ISRF has formed a research group called “Reconstructing British Universities”: I discussed its context and approach in my December Note. I’m very happy to share that we are launching a series of dispatches from the front lines of the UK higher education crisis. 

Featured in this month’s Dispatches are reflections from two members of our group. Glen O’Hara gives an overview of the problem of the absence of academics from the discussion of their own sector. Lorna Finlayson discusses the ways in which academics weaken their own forms of resistance to harmful interventions.

Over time, the Dispatches are heading towards the development of an alternative funding model for British universities. Whatever the particular topic, each individual essay emerges from a faculty member’s personal experience within their destabilised sector, while guided by their professional expertise.  Each comes from the frontline experience of an academic who has devoted their adult life to universities. It may seem obvious that academics would already be powerful voices in analysing and steering academia. But in Britain they are not.

The series starts in a time when British higher ed policy is adrift. Much of the policy volume comes from private consultancy firms with near-zero interest in educational effects. Our premise is that building a discourse, informed by the direct knowledge of academic staff, will move the higher education debate in a more realistic direction, one that will also expand universities’ intellectual and public benefits.

As you will see in the Dispatches, British universities are often sites of programme instability, autocracy, overwork (of staff, but also of students on side-jobs to cover food and rent), imperilled quality, yet also never-say-die staff efforts to hold the operation together while continuing to teach and research as well as humanly possible. Our authors write in the spirit of reconstructing education for a rebuilt Britain, even when that spirit doesn’t preside over university reality.  

Although we are hardly alone in our concerns, UK policy analysts have a hard time including academics and their expertise in their analyses of the present and future of universities. This exclusion has affected two of the most serious recent papers on the sector, both of which appeared just last month.

One is a report in the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) Debate series. Written by Tom Richmond, its subtitle calls for “building a more financially sustainable and resilient higher education sector,” which certainly everyone wants. It indicates its method: “A degree of regulation.” Most of the paper’s eight suggestions are good, if we assume the current system is to remain in place. All of them propose change through compulsory rules made at a great distance from the teaching and research that are universities’ core functions.

Richmond’s general view is that universities have destabilised themselves by growing too fast and borrowing too much. All his fiscal measures are caps and restrictions—on debt levels, enrolment growth, international students, and franchising agreements (third party runs courses taught by people with unknown qualifications using the university’s brand). All his student measures restrict student growth and over enrolment: admit no more students than you can actually teach, publish data to show what capacity actually is (given your standards), and house every student you admit near the actual university. (A fourth student measure, fixing certification curves across the sector by setting bell-curve quotas for Firsts and the other types of degree, would violate the academic freedom of both instructors and students and damage learning.)

It would be great if British universities stopped staying solvent through sheer overcrowding. They lose money on research and lose money on home students at traditional class sizes. They aren’t fixing these problems (rooted in public funding policy), so they cram in home students and (profitable) international students to help subsidise research losses, with the result of a net loss of £2.4 billion for the sector in 2023-24 (Figure 2).

Structural funding shortfalls have encouraged more selective universities (“high-tariff”) to steal students from the less selective for the sake of their fees. Market competition has come to mean not higher quality or differentiation but beggar-thy-neighbour. Student debt has ballooned even as learning conditions degrade. Weakening much of the sector to sustain the rest of it lowers the wider public benefits of higher education. Richmond is certainly right to lament this system and to try to rein it in.

However, he ignores the underlying system. None of his measures would fix the funding gaps that drive the shrinkage. None address the concerns about academic quality that shrinkage puts at risk.

The great strength of the other April paper is that it admits that the system is broken. Writing for WonkHE’s Post-18 Project, this is the premise of the University of Salford Vice-Chancellor John Blake’s report, “Blood, debt, toil, and arrears: why thirty years of policy struggle has left us without the higher education system we deserve.” It’s a huge relief to see someone inside the system plainly state three fundamental design flaws:

1. Student choice could never and will never work as an “accountability system.” (In fact, it’s a commercial marketing system.)

2. Funding is structurally inadequate. “Thirty years after [the] Dearing [Report, 1997], this funding system has left us exactly where we started” –at about £10,000 per domestic student in current pounds. “Too little attention has been given to this: the very reason for Dearing and building a new fee-based system has failed” (20).

3. The system is “significantly less well governed that when we started.”

These are essential starting points, and Blake is the rare senior official to confront them.

Unfortunately, he then strains these foundational problems through a grid of “fourteen control factors” as defined by a 2010 report on the English school system. The result is a familiar regulatory soup and paired call for a government report.

I certainly take the point that a system is comprised of many factors that can only be grasped in their interrelations. But these 14 are not equally important, and they mainly serve as platforms for more of the same kind of government regulation (metric, reports, rules) that created the system that Blake defines as intrinsically flawed. Having described British higher education policy as a “cycle of planned failure,” in which each government publishes a (faulty) White Paper that leads to (skewed) legislation that creates (new) problems that leads to (another) new review, Blake calls for another new review. 

Blake insists that this review is to be “comprehensive” and lead to a “governance concordat” between government and universities sometime in the future (6). But he does not extract from his own diagnosis the principles that would lift it out of the failure cycle. 

On problem (1), instead of putting academic life back in the hands of academics and their expertise, he calls for more external oversight, including a schools-like review of curriculum content (45). Blake values the rule of professional expertise in research (via the Haldane principle and its 2017 codification in law) (42). Why not put equal value on the rule of academic expertise for teaching, curricular design, and academic governance?

On problem (2), rather than calling for restoration of the central government teaching grant (since nothing else will stabilise the system), Blake proposes a report on real-terms per-student funding (useful) and a committed trajectory for fee increases (student debt goes unmentioned). Having rightly noted that Britain never stopped failing the funding challenge once the Dearing Report (1997) shifted demand management and funding duties onto students, he says the new review should not focus on funding. 

On problem (3), rather than suggesting that academic governance be improved by the (re)inclusion of academics, he calls for two government reports and compliance with the Committee of University Chairs Higher Education Code of Governance, without saying why. A focus on sector governance sidesteps the fact that stress, grievance, demoralisation, even “psychosocial risk” are now established features of academic life under corporate restructuring. This reduces universities’ performance and public benefits as well as human welfare on the job. Welfare has been getting worse in large part because universities are “less well governed” than in the 1990s when, not coincidentally, academic staff had more control over academics.

These new papers by Richmond and Blake do enhance the public discussion. Both would have offered real openings had they put academics, frontline staff, and students into the picture. This is what we hope to do with our Dispatches series-- to help provide anyone interested in the condition and future of British universities with some missing perspectives and insights.