 40% mark then we will in the future see the number of applications fall. Of course not all of those 40% actually go to university and then there are others who will choose later to go having not made an UCAS application.  The recent government white paper no longer talks of the 50% going to university but does talk about 67% undertaking some form of higher level education. What does that look like going forward?

The third blog post was on generalisations and assumptions.

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.

I have been looking at the European Higher Education Interoperability Framework, in the main for the work I have been doing in the E in NREN landscape, but also how it could support LLE in the future. It is also been used within the UCISA work on the student data model.

I have been researching and planning some position papers on the European Higher Education Interoperability Framework, looking at the current UK landscape and what Jisc is doing or could do in that landscape.

I have also been having discussions about collaboration and sharing. One question that sometimes comes up, is do we know how to collaborate?

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.

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.

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This is the way

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Image by Pexels from Pixabay

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.

weeknotes

Your radio voice – Weeknote #350 – 14th November

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Senate House Library

Much of this week was spent in London. Monday I was in our London office, and on Tuesday and Wednesday I was at the WonkHE Festival of Higher Education where I was speaking on a panel about collaboration.

I really enjoyed attending the WonkHE Festival of Higher Education and I am slightly sad that they are taking a fallow year in 2026. What works for me is the structure and format of the range of sessions that happen across the conference. I like the interview format of the keynote sessions which is different to the usual kinds of keynotes we see at other conferences. There was a dearth of PowerPoint slides in most sessions, which I liked. Sometimes slides dominate a session rather than enhance it.

My session was on how to collaborate, which seemed to go down well. Also decent audience for a penultimate session on the final day. The only issue for me was that I had a bad cough all week which meant that I had virtually lost my voice and did have trouble speaking in the session, a number of people referenced my radio voice.

I particularly enjoyed the final session about where will higher education be in 2050. There was an amusing lively debate on the discord channel for this conference session. It reminded me of how we would use what was the Twitter back in the early 2010s at conferences.

At the end of the week I braved the rain and delayed trains to get to the office in Bristol.

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Collaboration is a compromise

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coffee
Image by David Schwarzenberg from Pixabay

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.

weeknotes

Traitorous cooperation – Weeknote #345 – 10th October

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The week before I was quite unwell with covid. I was getting better, so I did another test and this one came back negative. I wasn’t 100%, but I did think I was well enough to travel to Birmingham for a couple of days. We had a team away day on Tuesday and an all staff conference on the Wednesday.

Jisc is very much a hybrid geographically distributed organisation across the UK, so more often than not, conversations and discussion is over Teams. So, it makes a nice change to actually meet in person and chat and discuss stuff.

On Monday the day before I headed off to Birmingham, we had a meeting about collaboration. I was reminded of the article I wrote on blocking collaboration back in 2022.

Collaboration is defined in the dictionary as: traitorous cooperation with an enemy. That may not mean what we think when we say collaboration. Of course there is another definition which is: the action of working with someone to produce something.

I concluded that collaboration does require teams to plan and think about their ways of working. Compromises have to be made to ensure effective collaboration. You have to trust, and trust is a two way street.

It is looking like I will be travelling to the Netherlands quite a bit over the next few months delivering workshops and attending various meetings. One of things I will need to do before all that is renew my passport. In theory I have just under three months left on my passport, reality is that I need to have at least three months left on my passport if I am going to travel. I will be losing my nice burgundy passport and getting a new blue one.

The BBC reports on an UCU analysis which shows universities have collectively announced more than 12,000 job cuts in the last year. The article discusses not just the closure of courses, but also cuts to services for students. Could the ongoing financial crisis for the sector actually become worse, as some young people decide that an deprecated student experience isn’t the experience that they want from university, and choose a different path.

weeknotes

Is it a bird… Is it a plane… No, it’s a super-university! – Weeknote #341 – 12th September

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The big news this week was the announcement of the merger between the University of Greenwich and the University of Kent. It is being called the creation of the “first” super university. I wrote about this on the day of the announcement. Degrees from the new super university will still be awarded in the name of Kent or Greenwich. I think that this is a wise move and needs to be supported, mergers don’t and shouldn’t always means the loss of institutional identities.

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

Also this week I published a couple of vision pieces on The University Group™ and The Specialist University Centre. With the recent announcement of the “first” university super merger between Greenwich and Kent, I was reminded of a piece of work I wrote last February, which never got further than my hard drive (well cloud storage). Also last week was the UUK Annual Conference, the then science secretary Peter Kyle was speaking on the second day, and calling for increasing specialisation and collaboration in higher education, which reminded me of another vision piece. So, I put them both on the blog.

One of the reports I have been working on this year was on subject collaboration within higher education. We did reference a previous British Academy report, so it was with interest that I read their recent report, which obviously focuses on the arts and social sciences. I wrote up some thoughts on the report and the implications for the UK higher education sector.

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On the 1st September we published a version of one of the reports I have been working on, this week I have been  working with others finalising the second report which will be sent to UUK members.

The NRENS 4 Education group I am part of had a meeting with the European Commission. The last time we met, it was in-person in Brussels, this time it was a Teams meeting, so no Belgian chocolates for me this time.

We had a discussion and reflected on UUK’s annual conference, which took place last week. Positive attitudes to collaboration, however still understanding the challenges in making it happen. The Kent and Greenwich merger may demonstrate one way forward.

Writing up a business case for visit to Netherlands and attendance at Learning Impact Europe 2025 Conference.

I have been invited to be a speaker at HE Transformation 2025, taking place 19 – 20 November at the NEC, Birmingham.

I did make it to our office in Bristol and London this week.

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Increase in cold spots

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fence with ice
Image by Ramon Perucho from Pixabay

One of the reports I have been working on this year was on subject collaboration within higher education. We did reference a previous British Academy report, so it was with interest that I read their recent report, which obviously focuses on the arts and social sciences.

In this report the British Academy revealed a troubling trend in UK higher education: a growing number of “cold spots” where students have limited to no access to local humanities, social sciences, and arts degrees (known as SHAPE subjects). This is especially concerning since more than half of UK undergraduate students attend a university within their home region, and that number is even higher for disadvantaged students. The report argues that the lack of local access to these degrees risks deepening social inequality.

The Scope of the Problem

The decline in subject provision is not uniform. The report identifies specific subject areas that are particularly vulnerable. Modern foreign languages have been hit the hardest, with the number of available courses having nearly halved since 2011. Other subjects like linguistics, anthropology, and drama are also showing significant declines in geographical coverage. While parts of England are affected—especially the North, South West, and East—large areas of Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland are also experiencing a shrinking of SHAPE degrees.

This issue is a symptom of wider financial pressures on universities. The report warns that institutions are making decisions based on short-term financial concerns and competition for students, rather than a strategic vision for the future. The British Academy cautions that if these trends continue, even more popular subjects like English and history could be at risk.

Recommendations for possible solutions that come from the report.

To combat this trend, the British Academy is urging a collaborative response from the government, universities, and regulators. The report’s key recommendations include:

  • National Registers for At-Risk Subjects: The creation of a national register to monitor and track the health of specific subjects in different regions. This would provide a clearer picture of where “cold spots” are emerging.
  • Government Financial Support: The government should provide targeted funding to protect and support subjects that are identified as being at risk.
  • Encouraging Collaboration: Universities in each UK nation and region should actively seek opportunities to collaborate on teaching, research, and shared services. This would help ensure that specialised courses remain available to students without requiring every institution to run a separate program.
  • Legal: The government (well the CMA) should issue clear guidance on how far higher education providers can collaborate without breaching competition law.

The report serves as a stark warning that without urgent intervention, access to these critical subjects will continue to diminish, undermining the UK’s reputation for academic excellence and weakening the skills needed to tackle major societal and economic challenges. The British Academy argues that SHAPE subjects are crucial for fostering a well-rounded society, as they contribute to innovation, critical thinking, and cultural understanding.

It should be noted that there are similar cold spots in other subject areas as well, including core priority subjects such as nursing.

weeknotes

Radical Collaboration – Weeknote #334 – 25th July

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I headed to the Bristol office this week, in the main as the car was getting a service, but also, I do like working in the office on a regular basis.

This week saw the publication of the Radical Collaboration Playbook.  This report is one of the key outputs for Universities UK’s (UUK) transformation and efficiency taskforce which was established in December 2024 to understand where further opportunities for universities to save costs and transform their operations exist. It has become clear in this process that one of the greatest opportunities lies in collaboration – in building on what exists and in finding novel ways to deepen partnerships across the sector.

This is quite a substantial piece of work, covering 74 pages. My first reading and first impressions was that this was a detailed piece of work and certainly well worth looking at if you are looking at mergers, collaboration, or sharing. Though one question it doesn’t, and couldn’t answer, is when do you make the decision to merge? Do you wait until everything is falling apart or even afterwards? Do you plan for that possible future now? Or, what about biting the bullet and merging now, before things get bad.

This is the outcome from strand 3 of the UUK Phase 1 Transformation and Efficiency Taskforce. I have spent much of the last year working on strand 2.

Though there appears to be an appetite for collaboration, I haven’t seen much evidence for actual collaboration or sharing over the last twelve months. Will that change over the next year, who knows!

people
Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

Went through a third draft of my objectives for next year. Our year runs from August to July, in line with the academic calendar. They cover three main areas, continuing the E in NREN work I have been doing, likewise a similar objective looking at optimisation and collaboration. The third objective is looking at the LLE (Lifelong Learning Entitlement) in UK higher education and what it means for Jisc.