Is another future for English higher education possible?

This is a version of the talk I gave at the Universities UK conference at Nottingham Trent on 9 September, on the panel “What should the higher education system look like in the years ahead?” 

(I should apologise to readers outside England: most of what follows is about the English system, partly because it is the one I know best, and partly because its gravitational pull on the other nations is so great.)

I did consider calling it "Is any future possible?", but even I thought that too pessimistic.

In the 1990s it was clear there were three fundamental problems in English higher education – funding, access and teaching quality – and they were grinding against each other. More students meant less funding per student. Less funding per student meant lower quality. But everyone agreed there had to be more HE students. 

Thus, everyone agreed on the diagnosis, everyone wanted a solution - and the Dearing Commission was set up to find one. 

The system that was supposed to run from Dearing was elegant on paper. 

Undergraduate students would generate fee income. Fee income would be invested in teaching. Teaching quality would rise, and more undergraduates would choose the institution as a result. A reinforcing loop. 

Alongside it ran a second loop: fee income would fund widening participation activity, which would raise aspiration, which would bring more undergraduates in. 

More quality, more students … but what about the money? This too would exist on its own loop: Government would borrow the money, and it would be paid back out of the increased economic performance that an expanded higher education system would generate. 

In general, the whole thing was supposed to roll along in a relatively stable way, with the government stepping back, facilitating the money, and having to only manage the money tap, via the Treasury's control over the level of fee which could be charged.

Everyone looks after themselves, and the system looks after itself (a form of system design found nowhere else, apart from pre-2008 financial regulation…).

What actually happened

More undergraduates did lead to more fee income. Did it lead to investment in teaching quality? We don't really know. Teaching quality continued to be unmeasured in the ways that would be familiar in any other educational system – pedagogy, curriculum, assessment. 

And it is not clear that even if quality had improved, more undergraduates would have followed, because all the evidence suggests that isn't why students choose the institutions they choose.

Widening participation activity got funded while there was extra money. When the extra money went, so did it. It isn't clear that it raised aspiration, or that aspiration was the thing we needed to raise, or that any of it drove undergraduates into the system, as opposed to a more general increase in the determination of working class families that their children should receive a university education.

The loop that did work was fee income spent on marketing and recruitment, which bought more undergraduates. That is not a criticism. It is a perfectly logical outgrowth of the way the system was designed.

What also worked was the increase in government debt. 

But the link to economic performance, and therefore to graduate wages, was weak, and graduate repayments did not come in at the speed anyone wanted. In truth they were never going to: the fee cap calculations runs on a spending-review cycle, while graduate wages and repayments run on a thirty-year cycle. 

The gap between what the system was supposed to do and what it actually did was enormous.

So, to solve the problem of not getting what it wanted, government leaned more and more heavily on regulation: TEF, B3, Access and Participation Plans. (Declaration of interest: I ran at least one of those.) I think there was definitely an impact of such regulation – whether that impact drove the outcomes we wanted is much harder to say.

The result is an incoherent system. (If you want to know more about incoherent systems and why they are a problem, Blood, Debt, Toil and Arrears sets it out at length.)

Parameters, structures, constitution

Here is what I draw from it. 

In a coherent system, control factors are badly or barely governed, with the result that they do not pull together. But worse than that, the collisions between those levers are not governed at all. No one superintends the system, so the space between different activities, the generative mechanisms that produce the outcomes we actually get, is nobody's responsibility. 

So if we think about the system’s different layers, we see that we often only ever work on one of them.

We are obsessed with the layer of parameters – fees, caps, thresholds, rates – endlessly adjusted. Everyone looks after themselves; the system is supposed to look after itself, right? 

Structures exist to manage the parameters. They get reorganised about once a decade.

What we never get down to is the constitutional level: the rules about rules. Who holds which factor? Who weighs the goods those factors produce? Who handles the unexpected consequences? 

Essentially: who sets the parameters and the structures, by what right, and through what process?

We have spent forty years on the first layer. 

We occasionally reach the second. 

We never get to the third.

My contention is that now, we have to. 

We need a proper constitution for the system, built through … well, I wrote "review" in my original paper, but I don't mean a review. I mean a convention in which the different parts of the system, properly represented, build the rules about the rules together, so that those rules are owned and obeyed by everyone rather than manufactured in the seemingly random way they are now.

What would go in it

The point of a convention is that people generate the consensus themselves. One reason the system has been so unstable is that so much has been imposed – arbitrarily, or from outside people's legitimate roles. Building the consensus is part of the purpose. 

But since you ask what I would put in...

First, formalise the distinct missions of institutions, on a spectrum rather than a binary. We are not going back to polytechnic versus university (and that isn't possible anyway), but some institutions are simply doing different things from others. That is the diversity of the system we often boast about. And it cannot be entirely the decision of individual institutions what their mission should be: choices about mission affect everyone else, and a system that owns and understands that needs to reflect it.

Second, eliminate unfettered student choice as the mechanism for distributing funding. The aggregated decisions of seventeen-year-olds have not generated a system in their interest, in institutions' interest, or in the government's interest. The logical corollary to this is some form of student number control.

Third, establish mechanisms for moving control of institutions, in an orderly way, into the hands of those better placed to run them. We know that several institutions are in financial crisis - that may or may not be the fault of the people running them, because in many cases the way the system was run has produced poor outcomes for institutions that were run well as much as those run poorly. But at present we have no way of intervening in an institution in an orderly way, and so we will see either catastrophic closure or late-stage, unmanaged merger.

Fourth, codify academic freedom. Be clear what licence it buys institutions and what it doesn't; what licence it buys academics and what it doesn't; and what rights government has, or does not have, to intervene, directly or through its agencies.

All of that will require sacrifices from everyone in the sector, in one way or another. It is also the essential prerequisite for getting sacrifices from the other stakeholders whose consent a properly enduring constitution needs.

Three questions

So, to return to where I started: is another future possible?

Well, one is coming, whether you want it or not: the current system cannot survive. It is already dying as we speak. 

Which, I think, leaves three questions for everyone who works in it.

Do you want this done with you, or to you?

Do you want it to happen before, or after, the first disorderly exit?

And most importantly: are you prepared to lose individually, in order to win collectively?