News round-up: Some universities are at risk of collapsing, and Justine Greening calls for the return of student grants

The big news this week is that there’s a real danger that falling student numbers may see some English universities forced to close down. Elsewhere there’s concern about pensions, student finance and bullying

Fears of university closures after removal of safety net  

The Guardian, 30/01/2018, Anna Fazackerley

Some English universities may be in danger of collapse, experts warn, as numbers of young students enrolling at several institutions have dropped alarmingly in the new competitive education market.

Figures released by Ucas, the universities admissions service, last week reveal that the number of 18-year-olds enrolling at London Metropolitan University, the University of Cumbria, Kingston University and the University of Wolverhampton have shrunk every year, with major losses over the past five years. However, with more universities in a potentially dangerous position than ever before, fear is growing that there is no government body with a clear responsibility to predict or prevent a university failure.

Professor Colin Riordan, the vice-chancellor of Cardiff University, a member of the elite Russell Group, told Education Guardian: “To my knowledge we haven’t been in a position in living memory where it seems likely that established universities could find themselves in an unsustainable position and having no option but to close.”

Poorest children risk being ‘set up to fail’ by university diversity drive, Russell Group leader warns

Daily Telegraph, 30/01/2018, Camilla Turner

The poorest children risk being “set up to fail” by the university diversity drive, the chief executive of the Russell Group has warned.

Dr Tim Bradshaw said that if top universities lowered entry requirements for disadvantaged children “too far”, it could lead to an increase in students struggling to keep up with their peers, and ultimately dropping out of courses. He said that all members of the Russell Group, which represents the UK’s 24 leading universities, use contextual data about a prospective student’s socio-economic background, as part of a bid to boost diversity.

“We try very hard to find students from all backgrounds and match them in terms of their ability to the course so that they get the right support to actually finish the course,” Dr Bradshaw said. “The difficulty would be if you went too far, I think you would find you would struggle to maintain the level of engagement of students throughout.”

University staff to go ahead with strike over pensions

FT Adviser, 30/01/2018, Maria Espadinha

The Universities and College Union (UCU) has announced 14 days of strikes across 61 universities following a pensions dispute. The strikes will begin on Thursday 22 February, and will run over a four-week period that will begin with a five-day walkout either side of a weekend, the trade union said. The last day of planned strike is Friday 16 March.

2VCs on … what does 2018 look like for universities?

The Guardian, 31/01/2018, Anna Fazackerley

What are vice-chancellors expecting from 2018? As part of a discussion series with university vice-chancellors, Anton Muscatelli, vice-chancellor of Glasgow University, and Professor Debra Humphris, vice-chancellor of Brighton University, discuss the new Office for Students, Brexit, and changes to student finance.

Justine Greening calls for return of student grants

BBC News online, 29/01/2018, Sean Coughlan

Former education secretary Justine Greening says maintenance grants for poorer students in England should be reinstated, after being scrapped by the government last year. Ms Greening, removed in the cabinet reshuffle, also raised concerns about the level of interest on student debts. She said that any student finance system needed to be “progressive”.

Prime Minister Theresa May has announced a major review of tuition fees and university funding.

But Ms Greening, speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, said she was against the idea of different levels of fees for different courses, because it could push poorer students into cheaper, less prestigious degrees. Her successor as education secretary, Damian Hinds, is expected to launch a review of student finance in England.

UNI FEE ‘DITHER’: Sacked Education Secretary Justine Greening accuses Government of dithering on tuition fees

The Sun, 30/01/2018, Lynn Davidson

Justine Greening attacked the government for “kicking things into the long grass”.

Students’ low scores ignored by universities

Daily Telegraph, 26/01/2018, Camilla Turner

Universities are ignoring students’ lowest module scores, a report has found, as it warns that the practice could lead to grade inflation. Dozens of institutions use the discounting mechanism to leave out the courses in which undergraduates got the poorest results when calculating a student’s final degree classification, according to a survey of universities.

A report was conducted by Universities UK, the vice-chancellor membership body, and Guild HE, a group for leaders of higher education institutions. It found that there is widespread variation in how universities calculate the degree classifications, including how much weight is given to modules in different years of study – known as the degree algorithm.

We need a bigger conversation about bullying in academia

The Guardian, 26/01/2018, Anonymous

The Academics Anonymous blog discusses bullying in higher education and the need to develop a policy for dealing with bullying more systematically.

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Britain has one of the best higher education systems in the world. So what did Jo Johnson do to cheerlead us?

Professor Jo Wolff goes hunting for positive remarks from Jo Johnson about universities – and offers some advice to successor Sam Gyimah

‘Farewell unis and science’, tweeted Jo Johnson, channelling Private Eye’s E.J. Thribb. Academics were astonished by such an honest statement of government policy. Relief flooded in when it was realised that it was Johnson’s way of saying he had been moved on from his position in higher education to transport. The line continued ‘our greatest national asset & best thing about this country’.

What a shame he hadn’t done more to emphasise his admiration for the sector before. His successor Sam Gyimah has inherited what should be cushiest job in government. True, there are problems, most notably around student finance, but there is universal agreement that UK higher education is second only to the US. We have two of the world’s leading ‘brands’ in Oxford and Cambridge, rivalling Coca Cola. London is among the most powerful cities in the world for higher education, attracting international staff and students to an extent that outstrips all its major rivals. World-class research runs right through the system, to be found everywhere. And what did Jo Johnson do to cheerlead for us?

Well, excepting his final tweet, you have to look pretty hard. In early January, Dorothy Bishop, Oxford professor of developmental neuropsychology, noted that Johnson was surprisingly unsupportive of universities, dishing out much more criticism than praise. To test the hypothesis as scientifically as possible, consistent with spending no more than five minutes on the task, I googled ‘Jo Johnson universities’. Of course, there would be different results today, but at the time, it was pretty dismal.

There was a lot about the need to protect free speech on campus, alleged to be under attack. There were dark mutterings about university libraries supposedly censoring their collections. Then there was support for deeply troubled Toby Young. More subtly, there was an attack on those criticising the high pay of vice-chancellors, but suggesting that the system of remuneration as a whole needed attention, not just a few individual scapegoats (almost all of whom have been women, incidentally). Deep on page six of the search, some positives: a defence of the student fee regime, and praise for a private provider that had won a research grant.

Tough love?

It leaves a disappointing impression from a government that, one presumes, wishes to celebrate success. Perhaps it was intended as tough love, challenging us not to be complacent. But it looks more like the idea that the universities have got too big for their boots, and need to be taken down a peg or two. I completely accept we do have serious vulnerabilities. Among the things I worry about is the lack of progress in making all universities diverse, welcoming, inclusive places, equally respectful of all. I worry about job insecurity and casual contracts, and unequal pay and progression. And I worry about closing of borders, the long-term effect it could have on the recruitment of the best staff and students, and more, generally to energy levels in UK economy and society. I’d be very pleased to focus on any of this, but unfortunately attention is being diverted elsewhere.

So, farewell then, Jo Johnson, and perhaps you will get what you seek at the Department of Transport. And welcome Sam Gyimah. We hope you realise what a privilege it is to oversee higher education in the UK, and that you avoid two easily made mistakes. One is to assume that nothing has changed in higher education since you picked up your degree certificate. And the other is to suppose that what the sector really needs right now is a few sharp ministerial pronouncements.

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No, academics are not obsessed with research – we care deeply about our students

Mary Curnock Cook, the former chief executive of UCAS, delivered an annual lecture to the CDBU on January 23. Professor Dorothy Bishop, who was there, responds to accusations that academics prioritise research over teaching

Ms Curnock Cook is a brave woman: she noted at the outset that CDBU was opposed to managerialism and consumerism, so as a businesswoman she was knowingly strolling into a den of growling carnivores. She was able to subdue the fiercest beasts by stressing her own transformational experience of higher education, the importance of equipping students with what she termed ‘cognitive agility’, and the contrast between the nature of educational experience in school and university. For those of us who are worrying that the quality of education is starting to be equated with the quantity of ‘contact hours’, this was reassuring common ground.

But – and you know a ‘but’ is coming. At times, Ms Curnock Cook appeared to be channelling Jo Johnson: someone who always made me wonder if he really was sincere – in which case his understanding of his brief was wildly distorted – or whether he was deliberately demonising the sector for which he was responsible – in which case one could only assume serious Machiavellian tendencies. Ms Curnock Cook did not seem Machiavellian, and so we have to conclude that she has bought into the Johnson view of higher education.

The tension between the speaker and her audience was palpable from the outset, when she explained that she had reason to be apprehensive about addressing CDBU because she was a ‘defender of the student interest’. This theme continued throughout the lecture: at numerous points she treated it as given that the interests of academics conflicted with those of students. She described her own experience at business school where a lecturer recycled the same old slides across two courses – implying that laziness was commonplace. And why was teaching neglected? Because academics were just interested in research!

Academic work is a vocation

This bears no relation to my experience of how academics view students. I’m an unusual case: a full-time researcher who is not required to teach at all, but I do a few hours of (unpaid!) teaching each year because I love my subject and I want to inspire fresh young minds with the same passion. Nothing quite beats the thrill of seeing a student move from incomprehension or lack of interest to intellectual excitement. I don’t want to exaggerate: one can get stale if required to repeat the same material over and over, or if the students are not interested in studying. And ancillary activities, such as admissions or marking, can be stressful and time-consuming. But in general, most of my colleagues treat academia as a vocation and regard the young as the future.

The idea that we’re all neglecting students because we’re obsessed with research misses the role of incentives. The Research Excellence Framework has had a pernicious influence by linking research outputs to financial reward for institutions, so that academics may put their career at risk if they prioritise teaching over research. I’m well-known for being a strong critic of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF): there are several reasons for this, one of which is that it is neither valid or reliable as a measure of teaching excellence. But the other is that you have a whole group of people who’ve been evaluated largely on the basis of their research activities, who are now told to jump through a new set of hoops to demonstrate their teaching excellence – while presumably maintaining a world-class research profile. It is vice-chancellors, with an eye to the money, who determine these priorities – not the jobbing academic.

So overall, I was disappointed that Ms Curnock Cook reinforced the idea that universities are places of privilege where the staff want to sit idly around thinking great thoughts, taking no heed of student needs, and that without firm regulation from an Office for Students, we’ll just continue in this dissolute fashion. For a group of people who already have the interests of higher education at heart, this is hard to swallow.

 

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News round-up: a drop in student applications and a possible cut to tuition fees

It’s been a busy week in higher education. We’ve rounded up some of the most interesting stories, from a possible cut to tuition fees to the revelation that a diploma mill in Pakistan has been selling degrees to British nationals

Universities expect sharp drop in student applications

i, 16/01/2018, Richard Vaughan

University leaders are braced for a drop in the number of applicants as the higher education sector continues to be buffeted by shifting demographics and the impact of the Brexit vote. Students had until 6pm on Sunday to submit their UCAS application forms to secure a place at university in time for the start of the 2018/19 academic year. But institutions were concerned as early indications suggested submissions ahead of the deadline were down on last year, with some estimations showing that student recruitment was down by as much as 5%.

According to sources, the fall in applications is down to a range of factors, including a decrease in the number of 18-year-olds in the UK. Experts have also highlighted that the Brexit decision in 2016 continues to be felt by universities. The number of EU students applying to study in the UK continues to fall despite the government committing to fund places starting in September for the duration of the degree. Changes to funding for courses such as nursing have also had an impact on certain institutions.

Tuition fees cut is back on the table

The Times, 15/01/2018, p.10, Rosemary Bennett

The £9,250 cap on university tuition fees will be reviewed and could be lowered after Justine Greening resigned as education secretary. With Jo Johnson, the former universities minister, Ms Greening had argued that the system was sound in principle but the 6.1% interest rate on loans should be reduced and maintenance grants for poorer students restored immediately rather than after a lengthy review.

Mrs May’s advisers wanted to go further and use the review to challenge Labour’s appeal to young people, which hurt the Conservatives in the election. Labour says it will scrap tuition fees. Damian Hinds, the education secretary, and Sam Gyimah, the new universities minister, are understood to be more sympathetic to No 10’s ambitions for the level of fees to be reconsidered.

Tories to rethink tuition fees within months

Sunday Times, 14/01/2018, Sian Griffiths and Caroline Wheeler

Stop ‘over-obsessing’ about net migration, UK’s HE sector told

Times Higher Education online, 12/01/2018, Simon Baker

The UK higher education sector needs to stop ‘over-obsessing’ about the ‘ridiculous process argument’ of whether overseas students are included in targets on net migration, a former immigration minister has said.

Mark Harper, a minister in the Home Office from 2012 to 2014, when there was a major crackdown on what was deemed to be ‘abuse’ of the student visa system, said that it ‘served nobody’ if the numbers of people coming to the country to study were not counted.

His comments follow reports in the past few weeks that Theresa May, the prime minister, who was in charge of the Home Office when Mr Harper was immigration minister, has become increasingly isolated over her resistance to removing students from the net migration figures. The government has a longstanding target to cut net migration to the tens of thousands.

‘Staggering’ trade in fake degrees revealed

BBC News online, 16/01/2018, Helen Clifton, Matthew Chapman and Simon Cox

Thousands of UK nationals have bought fake degrees from a multi-million-pound ‘diploma mill’ in Pakistan, a BBC investigation has found.

Buyers include NHS consultants, nurses and a large defence contractor. The Department for Education said it was taking ‘decisive action to crack down on degree fraud’ that ‘cheats genuine learners’.

All the facts you need to answer tricky questions about higher education

The Guardian online, Higher Education Network, 17/01/2018, Fran Abrams

Article addressing a number of questions about higher education by looking at what the available research says. The topics include whether fewer poor students are entering higher education, whether boys outperform girls at university, and whether the graduate earning premium is a myth.

NHS doctors ‘bought fake degrees from Pakistan diploma mill’

The Times, 16/01/2018, Duncan Geddes

Thousands of people caught buying fake degrees online

Metro online, 16/01/2018, Zoe Drewett

International students boost the economy by £20.3bn – we must encourage more of them to study in Britain

Prospect Magazine, 16/01/2018, Nick Hillman

Comment: Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, writes about the impact of international students on the British economy.

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Book review: A university education by David Willetts

Professor GR Evans finds much that is self-justifying and sometimes misleading in a new book by former universities and science minister David Willetts

David Willetts defends himself more than once about the purpose of this book. He dismisses the possibility that it is ‘just a heavily disguised ministerial memoir’ and claims on another page that it ‘is not a politician’s memoir’. Nevertheless, the reader has to disentangle several genres: history, a statement of political faith; an exercise in policy-planning for the future and – undoubtedly – the memoirs of a politician who had a significant role in some of the events he describes.

There is a great paradox at the heart of this book. David Willetts clearly loves universities. Indeed he says so in his very first sentence. But to anyone who has spent a working lifetime as an academic or a university administrator his illustrative snapshots have the look of the ‘politician’s anecdote’ rather than examples reflecting the realities of working and studying in universities. He admits to having faced a few student protests’ while he was ‘minister for universities and science’. The protesters were ‘usually well-intentioned young people’ who ‘just did not accept what I was trying to do or why’.

He has his prejudices and they affect his use of evidence. He makes many statements which make one want to add a footnote demonstrating the error. But he has his reservations about footnotes. ‘The footnote, for example, says that there is evidence which connects to or supports what one says’. However, ‘this scholarly apparatus can descend into pettifogging detail’.

Writing this book seems to have become quite a collaborative venture. Two research assistants, Dean Machin and Kathleen Henahan, are acknowledged for their help and Chris Wickham is named as one of the OUP’s ‘readers’ who acted as the book’s peer-reviewers. Adam Kamenetzky ‘helped research the history of British science policy’ which had been the subject of David Willetts’ inaugural lecture as a Visiting Professor at King’s College, London. For each section of the book there are further extensive acknowledgements of advice received, information provided, contacts, readers and comment.

The first section describes ‘the University’ from its medieval invention about 1200 (if we rate early Bologna as the mere Business School it probably was) to the realisation late in the nineteenth century that it was going to be necessary for the state to put in some funding. That conclusion became inescapable when universities ceased to be ‘teaching-only’ institutions and became ‘research-intensive’. On that topic Willetts writes encouragingly about the intentions of UK Research and Innovation, created under the Higher Education and Research Act 2017 to take over the funding responsibilities both for an infrastructure of laboratories and libraries and for the projects bidding for specific support.

Then comes a set of chapters on ‘the Student’. In this section, Willetts opens with an explanation directly to prospective students why it is ‘worth going to University’, despite the tripling of tuition fees for which he was personally responsible as Universities Minister. On 13 December 2017, giving evidence to the Treasury Select Committee, he ‘pleaded guilty’ to the dramatic drop in part-time students which had resulted and said he regretted it, but the book was heading for the bookshops by then.

The third section of the book covers the ‘useful University’, with chapters on vocational higher education; higher education as a driver of innovation and ‘the University in the Marketplace’. Vocational education is treated very broadly, as a carpet-bag containing everything from the practical skill to the professional qualification. There is a confident but often historically misleading account of the ways in which universities down the centuries have engaged with the teaching subjects of not purely theoretical.

Writing about ‘Innovation’ Willetts casts a similar all-embracing net in an attempt to give an account of what he sees as a stand-off between academic research (done for its own sake) and the industrial and commercial application of discoveries. ‘I introduced a scheme’ ­– the ‘Research Partnership Innovation Fund’ – he writes. The chapter on the ‘marketplace’ discusses and seeks to justify the thinking behind the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, again sketching allegedly unsatisfactory attitudes in universities. For in universities ‘market values are thought to erode academic values by turning students into consumers’.

The book ends with a section on ‘the future’, with chapters on Globalization, ‘Edtech’ and a ‘Broader Education’ in which Willetts can roam freely but comparatively harmlessly among probabilities.

The book has been widely praised as a valuable addition to the literature on universities. That is true enough precisely because it is what it is: a politician’s attempt at justification in the face of the results of his own actions. The introduction is much better argued and more tightly organised than the discursive conclusion, but even here it is as though sometimes a burst of irritation has escaped and not been recaptured. Universities are able ‘to trade on their reputations to get away with inadequate teaching or the worst sort of picky scholasticism’. Those actually engaged in teaching and academic research may want to have a word with him about that.

Details

A University Education

Author: David Willetts

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2017

Price: £25

pp.x + 469.

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Jo Johnson: an end of term report

Professor DVM Bishop bids a not-so-fond farewell to universities minister Jo Johnson.

So Jo Johnson is gone, brought down by poor judgement demonstrated by, first, the appointment of Toby Young to the Board of the Office for Students, and second by his obstinacy in defending that decision to the bitter end. The day before his departure he was arguing that Toby Young had been unfairly represented by a ‘one-sided caricature from armchair critics’, ignoring the numerous indicators of Young’s unsuitability for a role that required wisdom rather than impulsiveness and polemic.

As is customary on these occasions, Johnson’s tone in defeat was positive; he tweeted: ‘Farewell unis and science – our greatest national asset & best thing about this country.‘ But this was the first time I’ve seen him praise the sector without immediately following up with an onslaught of criticism. While in office, he accused those working in universities of not providing ‘value for money’ for students, of neglecting teaching because they prefer to do research, of suppressing free speech, and of acting to block anyone who wants to enter the higher education sector because of fear of competition. Any attempt to rebut these criticisms was dismissed as complacency, self-interest and resistance to change.

His principal goals have been to ensure students get better ‘value for money’ and to help ‘alternative providers’ to enter the sector to improve competition. If we’re talking about caricatures, then Johnson’s view of higher education is a good example. He regarded the higher education sector as a market, where universities make money by selling degrees, and students are consumers who buy a product that will allow them to earn money. In this model, the interests of universities and students are in conflict. Johnson did not appear to grasp that, although this model applies to some for-profit providers, it does not represent the reality of our existing universities. Universities need money to operate but it is not the purpose of their existence: their goals are to educate people to be thoughtful, knowledgeable citizens who can evaluate evidence and arguments.

Impervious to evidence

Given his Conservative credentials, it’s not surprising that Johnson’s reforms have been criticised by those on the left wing of politics, but the problems went well beyond party political lines. Johnson was characterised by a remarkable level of obstinacy and imperviousness to evidence. Critics of his Higher Education and Research Bill were not just left-wing firebrands, but also a large swathe of those in the House of Lords, who expressed well-articulated concerns about the impact of changes to the governance of higher education. They noted the real risks associated with encouraging for-profit providers into the sector – of course, it is possible to have private universities that are of high calibre, but there is little sign that the ‘alternative providers’ who are waiting in the wings are going to rival Harvard or Yale.

I have blogged previously about Johnson’s other main achievement, the Teaching Excellence Framework, noting its weak foundations and statistical limitations – limitations that have been emphasised by the Royal Statistical Society and Office for National Statistics.* The potential for damaging our universities by badging them according to a Teaching Excellence Framework that does not measure teaching excellence was stressed time and time again – and yet Johnson persisted. Last year at the Annual General Meeting of the Council for Defence of British Universities, Martin Wolf gave a highly critical speech about changes to Higher Education. As discussant, I raised the question of why Johnson was pressing ahead with reforms when so many knowledgeable people were warning of the possibility of real damage to the sector. It was hard to believe that he wanted to destroy our world-class universities, but he seemed quite impervious to argument. Some of those in the room had tried to talk to Johnson about their concerns, but said that he was extraordinarily obstinate.

I’m under no illusions that Johnson’s successor, Sam Gyimah, will overturn his reforms. All the indications are that he is a hard-line Tory, which is to be expected given that he is a Conservative appointment. But I do hope he will at least show some flexibility in how he works with the sector and listens to evidence and arguments before rushing in to implement change. Johnson’s approach was recently described as ‘confrontational’ by Alistair Jarvis, the chief executive of Universities UK, who noted: “The student interest is framed narrowly, often in opposition to institutional interests, rather than reflecting the complex and multifaceted dimensions of students’ relationships with their higher education provider, not least as participants in institutional governance and decision-making.”

Johnson always appeared to treat consultation exercises as necessary evils, rather than an opportunity to solicit views. Universities are already struggling with the fall-out from Brexit: we could be badly damaged if changes are introduced impulsively without regard for consequences. The sector is indeed one of the UK’s greatest assets: let’s hope the new Minister will recognise this and work with academics to shore up this success, rather than treating them as the enemy.

* For a fuller account see https://www.slideshare.net/deevybishop/southampton-lecture-on-tef

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The OfS’s remit is still unclear – but it must work with universities

How will the new Office for Students operate? Professor GR Evans finds some worrying clues in job advertisements for the new regulator.

Alistair Jarvis, new CEO of Universities UK, presented a robust challenge to the Office for Students (OfS) in an article in Times Higher Education in late December.

He pointed out that its ‘relationship with the sector’ will be quite different from that of HEFCE. HEFCE acted as a buffer. The secretary of state sent it an annual letter announcing the grant for the year and the policies to be applied in its distribution. HEFCE then allocated the universities their ‘block grants’, which they were free to spend as they chose provided they kept, as the law required, to teaching and research and activities supporting those activities. Under its Memorandum of Assurance and Accountability, HEFCE required annual financial statements from universities as a check that they had done so.

Jarvis stressed that the OfS will be a ‘regulator’. It:

will be necessary for the OfS to establish itself as a mature, fair and accountable regulator that uses its powers to support students through proportionate regulation and judgement.

But he was concerned that the ‘consultation’ Securing Student Success, which closed in late December seemed unlikely to ‘achieve such a settlement without significant further development and clarification’.

So, he said:

There is an opportunity for the OfS, in the early months of its operations, to work with universities, students and other higher education providers to clarify the scope of its remit and set out some short- and medium-term priorities.

Indeed there is. The lack of an OfS website, when UKRI already has one at an advanced stage of development and full of information, seems to indicate a lack of even preliminary planning about the implementation of the duties which fall on the OfS under the Higher Education and Research Act (HERA) 2017.

What do we know about the OfS’s remit?

The only clue so far seems to lie in an Executive Recruitment website which seems to have been set up externally to OfS itself (using GatenbySanderson). This provides information under Priorities, Objectives and Duties. It summarises Sir Michael Barber’s speech of 23 June 2017 on his appointment as Chair of the Board. Governance ; the Seven Principles of Public Life; Further Reading. Our Team lists only the chair and chief executive and the members of the board transferred in from the HEFCE Board.

All roles lists three posts to be applied for: a head of legal services; a director of data, foresight and analysis and a director of external relations, all with a closing date of 15 January.

The head of legal services will be helping to shape detailed planning:

They will be the principal adviser to the OfS on all legal matters and the advice they provide will underpin decision making at every level.

The Head of Legal Services will provide strategic support to the OfS board, the chief executive and staff, helping to set corporate priorities, legal strategies and objectives, and supporting all regulatory decisions. They will be required to create and recruit a new legal team, as well as commission external legal advice as appropriate. This role offers a rare opportunity to deliver tangible results for a new high-profile regulator.

The director of data, foresight and analysis will have:

responsibility for leading the development and implementation of the OfS’ data, foresight and analysis functions

and:

be part of setting up a new and powerful organisation that has at its heart the interests of all students, and to help regulate and influence a sector that is of significant importance to the entire country.

The director of external relations

will contribute to collective strategic decisions to develop new organisational strategy, culture and systems, and to enable the delivery of the OfS’s objectives.

and:

As one of six directors reporting into the chief executive, the ideal candidate will be a strong leader with significant experience leading communications at an organisational level, demonstrable skills in managing multiple stakeholders, a proven record in developing excellent communications strategy in complex policy areas, and will be comfortable working in a fast-paced environment, handling issues at the top of the news agenda.

The OfS should think about universities as co-regulators

Alistair Jarvis set out some objectives in his article, which it is to be hoped the successful applicants (to be appointed only after final interviews in the week beginning 5 February) will bear in mind:

1. the OfS, in the early months of its operations [should] work with universities, students and other higher education providers to clarify the scope of its remit and set out some short- and medium-term priorities.

It does not seem to be envisaged in those job specifications that OfS will be working cooperatively with providers as autonomous institutions. All the job descriptions appear to envisage is planning and policy-making internal to the OfS. It is to be hoped the OfS will include serious rethinking of the need for co-regulation with institutions as autonomous entities.

2. the OfS should be clear and transparent about the processes and steps for adding new, general or specific conditions for inclusion on the register of higher education providers.

There is a current register compiled by HEFCE and designed to make it easy to check in detail what a ‘provider’ is and what it may do. It was designed to complement the information in the existing Operating Framework for higher education. This provides an extensive resource of information, much of which will not change when the OfS takes over from HEFCE. What is to become of this existing register must be an important and pressing question.

3. the OfS should recognise the principle of co-regulation in relation to quality and standards in which providers are responsible for safeguarding quality and standards as autonomous institutions.

On the ‘principle of co-regulation’ it is perhaps worth spelling out that the Quality Assurance Agency has been co-funded by the providers and HEFCE, thus securing its independence in arriving at its judgements. The independence of the Quality Body to be ‘designated’ for the future will be even more important’.

 

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A difficult birth for the Office of Students

The launch of the new higher regulator at the beginning of January was dominated by a single story – the controversy over the appointment of Toby Young to its board. In this opinion piece, Professor GR Evans and Professor DVM Bishop look at the challenges facing the OfS and ask whether the board members have the appropriate expertise to tackle them.

The Office for Students (OfS) put out a press release on 1 January 2018 giving the list of its board members, including those who had already been ‘transferred in’ from the outgoing HEFCE board. These are shown in Figure 1; we have colour-coded them to reflect their background, according to whether they have expertise in public higher education (yellow), private higher education (pink) or another sector (beige). We have done this to the best of our knowledge and relying on the information provided by HEFCE on its website for the HEFCE Board members transferring to OfS and the press release of the DfE for the others. The new appointees are shown with *.

The OfS came legally into existence on 1 January, though it is not yet in operation. It is created by the Higher Education and Research Act (HERA) 2017, which will also bring into being UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). OfS will be responsible solely for English higher education. UKRI will cover project research funding (roughly the work of the former research councils) for the whole UK and also the allocation of infrastructure funding of English higher education research.

So OfS and UKRI will divide between them the funding responsibilities covered at present by HEFCE, and acquire a number of additional regulatory roles. The government funding allocated to pay for both teaching and research infrastructure was for a century treated as a ‘block grant’ to each university, for it to use as it chose in teaching or research.

The teaching element was radically reduced when tuition fees for English students were tripled, and replaced almost all the former ‘T-funding’. OfS will therefore have a minimal funding role. UKRI will have an enhanced funding role, covering both the former ‘R-funding’ of research infrastructure needs through Research England and the project funding of the former research councils, and also including the former Innovate UK.

Where is the OfS website?

OfS does not yet have a website. It is therefore not possible yet to glimpse the operational planning of this new organisation, also to be launched in April 2018. I t is therefore not possible yet to glimpse the operational planning of this new organisation, also to be launched in April 2018. It offers three posts online at or close to six figures, though it is not clear how a board that has not yet met has approved them.

This is in contrast with UKRI, which already has an extensive website. There may be read a short account of its origins and purposes. It also explains its governance and structure and lists with biographies the people so far appointed to various roles. There is an Implementation Programme board with members listed, with the task of setting up the organisation ready for its launch in April 2018.

The OfS board and its operation

The press release of 1 January gave rise to press coverage, including the Guardian on I January and Times Higher Education on 1 January, with The Times and The Independent on 3 January. It launched a controversy about the suitability of Toby Young, one of the new appointees.

His suitability has been questioned for a range of reasons:

His suggestion that the Equalities Act may need to be repealed, coupled with derogatory comments about disability

Inflammatory statements about religion in his column in the Sun

Promotion of views on eugenics that demonstrate limited understanding of genetics or ethics

A history of making obscene, sexist comments on social media

A confession that he had used cocaine and supplied it to others

A history of flouting the rules of Wikipedia to edit his own entry to remove unpalatable facts

Taken together, these suggest a lack of judgement and tendency to polemic that make him ill-qualified for a role as a regulator of universities. Some of those defending him have noted his interest in promoting freedom of speech, a topic that is a focus of interest for OfS. However, his approach to this topic is not that of an expert who has carefully considered the issues, and there are many people with more expertise who could have been selected to ensure balanced coverage of this topic.

A further objection to Young’s appointment is his lack of experience with students or higher education. But is this criticism – which extends to other board members – valid?

This raises important questions about the balance of power and the distribution of responsibilities between the board and the executive of the new organisation, as it tackles the task with which UKRI is already visibly busy according to its own active website.

The business-style relationship of board and chief executive now universal in universities except Oxford and Cambridge took its present form in the wake of the Cadbury Report of 1992, which dictated the expectation – embedded in the Further and Higher Education Act 1992 section 124C – that the governing body of a higher education corporation would have ‘at least half’ independent members’. In the case of OsF this would ensure that we do not have undue influence from representatives of the same Higher Education Institutions that the OfS plans to regulate.

Given the stated priorities of OfS, one can see why the board should include a representative of the Competition and Markets Authority (Coleman) but the rationale for including some of the other new appointees is unclear. In the light of the controversy surrounding the Toby Young appointment, it has been argued there should be more transparency around the selection process for membership of the OfS board.

HEFCE has consistently referred providers to the CUC’s Higher Education Code of Governance (revised in 2014). It is not yet clear whether OfS will do the same. The Code sets out ground–rules for the conduct of board and the Key Performance Indicators of higher education boards, principles adopted by HEFCE itself in its own governance. OfS has given no indication yet of its own intentions but it must be a matter of importance how it intends to use its board’s expertise and policy preferences.

In our response to a recent consultation by the OfS, we noted some of the thorny problems that the organisation will have to tackle. They would benefit from having board members with serious expertise and experience in relevant areas. The current set of appointments does not instil any confidence that the OfS will be up to the task they have set themselves.

 

 

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