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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Scores of current UK students shared with the Guardian how they feel about attending university lectures and tutorials.
About half of the students who got in touch said they were regularly skipping classes, with many saying they were hardly attending at all. A lot of students pointed to financial difficulties forcing them to prioritise paid work over studying, a lack of enthusiasm for the format of lectures, low motivation to get up and go in, and the perception that attending classes was unlikely to improve their grades.
We have to remember that many of these students would not have been at university during the lockdowns in 2020 and 2021. They would have been at school or college. Going forward there will be a continuing stream of new students who experienced remote teaching at school who will be attending university.
Polly Toynbee in the Guardian questioned in an opinion piece on university finances,
…why sixth-formers get so much more teaching time than university students at far lower cost.
The amount of in-person contact time that students have, is so much less than they experienced at college and school, that you have to ask, with less hours to attend than their previous educational experiences, they might value it more. It would appear that they value it less.
The financial imperative for work by students was also illustrated at the Wonkhe event, The Secret Life of Students.
The latest and most powerful insights on the student condition from Wonkhe and Cibyl’s Belong student survey platform and from across the HE sector.
I did a sketch note on that session.
There was a lot of things in there, about sleep, travel time, working, and time travelling to work.
A student also presented at that event and talked about how the need for work, would often trump attendance at lectures and classes. The student also questioned the value of attendance of in-person sessions which could be accessed through recordings later, or what needed to be learnt was learnt more effectively through resources and books.
Lecture attendance is now so low that some academics have started to openly question the future of the teaching method.
So what should universities do in light of this insight? What is the future of university teaching and how does it need to change? Also how does the university manage student expectations so that they stop seeing in-person teaching as a choice, and isn’t the optional extra of a university education.
Finally, and something I have been reflecting on this, what is the role of digital and technology in all this?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
news and views on e-learning, TEL and learning stuff in general…
