It seems hard to remember now, but when Labour came into power in July 2024, there was a distinct mood of optimism in the air – at least in many policy circles.

On taking office, the policy objectives of the new government for higher education remained high-level. There was mood music on regional coordination between further and higher education, endorsement of the principles of quality and access, and a genuine understanding that the financial challenges facing the sector would need to be addressed in some way or another.

A key pledge to the sector was that higher education would no longer be treated as a political football but instead as a partner in delivering the government’s missions on opportunity and economic growth. Though few underestimated the scale of the fiscal and economic challenge facing Labour, the general belief was that this was a government that would welcome a grown-up conversation about how the government and the higher education sector could work together for the greater good.

But something important has failed to gel between higher education and government. This is a wider problem for all those connected to the post-18 education system, which could have serious ramifications for the quality of policymaking for the rest of this parliament and beyond.

The decision to allow undergraduate tuition fees to rise by inflation, with a door left open for future increases, has shown that the policymaking hasn’t all been one-way traffic. But the list of expectations that could be termed the quo for Labour’s quid is starting to get longer – a new accountability mechanism for vice-chancellor pay tied to graduate outcomes; a levy on international student recruitment; the promise of new powers for the Office for Students to protect public money driven by evidence of fraud in the franchising system. A fuller policy agenda is expected later this summer as part of the post-16 white paper incorporating a plan for HE reform.

The tone the government seems to be planning to take has been signalled by Minister for Skills Jacqui Smith writing in The Telegraph in early May that higher education has forgotten its core purpose to serve society, adding that universities “seem to have lost sight of their responsibility to protect public money.”

While it’s reasonable for government to approach all public spending with a close degree of scrutiny, this is an unusually punchy statement from a minister. The scepticism seems, however, not to be about the inherent value of a highly educated workforce and citizenry, but about whether institutions can deliver against a tightly defined mission and set of national priorities, as the responsible stewards of public money that the government expects them to be. It’s been a long time since we could assume that the government saw higher education growth as an automatic social good – accountability for the delivery of education beyond 18 in the context of the stated national priorities is now the underlying driving force, and if not careful, institutions are going to find themselves pivoting around this axis in an uncontrolled way.

It’s easy to criticise ministers for a failure to appreciate all the complexity of the work that goes on inside the education system, but a review of the charge sheet throws up some real and significant challenges that need to be tackled. Access and opportunity are stalling, the graduate premium is highly variable across subjects and regions, signalling a real challenge in the deployment of graduate-level skills to drive productivity, and there is a structural problem in deploying international recruitment as a panacea for financial pressure on teaching and research budgets.

Not only that, there is actual fraud in the franchise system, not to mention some very legitimate questions about quality. And we’re pretty confident that there isn’t enough diversity of provision to meet the needs of the future economy and achieve regional growth, fuelled by a deeply conservative cultural hierarchy of providers that pushes against the development of a healthy and diverse ecosystem of post-18 provision.

While the sector might have a case to answer on these charges, it is far from being solely responsible for these issues, and it certainly can’t solve any of them alone. Nor can all of these issues be solved from Whitehall. Neither of these statements should be controversial.

The way the sector has been imagined as a regulated quasi-market in the last decade-odd of higher education policy has not enabled the sort of innovation and transformation higher education institutions are now expected to pursue. There remains no consensus about what an alternative paradigm might be, but for it to work, it will need to arise from a constructive accommodation between providers and government, rather than solely from one or the other.

Education and research, the human capital and innovation that higher education produces, are among the very few drivers that the government has to achieve its growth ambitions. And the vast majority of people who work and study in the post-18 system are doing so because they care enormously about the various ways that knowledge can be deployed in the service of society. The claim that somehow they must all have collectively lost their grip on their sense of social responsibility is a misreading of their values, motivations and intentions.

The national conversation doesn’t have to look like this. A country and a government at ease with itself should depend on a thriving, diverse post-18 sector that is simultaneously woven into the fabric of regional economies and civic life, and a global powerhouse of ideas and impact. Different sorts of institutions and providers should not be pitted against each other: great education, research and societal impact can happen in the smallest FE college and the most famous university. A post-18 sector that has a functional relationship with government should be a trusted interlocutor on policy challenges and the experiences and concerns of citizens and communities.

Government and the post-18 sector should share the pursuit of the common good, and each should be prepared to show the leadership, creativity and political acumen to make that abstract concept real in people’s everyday life.

We have more than ten years’ experience of building Wonkhe from a blogging site for HE policy nerds into the higher education sector’s primary source of analysis, intelligence and debate about higher education in all its facets. And we’ve no intention of stopping bringing the daily insight and up-to-the-minute analysis you expect from it. But we also think there is room for a different kind of policy insight, more thoughtful and reflective, and designed explicitly for influencing and shaping policy in this parliament rather than just commenting on it in real time. If there is no longer a need for the project after the end of this parliament, then perhaps we’ll wind it down – but we’re here because we believe that it’s needed now.

We’ve created The Post-18 Project to offer a space to policymakers and those working in post-18 education to develop ideas for how the government can work together with the post-18 sector to achieve its mission to build a better country: giving people educational opportunities they have reason to value, tackling inequitable patterns of economic growth; restoring confidence in public services and ultimately in the institutions of government and civil society.

The post-18 sector is not short of ideas and expertise, but it can struggle to turn those insights into concrete policy recommendations that can command widespread support. We want to mobilise the right combination of evidence and innovative thinking – or find where the gaps are – to tackle the policy questions that are too intransigent and wide-ranging for any single mission group or representative body in post-18 education to answer. With that in mind, we have also decided to be institutionally agnostic, and will not seek to promote one sort of provider over another. We approach the system as it is in front of us, and what we believe the future should look like; rather than looking back to the past.

We have intentionally convened a powerhouse advisory board from across the full breadth of types of post-18 providers, industry and policy. We’ll be relying on them to help keep us accountable for how we develop a policy space that draws on the enormous range of experience and knowledge that the sector has to offer, while staying true to the principle that to work constructively with this government and align around its priorities, there will need to be some real change.

The government has been clear that its core missions are economic growth and opportunity, but has not yet configured higher education’s role in either of these.

On growth, we know that a key policy instrument to drive that growth will be industrial strategy. Post-18 providers will need to rise to the challenge of evidencing that they are guided to some degree by broader national and regional economic growth plans, whether in developing education provision that aligns with the changing labour market and skills needs, by intensifying innovation and knowledge exchange activity in core areas of alignment to industrial strategy, or by housing expertise on their regional economies and labour markets to inform growth agendas.

While any post-18 provider could point to activity in at least one of these areas, it’s clear that there is an expectation that this should be much more coordinated and strategic, and more accountable to regional stakeholders and the public.

On educational opportunity, we can see a route ahead both in terms of reimagining the “traditional” student experience to offer something a great deal more flexible and inclusive, but also to incorporate a greater diversity of pathways into and through post-18 education. Post-18 opportunities need to directly meet the needs of prospective students for options that mesh with their lives and aspirations, and that continue to equip individuals with the knowledge and skills they need to thrive not only immediately post-graduation, but throughout their careers. Successive attempts to set up “alternatives” to the traditional full-time degree higher education route in the form of higher technical qualifications at levels 4 & 5 and degree apprenticeships have not yet been sufficiently scalable to answer the policy question of how to expand higher education opportunity without simply replicating the culturally dominant model.

In the weeks and months ahead, we’re intending to publish new evidence and insight, incorporating solid recommendations for government and providers, all aimed at fostering a more constructive national policy conversation. Our three core themes are:

Higher education for the common good – exploring what a policy framework looks like that can maximise the public value of post-18 provision to the UK

The post-18 experience – what prospective and current students need from their education experiences and how to achieve scalable diversity of provision and pathways

Universities and colleges in a changing world – the global dimension of post-18 education and how it interacts with the UK’s position and influence in the world

Within these themes, we’ll be tackling questions like:

How can post-18 providers do more to drive economic growth through skills, R&D and innovation? 

What would a radical new vision for the full-time student experience include? 

What does post-18 education really cost, and why? 

How can the franchising system be brought back into line? 

What does the next generation of students want the post-18 options landscape to look like? 

What does the country and government need from post-18 institutional leaders? 

How does post-18 education enable public sector reform? 

Do we need another HERA? 

If the era of globalisation is over, how do global post-18 providers reconfigure their ambitions?

We hope through this work to contribute to building a new kind of policy agenda – one that is neither entirely top-down from the state, nor left to the vagaries of “market choice” but one grounded in a shared mission of public service, that builds in mechanisms for co-design and co-delivery from the outset, and in doing so establishes a new civic compact between the state, post-18 education providers, and the public.

We’ll build on many of these themes at The Festival of Higher Education this November (early bird tickets already on sale), and use the festival as a huge, live opportunity for engagement and input from the incredible community of experts in and around the sector who we believe can help provide many of the answers to these challenges facing us all.

We hope you’ll join us on the journey as The Post-18 Project takes flight.