After attending a conference in Belfast last week, this week I was off to Brighton for TNC25. TNC is the conference for the NREN community.
One of the sketchnotes I did.
At the conference I did four different key things.
Delivered presentation in the TF-EDU side meeting
Delivered presentation in the BoF NRENs 4 Education session.
Delivered presentation in the REFEDS side meeting
Supported Jisc stand at TNC25
I also attended NRENs 4 Education planning and development (side) meeting as well. Here we were working on an NRENs 4 Education proposal.
Attended an UUK Collaboration project update meeting and also spent time reviewing feedback on UUK Collaboration project strategic outline cases (new nomenclature for what were the business cases).
The week after next I am presenting at Networkshop, so reviewed my presentation and presentation notes.
Are students at breaking point? Via WonkHE
More than two-thirds of full-time undergraduate students undertake paid work during term time, up from 42 per cent in 2020 – while students report a notable decrease in time spent on independent study as they balance employment and academic commitments. The Advance HE / HEPI Student Academic Experience Survey also finds that 37 per cent of students perceive their course as good value for money (down from 39 per cent in 2024), and a record low of 56 per cent of students would have chosen the same course and university if they had their time again.
Three-quarters of students report that cost-of-living pressures have notably impacted their studies, nearly one-in-five students have taken on more debt than planned (particularly affecting home students), and other impacts include reduced spending on course equipment, lower participation in sports and societies, and increased commuting costs. Financial challenges mean that 6 per cent of home students selected a different course than they had planned to, and 7 per cent selected a different institution than they had planned to.
Is university still going to be a viable option for many prospective students?
Having spent last week in Brussels, this week I was over in Belfast attending the EUNIS 25 Congress. I was supporting a workshop session on student mobility. as part of our work on NRENs for Education, or as I have been calling it internally E in NREN.
There were lots of interesting sessions, I think for me one of the challenges the sector faces, is that yes there are data and technical issues that need resolving, but there are only part of the solution. Some of the real challenges is rethinking the operating model and making those cultural process changes required to take advantage of the work being undertaken with standards and data.
Spent some time preparing for events and meetings I am attending in Brighton at TNC25.
Universities UK’s (UUK) transformation and efficiency taskforce was established in response to significant financial pressure on the higher education sector in all four nations of the UK. Our aim is to tackle the challenges we collectively face, to support the efforts of individual universities to achieve greater efficiency, and to seek opportunities for collective action to help our universities go further and faster than they can alone. This report is the first of three outputs from the taskforce, and together these mark Phase 1 of a long-term commitment to embark on a new era of collaboration.
I have been working on phase two of the work, though not sure if there will be a similar public facing publication.
As with much of the communication about collaboration, the challenges facing the sector, means the real challenge for many universities will be taking that first step towards collaboration. What and where should a university collaborate and with whom.
The case for university collaboration in the UK has been made with increasing frequency as the financial squeeze starts to make itself felt in profound ways. That said, there has been little tangible activity – the report points to longstanding structures such as the University of London federation, existing networks of research collaborations, and strategic working with local stakeholders. The taskforce adds the multi-academy trust-esque group structures employed by the (HE and FE) University of the Highlands and (cross sector) London South Bank to the list., and there is a nod to the world of sharing expensive research infrastructure too.
Interesting blog from the Competition and Markets Authority
Our universities are one of the UK’s greatest success stories – they produce world-class research, drive innovation across the economy and remain critical to equipping people with the skills they need to get on in life. Skills are, of course, crucial to economic growth and a successful industrial strategy, both of which we support. However, we know that many higher education providers are facing very challenging financial situations and that greater collaboration between universities could help support the sector. This is where competition law – and the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) – can play a role. While some collaborations are more problematic under competition law, there are many areas where they are beneficial and pose no competition law risks. We can also support collaborations that benefit the UK by making clear that we won’t prioritise enforcement.
This was a shorter week, as not only was there a bank holiday on Monday, but I also took a day’s leave.
On Tuesday I was down in Southampton for a meeting. Though there are many advantages to Teams and Zoom, sometimes participating in an in-person meeting gives you more insights than the online version. There are affordances with digital, so I always consider them just different, rather than one being better than the other. Also, less train travel with an online meeting.
Spent most of the rest of the week working on the collaboration project we are doing with UUK. There were a few administrative meetings as well in my diary.
Friday I had an early start for an NRENs4Education (what I have been called in these weeknotes E in NREN) meeting about a future meeting in Brussels. As a group we have quite high aspirations, but there are many challenges that we face as we look at student mobility across Europe.
The press this week as been full of depressing detail about the financial state of higher education.
I’m a fan of net liquidity days (a measure showing the number of days a university could run for in the absence of any further income). Anything below a month (31 days) makes me sit up and take notice… there’s 10 large-ish universities in that boat including some fairly well-known names.
More than four in 10 universities in England are expecting to be in a financial deficit by this summer, according to new report from the Office for Students (OfS). The OfS, which regulates higher education providers, said universities were closing courses and selling buildings to cut costs, but “significant reform and efficiencies” were needed to turn the tide. It said a drop in international students coming to the UK was the main reason for the worsening financial position. The report found that 117 of 270 higher education institutions (43%) registered with the OfS expected to be in deficit by the end of July – despite course closures, job losses and selling off assets.
This demonstrates once more for the need for the sector to rethink their operating model. This can’t be just about more money, as we do need to consider the impact that (continually) raising fees will have on students, student wellbeing, and future student recruitment.
Much of the week was about working on the UUK project on collaboration.
I have been working on supporting the work on 12 ideas; combine that with review meetings, writing content, tidying up slides for a presentation, and then some.
Also been working on the E in NREN work looking at student mobility across Europe.
Attended the Wonkhe and Mills and Reeve Connect More webinar realising opportunities for strategic collaboration in higher education which was very interesting and relevant to my current work.
Attended a briefing for Digifest which is happening next week.
An interesting blog post from WonKHE about the challenges that exist with restructuring higher education. It’s not as simple as we think it is. There is a lot of resistance and scepticism about merger that we have seen elsewhere as well.
There is a startling dearth of law and policy around structural collaboration for HE; some issues such as the VAT rules on shared services, are well established, while others are more speculative. What would the regulatory approach be to a “federated” group of HE providers? What are merging providers’ legal responsibilities to students? What data and evidence might providers draw on to inform their planning?
Alignment, standardisation, rationalisation, and commonality, though requisite for merger, you don’t need to have merger to undertake the work to allow for greater alignment.
The Times Higher Education published an article about collaboration, and mentions the Jisc collaboration report by name.
A recent, comprehensive report on “collaboration for a sustainable future” by Jisc and KPMG celebrated more examples – but also made a compelling case for the sector to keep pushing itself on this.
In addition, Jisc is involved in and working with the Transformation and Efficiency Taskforce. I am working in collaboration with UUK on a joint project working on the following strand:
Developing detailed business cases on options for national collaboration, which will be externally published, and will give the sector clear paths towards transformation
The launch of the taskforce is on the UUK website as well. I like this quote:
“While institutions have been doing more and more to be as efficient as possible, they have largely been doing so at an individual level. Truly impactful transformation will best be delivered through partnership and collaboration at both a regional and a national level. It is time for some blue sky thinking on what that looks like.”
Ask any higher education institution leader about the organisational challenges they’re grappling with, and they’ll start talking about silos.
Though talking about silos, the article is more about integrating digital into learning and teaching. The article concludes
As the digital learning and teaching landscape continues to evolve, institutional strategic agendas to make the most of technology to enhance student engagement and support won’t be driven by small teams of experts, or even by digital leadership. It will require all student-facing staff to have the confidence and skills not just to follow processes and use systems but to actively work to deploy technology creatively and interpret data to take forward improvements to learning and teaching (and that don’t depend on staff simply working harder and longer). To get to that point, institutional leaders will need to continue to find creative ways to break down those silos and build whole-organisation digital capability.
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.
One question that I have been thinking about after reading his article was, what typifies a silo mentality, and what enables cross-silo working? I think a key aspect is strategic thinking within the silo. If you have a unique strategy for your department, this is symptomatic of silo thinking. If you have a strategy based on, say the student journey, the staff experience, research impact, then you probably have already broken down your silos.
I wondered 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.
The WonkHE article talks about digital learning and teaching, if the owner of the digital learning strategy is the head of the digital learning team, then how will that strategy, not only communicate across the university, but how will it compete with all the other departmental strategies out there.
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.
For the first time in an age I headed up to London for a meeting. I also did London in a day, which was a lot more exhausting than I remember it being. It was very cold, and though there was light snow on the way, I didn’t see the snow and disruption that others encountered.
The principal reason for heading to London was for an in-person discussion and workshop on planning some work around, what we are calling the Education in NREN. NREN stands for National Research and Education Network, in the UK that is Jisc, in the Netherlands it is SURF, whilst in Eire it is HEAnet. These are the national networks for educational providers. Though there are many similarities there are also marked differences between the various NRENs across Europe (and the rest of the world).
It was nice to work in the London office for a change. It’s never our busiest office, and that was even the case prior to the pandemic, but you do see and meet people there.
I had planned to head to the Bristol office on Wednesday, but when I tried to book a meeting room for my two online meetings, there were none available. Over the last year the Bristol office has got much busier, so meeting rooms get booked up very quickly. Part of this, is that not only do we still have a pattern of hybrid working, which means a lot more online meetings. The fact we are hybrid has also meant that are patterns of recruitment are less dependent geographically, which exacerbates the number of online meetings and calls that people are having. All this means that the number of calls in the office is higher than it was before the pandemic and there is increased demand on rooms for people to have online meetings in.
As well as the in-person meeting on the E in NREN, I had a fair number of meetings across the week, as I start to do more work in this area.
I am still continuing to work on the optimisation of operations and data following the publication fo the KPMG report I had been working on. I had a meeting about some collaboration with another agency on some next steps on some collaboration proposals.
In addition I wrote up some thoughts on next steps with KPMG report.
Across the sector there has been discussion about talk about the OfS report from last week. For example from WonkHE.
Last week’s update from the Office for Students (OfS) on the state of institutional finances for the HE sector in England brought any lingering sense of cheer from the recent announcement on the indexation of undergraduate fees to an abrupt halt. Based on the latest data available on student entry this autumn, OfS confirms that its warning in May that the sector’s recruitment forecasts had a degree of “optimism bias” has proved true.
It now appears the question of what will happen if a higher education institution fails, is less about if and more about when. The OfS requires all providers to have in place a student protection plan, to ensure a continuity of studying for students of a failing institution. The objective of these plans is to protect the students, however not the staff or the institution as a whole.
I do think that over the next year or so, we will see struggling universities merging and collaborating more closely, rather than waiting to fail. Though the independence mentality of the institution may mean that rather than merge, an institution will just keep cutting costs.
I have mentioned in a number of conversations about the attraction of degree apprenticeships and the impact that this could have on general HE recruitment.
The research found that outreach and recruitment for DAs was generally not integrated, although both institutions in the study highlighted increasing interest in DAs from schools with a greater proportion of higher-attaining students and non-state schools, rather than the schools where their outreach typically takes place. Both providers had recruited a range of apprentices, with older apprentices already working for the organisation from comparatively lower socio-economic backgrounds being the norm on health-related programmes, while digital and STEM-related programmes attract younger apprentices as new recruits, from comparatively higher socio-economic backgrounds.
Are degree apprenticeships opening up access, or entrenching privilege? Charlynne Pullen, one of the report’s authors, sets out what the research found.
A coming decline in the number of 18-year-olds makes the future ‘very bleak’ for some universities. A new report from the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) shows reductions in student demand in England, which are already affecting the higher education sector, will cause serious problems as the number of 18-year-olds in the population declines after 2030.
In an already financially constrained sector, the demographic changes will be making life more difficult.
Shorter week this week with the August bank holiday in England.
I went to the office a few times this week. I have written a fair few times about how I quite like going to the office to work. The change in routine and location is refreshing, and helps, especially as my current workload is very much focused on reading, writing, and having online calls. August is a quiet time for meetings and events.
I have been looking at which events to attend over the next few months, the WonkHE Festival of Higher Education is on that list, as is their Secret Life of Students taking place in early 2025. I am speaking at the Education Summit in October in London. I am looking at an overseas conference as well, torn between OEB in Berlin, or ASCILITE in Melbourne. They are close together, but don’t clash.
Wrote an update for the Jisc board on the work I have been doing. As part of this work I also reviewed content for a holding web page.
Had to use Excel, not my favourite activity, I was doing some research into higher education expenditure and was playing with some data. Excel is one of those applications I use infrequently, so I don’t always remember how to do stuff.
Read the OfS report on the closure of Schumacher College. In their overview the OfS said:
The higher education sector is facing significant financial challenges and institutions are facing difficult decisions. Universities and colleges are responsible for running their businesses and it’s vital that each provider has effective systems in place to identify and manage these risks to ensure students’ interests and rights are protected.
Closures of higher education providers due to financial pressures have been predicted for a long time – Schumacher may have existed outside of the traditional university sector, and was also experiencing wider and more sustained difficulties, but it is unlikely to be the only specialist provider that is struggling to make ends meet as we move towards the 2024-25 academic year.
So is this the first of many? There is a question of whether one of the (larger) more traditional providers will fail? There has been for many years rumours that there are three large universities on the brink of bankruptcy. No one actually names the three but reading across the education press there are numerous stories of financial problems, staff cuts, and closures. Would a large university be allowed to fail? I suspect more likely would be a forced merger with another institution to protect the students and allow them to finish their programmes of study. Regardless, the sector is facing huge financial pressures and this has implications for the way they are organised and operate.
This paper discusses the proposition that the issue with higher education is not so much a lack of proper funding, but that the current operating model isn’t fit for purpose.
Higher education’s onrushing insolvency is not, as many would wish, merely a fixable fault in our funding model, caused by government backsliding on the tuition fee. Instead, we have a system-design problem, in which funding problems are simply a characteristic, not a cause. What other sector would allow itself to stall in an era of surging demand, as our addressable market expands from young people to all adults? The fault lies in our business models and our operating assumptions, as a sector and as providers. We must rethink the types of people we serve, and how we can meet their needs for education and skills in ways that meet the test of private and public goods. Our fascination with the ‘world-class university’ model has had negative systemic effects, draining resources from the wider sector. And we must question our default setting, our cherished high-quality, high-touch and high-cost model. These attributes are not inviolable aspects of our offer. Each places huge demands on students and providers. Can our system really be fit for purpose, if it is unworkable for large minorities of students and providers, and unaffordable for the state?
I am reminded of the recent post I wrote about hindsight in which I looked at the challenges and change that Intel and Kodak faced, and some would say failed to adapt to.
There are lots of examples of how organisations and companies did not respond to changes and trends. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, as you can ask, why didn’t they change, they could see the challenge, they could have changed, they could have adapted. The problem often is that though internally the organisation may know it needs to change, the current situation means they are unable to change.
Higher Education knows that they are facing challenges, and that they need to change. They know this. However a deeper question is not the one that Higher Education needs to be told they need to change, they know that, but they are actually unable to change and so the question is how do we change a sector, that knows it needs to change, but actually can’t make that change.
Over the last couple of months I have been struggling to get these weeknotes up in a timely manner. I usually try and post them on the Friday of that week, but if not, get them finished over the weekend. However over the last few months I have been missing my own deadlines and have been posting them weeks late… I think I need to review the process by which I bring them together and what they are for, and what I need them for. I think that’s a blog post in itself.
Wonkhe in their weekly briefing were very positive about the recent A Level results.
Young people are turning away from university study in their droves. It is too expensive, too “woke”, too “marketised”, too traditional: too expected. There are other attractive options – apprenticeships, travel, specific work-related qualifications. University just isn’t as important any more. A degree is a financial millstone, not a career or lifetime benefit.
That’s the story we’ve been hearing all year from commentators who may (perish the thought) be incorporating their own ideological wish-fulfilment into their analysis. Any or all of the reasons may turn out to be correct for some groups of students, but the central contention is wrong. Overall there are more UK-domiciled 18 year old applicants with a confirmed university place one day after results day in 2024 than at any point in history.
Yes, you read that correctly.
…for now – take a rare vote of confidence: UK 18 year olds want to go to university, in record numbers.
Cash-strapped universities could fold within three years due to a “perfect storm” of plummeting international student numbers and being unable to attract undergraduates through A-level clearing, a leading education expert (HEPI) has warned. A funding crisis has left 40 per cent of universities facing budget deficits, a recent report has found, with around 70 undergoing redundancy or restructuring programmes amid growing fears over the higher education sector’s financial stability.
Some of the universities that today’s happy students will be aiming to attend from the autumn are facing huge financial pressures. Adam McCulloch investigates a sector that could well be on the cusp of contraction – with job losses and closed departments ahead.
You kind of hope that some enterprising manager doesn’t decide that the solution to reducing the number of staff is to replace them with some kind of AI.
The HE sector is facing tough financial times ahead. Last week’s A Level results may have been a good news item, but the university sector are facing falling student numbers, both domestic and international. In addition, flat student funding combined with rising costs, means that universities can not sustain their current expenditure and operating model
I had planned to go to the office this week, but they had closed the line from the Portway Park & Ride to Bristol for engineering work. So would have done my usual trip to Bristol catching the train from Worle, but in the end I drove to work and parked in Bristol.
I finally managed to get my Funky Cat back from the dealership after nearly three months having a software update fail. The car had been reset to factory settings, so it took a while to configure it to how I had it before I took it in. There was also a new GWM app for the car as well.
news and views on e-learning, TEL and learning stuff in general…
