Digital foundations for a changing sector: a response to Sir Chris Husband’s New Choices essay

This blog was kindly authored by Liam Earney, managing director for higher education and research at Jisc.

Professor Sir Chris Husbands’ new HEPI paper, New choices: Revisiting futures for higher education in England, offers an interesting assessment of where the sector is currently headed. It argues that English higher education is not moving towards a single, planned future, but instead is entering an unstable period of financial contraction, greater institutional differentiation, research concentration, changing student expectations and rapid technological disruption.

One of the central observations of the paper is its recognition that universities cannot respond to these pressures through another round of restructuring alone.  Husbands draws an important distinction between measures intended to preserve an existing operating model and those designed to create a genuinely different one.

The sector is no stranger to change. Universities and sector bodies have spent years running transformation programmes, reorganising services and introducing new systems. Yet for all this activity, institutions have often changed their component parts without changing their underlying model. Cutting modules or closing courses may reduce cost, but it does not change how the institution fundamentally works. The challenge now is to develop the capability to operate differently.

A differentiated higher education system will require institutions to make choices about their mission, partnerships, and areas of strategic focus. Some may become part of larger regional groupings. Others may focus more sharply on teaching, specialist provision or particular areas of research. Many will need to collaborate more extensively, share services or build new relationships with further education providers, employers and local government.

None of this will happen through strategy documents alone. Institutional change depends on the underlying capacity and capability to redesign processes, connect services, and operate across organisational boundaries. Where systems are fragmented, data is unreliable and platforms cannot communicate, even straightforward reforms become slow, costly and risky. Anyone who has worked with student records systems will understand the challenge.

Digital foundations need to be understood as part of the sector’s change infrastructure. They include the less visible capabilities on which institutional adaptation depends, from trust and identity to reliable data and strong digital governance. These are not just technical issues; together they determine how effectively institutions respond to change.

The paper is especially persuasive when it argues that the sector is being pushed towards greater collaboration without the infrastructure needed to support it. Government may want more specialisation, regional coordination and institutional cooperation, but collaboration is difficult when universities operate incompatible systems, duplicated processes and different approaches to data and identity. A collaborative sector requires more than goodwill; it needs pragmatic mechanisms that allow institutions to work together.

That means creating practical mechanisms that allow institutions to work together while preserving their autonomy, whether through shared services or coordinated provision across higher and further education.

The Lifelong Learning Entitlement illustrates why this is important. Its success will depend not only on policy and funding, but also on institutions being able to support modular admissions, credit accumulation, transfer and recognition. Husbands explicitly identifies institutional systems development and digital badging as necessary parts of implementation.

The same principle applies to institutional consolidation. Mergers and shared-service arrangements may look attractive on paper, but they are difficult to deliver when organisations have incompatible data, contracts, platforms and security arrangements. Without planning for digital integration, structural change can create additional complexity rather than resilience.

The digital foundations in the sector need to be treated as an enabling condition of sector reform, not as a separate technology agenda.

AI will also have an impact on the futures highlighted in the paper. It is already reshaping the sector in a multitude of ways. But rather than just adopting tools, we must also look at the underlying infrastructure and governance needed to use them well. The paper notes that many institutions lack the digital foundations on which meaningful AI deployment depends. Legacy systems, fragmented data and limited investment capacity make it difficult to move at the pace of technological change.

Without stronger digital foundations, AI risks becoming another layer added to already complex institutions. It may automate existing processes without improving them, deepen dependence on external suppliers or amplify weaknesses in data and governance. However, with the right foundations, AI can become part of a broader programme of institutional redesign, supporting more flexible learning and more effective institutional operations.

The sector needs shared digital foundations that allow institutions to change in different ways while remaining connected, resilient and capable of collaboration.

For us at Jisc, we have a clear responsibility. We need to work with stakeholders across the sector to define the shared digital foundations a changing sector requires, identify where common approaches can reduce duplication and support institutions to adapt without losing control of their missions. Husbands’ paper makes clear that the old model cannot simply be restored. The sector is moving towards greater differentiation, collaboration and complexity. The question is whether that transition will be managed or just endured.

Digital foundations will be central to the answer.