This speech was delivered by Nick Hillman (HEPI’s Director) in a personal capacity in his role as a Council Member at the University of Buckingham.
Good morning. Thank you for inviting me to speak at this important event. Our overarching theme today is ‘Educating the Educators’. I have spent most of my life in education, including education policymaking, and I come from a family of educators – for example both my parents, both my siblings, two of my four grandparents are or were teachers, as was I in my first job after university.
So I hope I know as well as anybody that the best educators are themselves learners as well as instructors, always striving to find out more, whether from their students or from the latest educational research or simply from their own daily experiences. And as a parent of two children in local schools here in Buckinghamshire, I certainly want their educators to embody the humility and appetite for learning that is contained in that phrase ‘Educating the Educators’.
I plan to do three things in my remarks.
- First, I want to note the important role that this institution, the University of Buckingham, plays in our local and national life.
- Secondly, I want to look at the new Government’s approach to higher education to see what we can discern about what may happen over the next few years.
- And thirdly, I want to end with a few words about your important initiative here today.
Higher education in Buckinghamshire
I have been invited to speak I think in part because I am a long-standing Council member here at the University of Buckingham, and I am very proud to hold that role. This University is especially important to this county, the county that I am pleased to call home.
Buckinghamshire is actually a distinctly odd place when it comes to higher education. We have more universities than many other counties but they are nearly all untypical ones. I would count Buckinghamshire New University as the most regular university we have: that institution, with which this one is often muddled up, is incredibly important for the supply of local public service staff, for example our nurses and our teachers, and they are leading the pack in a number of ways – as with their Gypsies, Travellers, Roma, Showmen and Boaters into HE work – while their Vice-Chancellor, Professor Nick Braisby, recently wrote a wonderful and influential report for the organisation I lead, the Higher Education Policy Institute (or HEPI), about how franchising arrangements can be improved.
But it is nonetheless probably fair to say that the influence of Bucks New University is mainly in the southern end of our long and oddly shaped county, and it is therefore felt less up here in the north of Buckinghamshire, around our original county town of Buckingham.
Aside from Bucks New, here in Buckinghamshire:
- We also have the biggest university in the country in the Open University, based down the road in Milton Keynes … but the OU is really a national University, with a deep presence in all four parts of the UK, and it educates people all over the country via distance learning rather than being distinctly local.
- And we have Cranfield University, based just a few miles away from here. It is the UK’s only wholly postgraduate university, the only university in the UK with its own airport and pretty much the only one situated in a village.
And we have the institution where we are today, the University of Buckingham, which really is unique in our higher education system – and always has been. On gaining University Title back in 1983, Buckingham became the UK’s first fully private university since the establishment of the University Grants Committee just after the First World War. It is also the only new university that was founded in Great Britain between the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1990s.
The University of Buckingham has continued to plough its own furrow ever since, being more fiercely independent than any other UK university I know of. It does things differently, whether it is serving as the home of two-year degrees, protecting small-class teaching while others are being forced to increase their staff:student ratios or providing a home to academics who undoubtedly should have a place in our higher education system but who would not fit in so snugly anywhere else. In. my own area of educational research, for example, I think of Professor Alan Smithers, who has been the most quoted academic specialising in education research since seemingly forever.
As one of the smallest universities in the country, Buckingham has never had an easy ride. It is currently in a good place, with stable leadership from the Vice-Chancellor, the Registrar Chris Payne, the Pro-Vice-Chancellor Harriet Dunbar-Morris, the Chief Financial Officer David Cole and the Deans, and with a new Strategic Plan. But just a few years ago, the Council oversaw the challenge of some delays with Buckingham’s financial statements. I don’t want to open old wounds but it was a very interesting process for me as a higher education policy wonk for it highlighted where the current regulatory regime for higher education is going wrong.
At one point, the Office for Students threatened the institution with a fine of £164,492,240 – that is four times the entire annual income of the University at the time. This was calculated on the basis that the maximum monetary penalty can be imposed for each day that an institution’s accounts are late, suggesting the underlying legislation is badly flawed. If anyone does not immediately see this as wildly disproportionate and concerning, let me tell you the fine was, in the end, a modest £37,231, which is 99.977% less than the original figure.
The risk of such an overbearing approach from regulators is why the new book from the Vice-Chancellor, James Tooley, is so important. Cry Freedom: The Regulatory Assault on Institutional Autonomy in England’s Universities shines a spotlight on the importance of institutional autonomy, how it can all too easily be trampled upon and why it needs to be protected not only for Buckingham’s sake but also for the sake of the whole UK university sector, if we are to maintain the world-class mantle.
Personally, I was particularly struck by the plea in James’s book for a clearer distinction between the two categories of higher education provider on the Office for Students’ Register, in other words between those in the ‘Approved’ and those in the ‘Approved (fee cap)’ categories. These were meant to be meaningfully different from one another (and there was meant to be a third category too) as part of a more complex higher education system in which there would be institutions of rather different types, more heterogeneity and less homogeneity, including a clearer pathway for new providers.
Instead, just as in the 600 years when Oxford and Cambridge blocked the foundation of new universities, we have ended up with a regulatory regime in which existing institutions are insulated a bit too much against competition from new providers and non-traditional providers wanting to do things differently.
If we are serious about looking for efficiency gains across higher education as the funding crisis persists, then new ways of operating should be a core part of that. So I am delighted to see that the University of Buckingham, which was already a proud member of Universities UK, recently also joined the representative body IndependentHE, which has been long campaigning for more sensible regulation.
The new Government’s approach to higher education
To be fair to the new Government, they have started pretty well on this front. For example, in her speech to the Universities UK Annual Conference the other day, the Minister for Skills, Baroness (Jacqui) Smith, noted they are:
refocusing the Office for Students’ role to concentrate on a number of key priorities, including prioritising the sector’s financial stability.
The full title I have been given for today is ‘What can Post-16 / Further and Higher Education expect from the new Government?’ so let me say a little more about this. I am just back from the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool, where in truth we did not find out anything like as much about the new Government’s plans as we had hoped.
But the outlines of the new Government’s general approach to higher education are beginning to become clearer even if the specifics remain frustratingly vague. In particular, it seems that the new ministerial team in the Department for Education want to take action in the following areas:
- prioritising access and progression;
- strengthening the university sector’s contribution to economic growth;
- focusing on the local and regional contributions that universities can make;
- improving the quality of the student experience; and
- sorting out the funding issue – which HEPI has had a lot to say about this week, given our new paper which came out yesterday by the leading economist, Professor Tim Leunig.
There is nothing to dislike here. In fact, as a parent, a policy wonk and a university governor, I like the list. But most of it is focused on what the higher education sector can do to help the Government meet its priorities and only one point, the last one on finances, is clearly on what the Government can do to help institutions at a time when they are struggling. So there is a notable imbalance.
And when it comes to the Government’s wider overarching five missions, I worry that the higher education sector could be tempted down a slightly dangerous path in the waiting game while ministers are deciding how to convert their aspirations into hard policy in time for next month’s budget or next year’s spending review.
University managers were generally nervous about helping the Coalition Government deliver the ‘Big Society’ and a little reticent about parroting the ‘Levelling Up’ language of the Boris Johnson Government, yet the sector seems somewhat keener to adopt the new Government’s own politically charged language. While there is absolutely nothing wrong with universities asking a newly elected Government ‘What can we do for you?’, as proud autonomous institutions we should also be asking even more loudly ‘What will you do for us?’
The best way for universities to thrive is for the Government to put in place the conditions for them to thrive; it is not for universities to try and please the politicians by promising to deliver on the latest political slogans that may well quickly go out of fashion.
If this seems overblown, consider what has been happening in Australia in the two years since the election of a centre-left government after many years of centre-right leadership. The relationship between Canberra and Australian universities started out in a very positive vein but has since deteriorated. As Duncan Ivison, the incoming Vice-Chancellor of the University of Manchester who has come to the UK from the University of Sydney, recently warned:
Don’t get too comfortable; things can change. … We shouldn’t be complacent about the kinds of challenges that will come.
So it is vitally important that the whole higher education sector develops a clear plan of what we want to see happen which includes:
- clear proposals on increasing teaching income for home students;
- a renewed focus on the student experience, including the intensity of teaching they receive;
- protecting research spending;
- maintaining the removal of student number caps;
- doing more to help students cover their true living costs;
- promoting the UK as a destination for international students;
- supply-side reform; and
- a restructuring regime for institutions that wobble.
I hope and believe that next week’s white paper from Universities UK will help lay out a sensible plan in pretty much all these areas. Look out for a HEPI blog responding to the ideas from the former Buckingham Vice-Chancellor, Sir Anthony Seldon.
Today’s initiative
Finally, let me end by saying a few remarks about today’s event, the launch of the Dyslexia Research and Education Hub. As I have made clear, this institution has been a trailblazer in many respects over its first 40 years, especially when it comes to providing a student-centred education and standing up for academic freedom and free speech. And it seems to me that it is about to serve as one yet again in the launch of this new Hub, which is designed to fix the yawning gap in the knowledge base of FE and HE staff on how best to support dyslexic and neurodivergent students – and staff. This is especially important, given the big increases in the number of students disclosing a disability of some sort.
There is, fortunately, a growing understanding of the importance of neurodiverse students to the future expansion of higher education. There is a piece by John Ross in yesterday’s Times Higher Education, for example, which notes that Australia is unlikely to reach their new targets for future higher education expansion unless they recruit more neurodivergent students.
The same piece also points out that modifications for some students can improve the learning environment for everyone, so this is not about separating students out from one another.
This week we have also seen the launch of DyslexicU, which has been labelled the ‘world’s first University of Dyslexia Thinking’, and which is supported by Sir Richard Branson. He went to school just a mile or two away from here and he cares about these issues in part because his teachers called him ‘stupid and lazy’ while simultaneously missing his dyslexia.
There remains a big gap between what we understand to be the best support and what neurodivergent students tend to receive. So I congratulate Sarah Myhill and Patricia Covarrubia for their work establishing this new Hub and on the event today, which suggests yet again that Buckingham is leading the pack.