left to my own devices – occasional thoughts on higher education

Bear with me on this, but in some ways blogging is like guerilla warfare.

The blogger chooses when, where and how to engage.  The timing of the engagement and its duration.  And when it’s done they melt away from the scene, becoming difficult if not impossible to re-engage unless the blogger chooses to do so.  And when they do, the cycle starts again.  The blogger chooses when, where and how …

It’s a valid and frequently successful approach mode of engagement; but other times less impactful.  And the determinant of this is often whether it is just a tactic, or part of a strategy.

That’s a context for this post.

tactics and strategy

What I publish is undeniably tactical, reflecting things I want to think about when I have some time on my hands.  And my default, my bias is to think about something by writing about it, which I’ve done fairly frequently this last academic year (though I have blogged a little less this year than last; and apart from a post on education, the Prevent Duty and neurodiversity have managed to avoid the practice of becoming exercised by an issue, hammering out a post and publishing it immediately).

So as I did last year, I wanted to reflect back on a year of posts and see if as well as being tactical, there’s any element of strategy (albeit emergent strategy) from 2024-25’s posts.

organisations

I’ve written a fair amount about how universities run, and present, themselves.  Two things which perhaps feels a bit unrelated, but in my own mind I tend to link them as two key dimensions of an organisation (perhaps due to being a past, and currently frustrated, organisational developer of sorts).

Decision-making in universities is an ongoing obsession, so posts on supporting committees to make good decisions (the technicalities of writing good committee papers; and the mindset in which people write these) are perhaps unsurprising.  Possibly a little more so were a post on the impact of uniqueness bias on the way we manage projects; and venturing into a little quantitative data collection and analysis on an aspect of who makes decisions in universities (i.e. female:male balance on university executives).

And well away from the track I normally beat, a couple of posts on reputation: the easy misunderstandings of HE mission groups (well, ok – one of these groups); and the sleights of hand to create misunderstanding.  As I say, posts I wouldn’t have expected to write; but which I very much enjoyed writing.

finances

In terms of running UK universities, of course the elephant occupying almost the entire room is the state we’re in as a sector.  So although they have been a very small drop in the enormous ocean of writing over the last year on the challenges for the UK higher education sector, this has inevitably been a focus of a number of posts.

This is an area where my approach has definitely been tactical rather than strategic.  Niche posts on how we should view the sector’s capital spending splurge of the last decade or so, and the government’s magical ability to spirit away the sector’s already scarce resources.  And posts on the questions the current circumstances pose for universities, and the big question they pose for government.

Unfortunately we still don’t know how the government in England is going to approach these challenges.  My claim last November that they had plans for the sector proved to be uncharacteristically optimistic.  As with almost everything else with the current government, they had plans to have plans and we’re still waiting.  I’m intrigued to see how far into the year they can drag out their claim to be intending to publish their HE review plan in autumn 2025.

regulation

Inevitably the regulation of the sector has again been a recurring theme.

Sometimes I’ve attempted the bigger canvas, such as the legislative ideological (and the lack of a comma between those two words is deliberate) underpinning of higher education regulation in England or the existential rationale for consulting on a new OfS strategy this year.  Other times the posts have been miniatures; suggesting we need a new locus for the regulation of research degrees, or peering into the intriguing world of OfS fines.

What’s clear is that to date the new regulatory structure in England hasn’t worked well. At the same time it’s not going to change, so that with HERA and all its works we need to concentrate as a sector on making the best of a bad job.  Judge OfS more contextually and on distance travelled, rather than absolute performance, perhaps.

quality

At the start of this academic year I’d expected to write a lot about quality assurance.  Partly because that’s (one of) my thing(s).  Largely as I’d expected there to be a lot of activity in this area in light of the recommendation from last year’s Behan report on the need for a new integrated approach from OfS.

However, it’s felt a little like a phony war for much of the year, so for the first half of the year my only posts were on the sort of (but tangentially) related issue of student evaluations of teaching – both the NSS, and internal surveys.

Of course come the spring I couldn’t resist writing about perhaps the worst failures in academic quality and standards of the last decade, the instances of failure in managing franchise provision.  And this proved to be limbering up for a series of three posts this summer, once OfS broke cover to give some hints of what they’re planning.  I’m hoping that, among other things, their plans encompass partnership and co-regulation with the sector; recognising that process matters; and placing the strategic dimension in its rightful place in the regulation of academic quality and standards.  We shall see in the coming year …

so what?

I’ve always been fond of this question, for both myself and others, and it seems a fair question to pose about my last year’s posts.

If I’m honest I’m not entirely sure of the answer.

To return to the analogy of the opening paragraphs, my posts are undoubtedly tactical. However, while the recurring themes and issues in 2024-25 (some consistent with previous year, others not) may not amount to strategy, they perhaps suggest there’s something more at play than tactics.  A continuing concern to make a positive contribution, in a very small and minor way, to discussions about where we are and where we’re going in UK higher education.

Anyway, now’s the time for a break from blogging.  What will I do with the time on my hands that this frees up?

Well, there’s a series of mid eighteenth century pamphlets I’d like to read about a parliamentary borough that spent a century arguing about whether power in the town lay with the assembled masses of the town’s freemen or with a small, self-selecting and self-serving oligarchy.  So I might do that, to get a break from current issues in UK higher education.