January 2020 marks the second year of the Office for Students’ (OfS) operations. The OfS represents the latest organisational iteration of state direction of (once) British and (now) English higher education, stretching back to the creation of the University Grants Committee (UGC) in 1919. We therefore have a century’s-worth of experience to draw on: what lessons might there be?
There are, I think, two ways to consider the
cavalcade of agencies that have passed through the British higher education
landscape since 1919. One is to see in it how higher education has been viewed at
various points over the last century. The other way is to see it as special
cases of methods of controlling public bodies generally. I think that both
perspectives can help us to understand what has happened and why.
In the post-war decades, up to the later
1970s, central planning was almost unquestioningly accepted across the
political spectrum in Britain as the correct way to direct nationalised
industries such as electricity and railways, but also to plan the economy as a
whole, as the National Plan of 1965
showed. In higher education, broadly similar methods – predict and provide – were
operated by the UGC for universities, and by a partnership of central
government and local authorities for the polytechnics and other colleges. A key
feature of this mode of regulation was expert judgement, largely insulated from
political pressures. As Michael Shattock and Aniko Horvath observe in The Governance of British Higher Education (Bloomsbury,
2020), “In the 1950s it had been the UGC, not officials in the ministry, who
initiated policy discussions about the forecast rate of student number
expansion and its financial implications, and it was the UGC, not a minister,
that proposed founding the 1960s ‘New Universities’” (p18).
Higher education, then, was viewed as a
collective national resource, to be largely centrally planned and funded, in a
similar way to nationalised industries.
The rejection of central planning methods by
the Thatcher governments (1979-1990) affected the control of higher education
as it did other areas of national life through the ‘privatisation’ of public
enterprises. Instead, resource allocation decisions were to be made by markets,
or where normal markets were absent, as with higher education, by using ‘quasi-markets’
to allocate public funds. Accordingly the UGC was abolished by legislation in
1988, and (eventually) national funding bodies were created, the English
version being the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). Whereas
the UGC had a key task of preserving academic standards, by maintaining the ‘unit
of resource’ at what was considered to be an adequate level of funding per
student (as a proxy for academic standards), HEFCE’s new task, little-noted at
the time, became the polar opposite: it was required to drive down unit costs
per student, thereby supposedly forcing universities to make the efficiency
gains to be expected of normal market forces.
The market, then, had supplanted central
planning as an organising principle in British public life (perhaps the lasting
legacy of the Thatcher era); and universities discovered that the seemingly technical
changes to their funding arrangements had profoundly altered their internal
economies.
HEFCE’s main task, however, as with the UGC
before it, was to allocate public money to universities, though now applying a
different methodology. The next big shift in English higher education policy,
under the 2010 coalition government, changed the nature of central direction
radically. Under the full-cost fees policy, universities now typically received
most of their income from student loans, making HEFCE’s funding role largely
redundant. So, after the usual lag between policy change and institutional restructuring,
a new agency was created in 2018, the Office for Students (OfS), modelled on
the lines of industry regulators for privatised utilities such as energy and
telecoms.
In contrast to its predecessor agencies, OfS
is neither a planning nor a funding body (except for some special cases).
Instead, as with other industry regulators, it assumes that a market exists,
but that its imperfect nature (information asymmetry being a particular concern)
calls for detailed oversight and possibly intervention, in order to ‘mitigate
the risk’ of abuses by providers (universities) which could damage the
interests of consumers (students). It has no interest in maintaining a
particular pattern of institutional provision, though it does require that external
quality assurance bodies validate academic standards in the institutions it
registers.
As with utilities, we have seen a shift in
Britain, in stages, from central planning and funding, to a fragmented but
regulated provision. The underlying assumption is that market forces will have
beneficial results, subject to the regulator preventing abuses and ensuring
that minimal standards are maintained. This approach is now so widespread in
Britain that the government has produced a code to regulate the regulators
(presumably anticipating the question,
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?).
Examining the changing pattern of state
direction of higher education in England in the post-1945 period, then, we see
the demise of central planning and its replacement, first by quasi-markets, and
then by as close to the real thing as we are likely to get. Ideas of central
funding to support planning goals have been replaced by reliance on a market
with government-created consumers, overseen by a regulator, intervening in the
detail (see OfS’s long list of ‘reportable events’) of institutional management.
Despite every effort by governments to create
a working higher education marketplace, the core features of higher education
get in the way of it being a consumer good (for the many reasons that are
repeatedly pointed out to and repeatedly ignored by ministers). Central planning has gone, but its replacement depends on central
funding and central intervention. I don’t think that we’ve seen the last of
formal central planning in our sector.
SRHE member Paul
Templeis Honorary Associate Professor,
Centre for Higher Education Studies, UCL Institute of Education, University
College London. See his latest paper ‘University spaces: Creating cité and place’, London Review of Education, 17 (2): 223–235 at https://doi.org/10.18546
“…problems arise when language goes on holiday. And here we may indeed fancy naming to be some remarkable act of mind, as it were a baptism of an object.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical
Investigations, para 38 (original emphasis)
The paradigm shift of students to customers at the heart of higher
education has changed strategies, psychological self-images, business models
and much else. But are the claims for and against students as customers (SAC)
and the related research as useful, insightful and angst ridden as we may at
first think? There are alarms about
changing student behaviours and approaches to learning and the relationship
towards academic staff but does the naming ‘customers’ reveal what were already
underlying, long standing problems? Does the concentrated focus on SAC obscure rather
than reveal?
One aspect of SAC is the observation that academic performance
declines, and learning becomes more surface and instrumental (Bunce, 2017).
Another is that SAC inclines students to be narcissist and aggressive, with HEI
management pandering to the demands of both students and their feedback on the
NSS, with other strategies to create iconic campus buildings, to maintain or
improve league table position (Nixon, 2018).
This raises some methodological questions on (a) the research on
academic performance and the degree of narcissism/aggression prior to SAC (ie around 1997 with the Dearing Report); (b) the scope and range of
the research given the scale of student numbers, participation rates, the
variety of student motivations, the nature of disciplines and their own
learning strategies, and the hierarchy of institutions; and (c) the combination
of (a) and (b) in the further question whether SAC changed the outlook of students to their education – or is it that
we are paying more attention and making different interpretations?
Some argue that the mass system created in some way marketisation of
HE and the SAC with all its attendant problems of changing the pedagogic
relationship and cognitive approaches. Given Martin Trow’s definitions of
elite, mass and universal systems of HE*, the UK achieved a mass system by the
late 1980s to early 1990s with the rapid expansion of the polytechnics;
universities were slower to expand student numbers. This expansion was before
the introduction of the £1,000 top up fees of the Major government and the
£3,000 introduced by David Blunkett (Secretary of State for Education in the
new Blair government) immediately after the Dearing Report. It was after the
1997 election that the aspiration was for a universal
HE system with a 50% participation rate.
If a mass system of HE came about (in a ‘fit of forgetfulness’ ) by
1991 when did marketisation begin? Marketisation may be a name we give to a
practice or context which had existed previously but was tacit and culturally and
historically deeper, hidden from view. The unnamed hierarchy of institutions of
Oxbridge, Russell, polytechnics, HE colleges, FE colleges had powerful cultural
and socio-political foundations and was a market of sorts (high to low value
goods, access limited by social/cultural capital and price, etc). That hierarchy was not, however,
necessarily top-down: the impact of social benefit of the ‘lower orders’ in
that hierarchy would be significant in widening participation. The ‘higher
order’ existed (and exists) in an ossified form. And as entry was restricted,
the competition within the sector did not exist or did not present existential
threats. Such is the longue durée when trying to analyse marketisation and the
SAC.
The focus on marketisation should help us realise that over the long
term the unit of resource was drastically reduced; state funding was slowly and
then rapidly withdrawn to the point where the level of student enrolment was
critical to long term strategy. That meant not maintaining but increasing
student numbers when the potential pool of students would fluctuate – with the present demographic trough ending in 2021
or 2022. Marketisation can thus be separated to some extent from the cognitive
dissonance or other anxieties of the SAC. HEIs (with exceptions in the
long-established hierarchy) were driven by the external forces of the funding
regime to develop marketing strategies, branding and gaming feedback systems in
response to the competition for students and the creation of interest groups – Alliance,
Modern, et al. The enrolled students
were not the customers in the marketisation but the product or outcome of
successful management. The students change to customers as the focus is then on
results, employment and further study rates. Such is the split personality of institutional
management here.
Research on SAC in STEM courses has a noted inclination to surface
learning and the instrumentalism of ‘getting a good grade in order to get a
good job’, but this prompts further questions. I am not sure that this is an
increased inclination to surface learning, nor whether surface and deep are
uncritical norms we can readily employ. The HEAC definition of deep learning
has an element of ‘employability’ in the application of knowledge across
differing contexts and disciplines (Howie and Bagnall, 2012). A student in 2019
may face the imperative to get a ‘degree level’ job in order to pay back
student loans. This is rational related to the student loans regime and widening participation, meaning this
imperative is not universally applied given the differing socio-economic
backgrounds of all students.
(Note that the current loan system is highly regressive as a form of
‘graduate tax’.)
And were STEM students more inclined toward deep or surface learning
before they became SAC? Teaching and
assessment in STEM may have been poorand
may have encouraged surface level learning (eg
through weekly phase tests which were tardily assessed).
What is deep learning in civil engineering when faced with stress
testing concrete girders or in solving quarternion equations in mathematics: is
much of STEM actually knowing and processing algorithms? How is such learnable
content in STEM equivalent in some cognitive way to the deep learning in modern
languages, history, psychology et al?
This is not to suggest a hierarchy of disciplines but differences, deep
differences, between rules-based disciplines and the humanities.
Learning is complex and individualised, and responsive to, without
entirely determining, the curriculum and the forms of its delivery. In the
research on SAC the assumptions are that teaching and assessment delivery is both
relatively unproblematic and designed to encourage deep, non-instrumental
learning. Expectations of the curriculum delivery and assessment will vary
amongst students depending on personal background of schooling and parents, the
discipline and personal motivations and the expectations will often be
unrealistic. Consider why they are unrealistic – more than the narcissism of
being a customer. (There is a very wide range of varieties of customer: as a
customer of Network Rail I am more a supplicant than a narcissist.)
The alarm over the changes (?) to the students’ view of their learning
as SAC in STEM should be put in the context of the previously high drop-out
rate of STEM students (relatively higher than non-STEM) which could reach 30%
of a cohort. The causes of drop out were thoroughly examined by Mantz Yorke(Yorke and Longden, 2004), but as
regards the SAC issue here, STEM drop outs were explained by tutors as lack of the
right mathematical preparation. There is comparatively little research on the
motivations for students entering STEM courses before they became SAC; such research is not over the long term or longitudinal.
However, research on the typology of students with differing motivations for
learning (the academic, the social, the questioning student etc) ranged across
all courses, does exist (a 20 year survey by Liz Beatty, 2005). Is it possible that after widening
participation to the point of a universal system, motivations towards the
instrumental or utilitarian will become more prominent? And is there an
implication that an elite HE system pre-SAC was less instrumentalist, less
surface learning? The creation of PPE (first Oxford in 1921 then spreading
across the sector) was an attempt to produce a mandarin class, where career
ambition was designed into the academic disciplines. That is, ‘to get a good
job’ applies here too but it will be expressed in different, indirect and
elevated ways of public service.**
There are some anachronisms in the research on SAC. The acceptance of
SAC by management, by producing student charters and providing students places
on boards, committees and senior management meetings is not a direct result of students or management
considering students as customers. Indeed, it predates SAC by many years and
has its origins in the 1960s and 70s.
I am unlikely to get onto the board of Morrisons, but I could for the
Co-op – a discussion point on partnerships, co-producers, membership of a community
of learners. The struggle by students to get representation in management has taken
fifty years from the Wilson government Blue Paper Student Protest (1970) to today. It may have been a concession, but
student representation changed the nature of HEIs in the process, prior to SAC.
Student Charters appear to be mostly a coherent, user-friendly reduction of
lengthy academic and other regulations that no party can comprehend without
extensive lawyerly study. A number of HEIs produced charters before the SAC era
(late 1990s). And iconic university buildings have been significantly
attractive in the architectural profession a long time before SAC –
Birmingham’s aspiration to be an independent city state with its Venetian
architecture recalling St Mark’s Square under the supervision of Joseph
Chamberlain (1890s) or Jim Stirling’s post-modern Engineering faculty building
at Leicester (1963) etc (Cannandine 2002).
Students have complex legal identities and are a complex and often fissiparous
body. They are customers of catering, they are members of a guild or union, learners,
activists and campaigners, clients, tenants, volunteers, sometimes disciplined
as the accused, or the appellant, they adopt and create new identities
psychologically, culturally and sexually. The language of students as customers
creates a language game that excludes other concerns: the withdrawal of state
funding, the creation of an academic precariat, the purpose of HE for learning
and skills supply, an alienation from a community by the persuasive self-image
as atomised customer, how deep learning is a creature of disciplines and the changing job market, that
student-academic relations were problematic and now become formalised ‘complaints’.
Students are not the ‘other’ and they are much more than customers.
Phil Pilkington
is Chair of Middlesex University Students’ Union Board of Trustees, a former
CEO of Coventry University Students’ Union, an Honorary Teaching Fellow of
Coventry University and a contributor to WonkHE.
*Martin Trow
defined an elite, mass and universal systems of HE by participation rates of
10-20%, 20-30% and 40-50% respectively.
** Trevor
Pateman, The Poverty of PPE, Oxford, 1968; a pamphlet criticising the course by
a graduate; it is acknowledged that the curriculum, ‘designed to run the Raj in
1936’, has changed little since that critique. This document is a fragment of
another history of higher education worthy of recovery: of complaint and
dissatisfaction with teaching and there were others who developed the
‘alternative prospectus’ movement in the 1970s and 80s.
References
Beatty L,
Gibbs G, and Morgan A (2005) ‘Learning orientations and study contracts’, in Marton, F, Hounsell, D and
Entwistle, N, (eds) (2005) The Experience
of Learning: Implications for teaching and studying in higher education, 3rd
(Internet) edition. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, Centre for Teaching,
Learning and Assessment.
Bunce,
Louise (2017) ‘The student-as-consumer approach in HE and its effects on
academic performance’, Studies in Higher Education,
42(11): 1958-1978
Howie P and Bagnall R (2012) ‘A critique of
the deep and surface learning model’, Teaching
in Higher Education 18(4); they state the distinction of learning is
“imprecise conceptualisation, ambiguous language, circularity and a lack
of definition…”
Nixon, E, Scullion, R and Hearn, R (2018) ‘Her majesty the student:
marketised higher education and the narcissistic (dis)satisfaction of the
student consumer’, Studies in Higher
Education 43(6): 927-943
Cannandine, David (2004), The ‘Chamberlain Tradition’, in In Churchill’s Shadow, Oxford: Oxford
University Press; his biographical sketch of Joe Chamberlain shows his vision
of Birmingham as an alternative power base to London.
Yorke M and Longden B (2004) Retention
and student success in higher education, Maidenhead: SRHE/Open University
Press
There has been widespread discussion and outrage about the pay and reward of Vice Chancellors and their accountability to their governing bodies. In addition, there is discussion about the need to provide greater support for the lay members who govern universities, and the related need for the reform of institutional management to be less dependent upon an individual’s abilities as manager-leaders in a complex environment (‘less analogue and more digital’, Mark Leach, WonkHE).
A recent concern was whether ex-VCs should be encouraged to join the governing boards to provide some empathetic support for the management, and perhaps an independent but expert view of management in HE for the benefit of lay governors.
Another complaint has been the lack of gender balance and BAME representation on Boards of Governance, with women comprising 32% of board members (Sherer and Zakaria, 2018). There are other critical matters: civic engagement and the relationship with the local community; disproportionate pay increases for VCs and the consequent demoralisation of staff; the worsening conditions of all employees in pay and ‘contracting out’ to global corporations; calls for the democratisation of universities; and strategic engagement with political change. Issues such as freedom of speech, Prevent, institutional autonomy, public understanding of science to international partnerships and more are all directly or indirectly connected to the nature of governance. The governance of US universities is said to involve the triple duty of fiduciary, academic and moral responsibilities; there may be no limit to the responsibilities of governors.
A recent colloquium on governance focussed on the need for creativity in the global market of higher education and the needs for science innovation and pedagogic development (University Governance and Creativity, European Review, Cambridge, 2018). Whatever the limited pool of talent available for the lay governance of universities the UK stands strong in the league table for sectoral autonomy, scoring top at 100% in the European University Association (EUA) review in 2017. This is nonsense. Or rather, the concept of autonomy is nonsense for universities. It is an enlightenment concept out of Kant as a condition for moral agency and the categorical imperative. ‘Independence’ may be a better term to be used for organisations, but independence from what or whom? No organisation (or person) is context free or without history.
Explanations of university autonomy often appeal to von Humboldt and/or Newman; both had contextual arguments for independence from. In the first case, independence from crazed minor princes in the Holy Roman Empire or a Prussian king seeking fame as an enlightened autocrat making whimsical appointments; in the second, independence from the strictures of a bone-headed clergy in Dublin. (Interestingly, public state universities in the USA have senior appointments made by the state governor, boneheaded creationist or not.) Given the constraints and historical conditions for universities the question arises: is the governance what is needed? A related question then is what are universities dependent upon?
The EUA review of degrees of
autonomy is flawed in assessing governance as either unitary or binary. In a
unitary model the board of governors receives a strong or determining input
from a senate or academic board. In the binary model the academic receives
instruction from the governance/ management. The UK is assumed by the EUA to be
a unitary model, but any academic input is strongly mediated by the
management/executive, which to a large degree determines the agenda for the
boards of governance and also sets the conditions for academic performance and
structures. How can autonomy be graded? In the same way we might ask: how can
uniqueness be conditional?
The end of the public sector higher education (PSHE)
sector ended not just the polytechnics (and the soon to be promoted colleges of
HE), it ended an accountability regime linked to local democracy. The Education
Reform Act 1988 not only abolished that mechanism for local accountability (and,
for good measure, the architecture of accountability with the abolition of the
Inner London Education Authority and regional advisory councils), it put in
place a system for the self-replication of governing bodies once Secretary of
State Kenneth Baker had approved the initial tranche of governors. 30 years later
we have a uniform system of accountability dominated by a specific professional
outlook and culture.
A sample of the experiences of governors, if we ignore the small minorities of academic and student governors, is salutary*.
There are minor differences in board membership between Russell Group and post-92 institutions, but the similarities seem more important. The striking feature of governing bodies is the preponderance of accountants, or rather senior executives of the major accounting firm. In my sample one Russell board has four members with current or recent professional experience with the big four accountancy firms. This is not unusual; another Russell has three members similarly engaged. ‘High powered’ accountancy skills are of course useful in overseeing a £multi-million business such as a university.
However, the political and social values that go with the high-level accountancy skills are now intricately connected to external political discourse and practice: the governor who advised on the privatisation of the railways, or the advisor on the HBOS-Lloyds merger; the advisor to the government on deregulation in HR, the directors (regional or national) of the CBI. There are others: financiers, bankers, corporate lawyers, big pharma directors, entrepreneurs in a range of consultancies, a smattering of retired senior civil servants and even a lead figure in the Student Loans Company. Any concern about the impact of the REF and TEF on academic staff would be overridden by a priority to ensure that targets are delivered.
The values and ethos of the individuals who comprise the governance of universities are not left outside the boardrooms. Why would they enter governance if they did not bring with them the normative values of their competences? And such competencies, if they can be described as such, carry with them a world view of how others should be and do.
Post-92 governors are less elevated; not as many
MBEs, OBEs or knighthoods as the Russell Group. And there are more public
sector roles such as youth justice, charities, health service executives,
housing associations, media executives and senior local government or police
service officers. There are some interesting outliers in the post-92 sector
with senior women executives in industry, but – albeit to a lesser extent – the
bankers and senior accounting partners are still there.
The concern for diversity – there is some ethnic and gender diversity in the post-92 group, less so in the Russell Group – is diminished by the uniformity of seniority and positions of power that all board members have in the private or public sectors as CEOs, partners, and chairs of boards, with what is likely to be a uniform ideological outlook on the world. It has been suggested that remuneration (£20K pa has been mooted by the Committee of University Chairs (CUC)) would encourage more to volunteer their time and expertise on boards of governors, but the current incumbents are similar to those great and good who always seem to have volunteered in the past; they can afford to volunteer, others will be providing the work/value while they sit on the boards.
Remuneration would be appropriate if the board members needed the money to enable them to attend board meetings. The suggested amount from the CUC is more than annual wages for many.
Halting the self-replicating nomenklatura of these
boards would be difficult, requiring an external intervention to put forward
board members of a different character and set of values; perhaps those who are
antithetical to the interests of the Student Loans Company, to privatisation of
public services and the burdens taxpayers suffered with the banking crisis of
2008. But there have been interventions on board membership before – in the 1988
Act which ended ‘donnish dominion’,
thanks to the groundwork in the Jarratt Report. Some may protest that this
would be an attack on institutional autonomy, but autonomy is not an
unqualified condition of the success of universities in the UK, notwithstanding
the glowing report from the EUA.
The CUC code of conduct requires governors to have the interests of the HEI at heart, but governors’ perceptions, values and interests will determine assessments of current and future positions. Given the monoculture and common discipline background, there may not be enough disagreement. Such uniformity calls for more creativity in governance. The focus will be on the operational imperatives of performing well within the current context, a context of ‘academic capitalism’, with a well-known critique which may not be accessible in governance or top down management. The lineaments of such a regime are: funding via student enrolments; quality assurance regulatory systems; marketisation; the OfS regulatory framework; financial viability standards; league tables; branding and consumerisation of education.
The freedom of the market is an ideological position: the market is externally created and freedom for action and conscience is limited by the external impositions. These conditions are not only handed down by the OfS but from ‘advisory’ instructions from government on an annual basis to consider participation rates, schools links, the green agenda, grade inflation, freedom of speech (yet again), consumer rights for students, et al. The fiduciary responsibilities of governance leave little room for manoeuvre and no prospect of supererogatory action. The advisory, regulatory and the bigger socio-economic conditions, from mobility and debt aversion to the international market for students, predetermine the scope of governance.
In contrast to the UK’s HE market superstructure there is a telling edict in the EU Lisbon Treaty, which has lofty expressions of modernisation and the knowledge economy but also asks universities to contribute to the advancement of democracy. We will not have to worry about that anymore. Given the experience of many lay board members in being directly engaged in engineering the market conditions which prevail for universities it would be surprising if boards did not find a normalcy, a correctness in the prevailing conditions. The other responsibilities of governance for academic and moral matters as expected in the USA seem simply preposterous.
Beyond the need to broaden the experiential
background of governors, we can also question the constitution of boards. Current
expertise can be useful for audit, financial oversight and stress testing
business planning (although the big four accountancy firms have had some
remarkable involvement in corporate failures in the recent past), but to
duplicate this at full board means a loss of opportunities for the more
discursive. The current uniformity also explains why, notwithstanding the
managerial links of performance to executive leadership, high levels of pay for
VCs are not considered exceptional by remuneration committees – they share the
same atmosphere.
Reform of governance structures means that some of the axioms in mission statements should be considered as governance issues. If universities are ‘communities of scholars’ then why is the governance of that community in the hands of corporate accountants, financiers and directors of privatised public assets? If universities are to play a role in partnership with the local community in the civic mission then what of the governance implications with that community?
Finally, how can the academic/senate discourse connect with corporate governance? This is not simply about which will take priority: first we must ask, can they talk to each other? The simple hierarchical format of governance ‘works’ in terms of financial viability (more or less) and international status and delivery (more or less) but that should not be confused with overall efficacy. Other historical conditions contribute to the success of the HE sector – or rather, parts of the sector, as some struggle to survive in the market, or exit.
There is talk of the need to devolve managerial leadership, not always a happy experience if distant and indirect corporate performance targets give way to local bullying. Weakening governance by having the not so great and the good might not alter the dynamic of executive leadership; management might become even more powerful and autocratic. Anecdotal evidence suggests that, too often, challenging and questioning the executive is rare.
The deeper problem is to disperse governance from the hierarchical to a more clustered and broader stakeholder approach. Beware the unanalysed ideological values that we all bring to bear on decision making. Let’s ditch the concept of autonomy which is a historical accident in semantic terms and begin some creative discussions on what creative governance should look like.
Reference
Sherer, M and Zakaria, I (2018) ‘Mind that gap! An
investigation of gender imbalance on the governing bodies of UK universities’ Studies in Higher Education 43(4):
719-736
*I looked at 12 universities, six Russell Group and six post-92 universities.
Some governing bodies are known as Council, some have changed their title to
Board of Trustees, but all have the same legal responsibilities for the
institution. The Committee of Universities Chairs (CUC) has produced 3 advisory reports on remuneration of senior staff, one advisory report on Prevent, and on student’s (sic) unions.
Phil Pilkington is Chair of Middlesex University Students’ Union Board of Trustees, a former CEO of Coventry University Students’ Union, an Honorary Teaching Fellow of Coventry University and a contributor to WonkHE.
The use of the term ‘neoliberal’ to describe the marketisation of HE systems implies a ‘grand design’ that takes a public service like HE and creates a market; however it seemed to me that this differed from a ‘free capitalist market’, nor did my understanding of the historical development of HE in England seem to reflect such a simple linearity of design. Therefore I decided a couple of years ago to really nail down what neoliberal marketisation means in the context of the English HE system. The result was The marketisation of English higher education: a policy analysis of a risk-based system, my 2018 book summarised in a paper to the SRHE Research Conference in December 2018. Employing a political discourse analysis (PDA) approach to a close reading of 16 HE policy documents over the last thirty years I identified five distinct stages of marketisation policy, reflected in arguments used to justify reform:
Stage
1: efficiency, accountability and human capital (1986-1992)
This stage was exemplified by reforms
highlighted in: the Jarratt
(1985) Report on university management and the Croham Report
(1986) on the future of the University Grants Committee; the 1987
White Paper; the 1988 Education
Reform Act; and the 1992 Further and
Higher Education Act. Arguments deployed included the need for ‘New
Public Management’ thinking: ideas that promoted entrepreneurialism among
university and polytechnic leaders. University and polytechnic boards, and the
new Universities Funding Council, would henceforth include business
representatives; individual academics were also encouraged to be more
entrepreneurial, selling their expertise as consultants. At the same time the binary
system would be unified and expanded in the hope that institutional competition
would ensue, the better to meet the changing basis of demand for human
capital in the knowledge economy of the future.
Stage 2: diversity as a good
(1992-2000)
Policy documents during the 1990s
largely celebrated and encouraged diversity and the prospects for
widening participation. The new landscape of different types of institutions and
modes of HE were seen as essential for expansion and lifelong learning needs. While
the discourse shifted radically in some ways from stage 1, human capital needs
were still to the fore – as important as social justice arguments when it came
to arguing for a widening of participation. The
Dearing Report (1997) encapsulated most of the debates around the
future size and shape of the sector and how to fund expansion, recommending the
introduction of partial fees. Commissioned by the Conservatives, it reported to
an incoming Labour government wedded to social justice objectives and lifelong
learning.
The major policy statements covered in
this stage – the 2003
White Paper, 2004 HE Act,
and the 2009
White Paper – introduced radically new arguments for a new purpose.
No longer would system diversity be celebrated for its own sake, HEIs were now
exhorted to differentiate their offer in the marketplace to attract
applicant-consumers. Responding to institutional pressures for more funding,
government introduced a variable tuition fee, on the assumption that only the
most highly-demanded universities would justify the higher fee of £3,000 per
annum. The policy arguments used in this stage were unusually reactive; the
Russell Group and 1994 Group of universities had long lobbied for ‘top-up fees’,
partly on the basis of actual costs but also because they believed they needed
to be differentiated in the market from ‘other’ universities and types
of HEIs. Greater centralisation paved the way for the regulatory framing for
the market we see in 2019.
Stage
4: competitive differentiation (2010-15)
This stage can be seen mainly as the
continuation of the implications of the previous stage – the arguments deployed
in the Browne
Review of HE funding and student finance (2010) and the 2011
White Paper Students at the heart of the systemdominated policy discourse. The need to have an efficient,
responsive differential system reflecting a competitive fee distribution,
to (roughly) match the UCAS points distribution between highly-demanded and
less demanded institutions, became more critical in the era of £9,000 a year
tuition fees. This decision can be seen as the key driver of virtually all
policy since 2010.
Stage 5: risk and exit: the completion of the
market?
The 2015
Green Paper and 2016
White Paper introduced proposals and legislative measures finally to
actuate the variable tuition-fee market as envisaged as long ago as 2003. The Higher
Education and Research Act introduced a single regulator for all and
any HE providers – the omnipotent Office for Students (OfS) which manages, via
quality oversight and funding incentives, the system of risk-based monitoring
that is designed to encourage ‘exit’ for failing providers, to be replaced, if
necessary, by new alternative providers encouraged in turn by lower Degree
Awarding Powers and University Title barriers to market entry.
Marketisation 1986-2019: a tortured path or linear progression?
At the time of writing no providers
have been allowed to fail/exit and many in the sector are in denial that
government would ever allow it to happen: but that is the iron logic of the
market thus constructed. Successive OfS and government statements (from OfS Chair
Michael Barber, and successive Universities Ministers Sam Gyimah and Chris
Skidmore) have been at pains to reassure us that they will not prop up a failing
institution, defined as one that that fails to attract enough
applicant-consumers willing to pay a given tuition fee. New providers, coming
to market with a cheaper offer, will finally create downward pressure on
(stubbornly un-differentiated) fees: ‘failing’ providers either lower their
fees or risk losing students to the competition. Needless to say, none of this
harms the established research-intensive ‘elite’ providers that had been
lobbying for differential fees since the late 1990s.
Was all this part of a grand
neoliberal design, a blueprint for marketisation? Or a collection of reactive
decisions designed to ameliorate the effects of the unintended consequences of
previous reforms, or indeed externalities such as the 2008 crash? Diversity and
(largely unplanned) expansion certainly begat defensive differentiation among
the existing (pre-1992) universities, which immediately called for the right to
charge ‘top-up’ fees in the name of differentiation. Government, meanwhile,
trying to widen participation for human capital as well as social justice
purposes, also needing to satisfy the pre-1992s, hit upon choice for the
applicant consumer in the run up to the 2003 White Paper as the mechanism that
would allow applicants to see where the most highly valued HE was to be found. The
Times Higher Education duly obliged
with the first wave of its ‘price-list’ domestic league tables from 2005. While
commercial league tables never featured in any policy statement, officially
endorsed indicators of ‘quality’ such as the National Student Survey, the
Destination of Leavers from HE survey and a UNISTATs website containing
consumer information were all conceived at this dawning of the competitive
market, all in the name of differentiating the system so that applicants could differentiate
the pre-1992 ‘wheat’ from the post-1992 ‘chaff’.
The ‘end-stage’ of the market (HERA 2017) attempts to open up the system to cheap incomers that maybe, just maybe, will provide the much needed downward pressure on average tuition costs. Poorer students are exhorted to think hard about increasing their own (and public) future debt by choosing the wrong kind of HE providers: the 2016 White Paper celebrates the good access record of many ‘new providers’ and the virtues of alternatives such as apprenticeships. After twenty years of promoting the ‘graduate premium’ (first noted in the Dearing Report 1997), the White Paper points out how differentiated that benefit can be, and promises us more sophisticated evidence from tax returns (LEO data) to dissuade those with the least chance of enhancing their life though HE.
Colin McCaig is Professor of Higher Education Policy at the Sheffield Institute of Education, Sheffield Hallam University He has published extensively on widening participation and system differentiation and is a political scientist by background. His book The marketisation of English Higher Education: a policy analysis of a risk-based system, was published by Emerald Publishing (ISBN: 9781787438576) in 2018
Sam Gyimah MP, Minister of State for Universities and Science
Dear Minister
“Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”
If asked to sum up in a single word the direction of higher education policy from 2010 onwards, I think that many of us who try to follow Government thinking on these matters might say that the word would be “markets”. In successive White Papers and speeches, ministers have insisted that fee-paying students should see themselves as customers buying services from a university provider, which in turn should be competing with other providers in the higher education marketplace to offer the best value for money to student customers. In this way, your predecessors have argued, quality would go up and costs would come down, as happens in most markets for consumer goods. The Government has encouraged this trend by demanding that universities provide more information on which student-customers might base their purchasing decisions – most recently the TEF and the LEO data – and by encouraging new entrants into the marketplace with the aim of sharpening competition further.
Many of us in universities rather doubted that trying to create a straightforward market-type relationship between universities and their students was the best way to organise teaching and learning. For a start, there is little evidence that students themselves want a relationship on these terms: the great majority of students surveyed in the HEPI 2018 Student Academic Experience Survey, for example, arguably preferred a pre-2004 Act, certainly a pre-2011 White Paper, funding model. I think that one reason for this – paying lower fees is no doubt another – is because they understand that in order to learn effectively they must engage with the academic life of the university in a way that is qualitatively different to, say, my engagement with Sainsbury’s when I go shopping there. Sainsbury’s does not expect its customers to help create the products which appear on its shelves; and if I’m unimpressed with them today, and I can see what Tesco are up to tomorrow. I have made no particular commitment to the Sainsbury’s way of shopping. Forgive me if this seems terribly obvious, but it has not always been clear that ministers fully appreciated this distinction.
Although many of us didn’t much like its implications, we did at least think we knew that Government saw our relationship with our students in these transactional, market-based terms. But then, Minister, along you come saying that, on the contrary, we should be in loco parentis to our students, acting (for instance) as go-betweens with their parents or guardians if we have concerns about their mental health (as reported in The Guardian, 28 June). This is not just overthrowing normal market relationships – Sainsbury’s in truth couldn’t care less about my personal well-being – it is redefining universities’ relationships with their students, and in an unhelpful way. (Having a duty of care towards both students and staff members is a different matter.) If I may say so, this has the distinct feel of political grandstanding, wanting to be seen to be acting decisively in response to – what, exactly? Of course, mental illness is desperately serious for the families and friends of those suffering from its various forms, needing the involvement of skilled professionals. A particular concern may be that suicide could result from overlooking a person’s symptoms. (Though suicide in the UK is actually a good-news story – so to speak – as ONS data show that the number of suicide deaths has been falling steadily over recent decades. Middle-aged, disadvantaged men are most likely to commit suicide – and they don’t constitute a large part of the student demographic.)
But what should be the role of a university in relation to its adult students with mental health problems? Nicola Barden writing for WonkHE on 28 June (do you read it, Minister? – you should) identifies a few of the problems which the proposed opt-in system, allowing universities to contact a student’s parents or other nominated individuals in the event of a mental health crisis, will create. Any social worker will tell you that relationships within families can be difficult in ways that outsiders can’t immediately detect: any member of university staff intruding here must be certain that they will not cause further harm – and how can they know that for sure? Imagine a situation where a parent of a student with mental health difficulties believes that the university will contact them in the event of a crisis – only for the student to have withdrawn that consent subsequently, not wanting their family to be involved. The university will then be in an impossible situation, having made commitments to both parties (as they will see it).
We’re operating, Minister, in a Government-mandated market. Universities should support their students in their academic work, but should not set themselves up to fail as substitute families. That historically never was their role; your Government’s market-focused policies have now put it completely beyond reach.
SRHE member Paul Temple, Centre for Higher Education Studies, UCL Institute of Education, University College London.
