left to my own devices – occasional thoughts on higher education

One of the many wonderful things about universities is the sheer number of talented people with whom we get to work.  One of the less wonderful things is how few of these people we actually get to know.

And by that I don’t mean in any deep sense of ‘really knowing’ someone.  I just mean the literally thousands of people who in policies and missives from our corporate communication teams would be referred to as ‘colleagues’, but who we’ve never met (even by email, or your messaging system of choice) and never will.

That struck me recently when I stumbled across (via a LinkedIn post) a series ‘Reflections in Writing’ in the Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly.  Not a frequent port of call for me, but the serendipity of social media brought me to the article ‘Write with fire, edit with ice (and come up for air)’, written by a member of the Law School at my current university.  It’s a thought-provoking piece; very much worth reading.

The timing was fortunate, as I found the article at just the point where I was starting to think about my annual late July post (here’s 2024 and 2025) looking back on my blogging for the academic year that’s coming to an end.

Two things from the journal article stuck with me that feel relevant to this post. The first is the explanation of the phrase ‘write with fire’: ‘writing because you care.  Because something is important … Because for whatever reason it matters’ [p.32]; while also being sure to ‘write with care, and with precision’ [p.33].  How far have I done that over the last year?

I’ll come to the second thing at the end of the post.

integrated quality

As ever I’ve spent a significant amount of time writing about many things learning, teaching and quality.

One focus has been various facets of assessment, from external examining to degree classification and failings in awarding processes (and in national quality oversight of these).  That wasn’t pre-planned, but has been driven by events.

Slightly more strategically, I’ve entered the lists on OfS’s third attempt to design a functional national quality assurance approach in England and lamented the (continuing) failure to give sufficient weight to student voice. I’ve also tried to unpack the consequences for the sector of the wider range of OfS developments in this area.

These posts reflect my own background and interests; but they also reflect the flux (if that’s not too kind a word) that the English sector remains in on this topic.  And will continue to do so until we have a regulator that acknowledges that no national approach will be effective until it draws on both of the two dominant historically dominan in this area, quality audit and quality assessment; a case I made at length early last autumn (at such length, it required a separate addendum!).  Drawing together these two traditions is the only integration that will work in this area, rather than the OfS’s current proposals.

regulation and funding

It has been impossible to escape these two issues over the last year, and my posts have been no exception.  For better or worse (ok; for worse), that’s the sector we live in.

Developments in regulation should have been driven by last autumn’s skills white paper, but this promised little for, while demanding a lot from, the sector. It was a poor map for English higher education, made worse by implementation of this part of the government’s agenda being no more thought through or effective than any of the others. So instead we’re still stuck in the OfS paradox, where its regulatory reach expands at the speed of light while its regulatory activity proceeds on geological timescales.

Even less uplifting than regulatory developments over the last year has been the playing out of sector funding issues, as the government has utterly failed to preserve its modesty behind the fig leaf of the inflationary increase in undergraduate home fee level (the extent of its exposure made all too clear by Universities UK).

I’ve neither expertise nor appetite to dive too deeply in these waters, but I have paddled.  I focused largely on niche issues: how to approach the inevitable impact of the sector’s financial permacrisis on staff-student ratios; the role of external consultants as universities seek to stop the financial bleeding; and the real price mechanism in undergraduate home recruitment.  Though I couldn’t help but have one stab at the big picture by doubling down on my scepticism about government willingness to see provider failure extend to universities.  And yes, I’ve seen the recent assertions of government hard headedness on this (£); and I still don’t believe them.

The thing that is common across all of this is the extent to which all of this is driven by the government.  It’s tempting to think that the recent ‘not quite a change’ of government may impact this in the coming year.  However, I’m not sure how well-founded such a hope is given that the continuity of DfE higher education policy before and after the 2024 general election could almost be designed to promote agreement with the Gove-Cummings construct of ‘The Blob’ (£).

organisations

There’s a fair overlap in the Venn diagram between my posts on regulation and finance, and what I think of as writing more generally on universities as organisations.  The latter started with my first post of the academic year, focusing on the extent of change in the sector and individual universities over the previous year; and the uncertainty about how those changes would play out.

I’m not sure how much closer we are to knowing that, but as I observed earlier this year the dire forecasts of the impact of these changes on students is not being borne out in the student satisfaction/experience data.  That has done nothing to stop the deluge of reports on the imminent collapse of the university sector, analysis that justifies those reports’ prescriptions for sector restructuring.  Sometimes, though, such prescriptions perhaps hide other agendas.

On another aspect of universities as organisations, at times 2025-26 has felt like Higher Education Year of Governance.  I have, predictably, been unable to risk the urge to join in, which I did via my first ‘mini-series’: three posts on the key question for committees, and the crucial roles of chair and secretary; the final one being the first on my blog written by a guest contributor (I say first; I live in hope I can persuade one or two other colleagues to follow suit).

just saying …

Of course it’s my blog, so I want to have it all ways and be allowed to contradict myself; that’s my right.  Hence those three posts on governance being followed by one arguing that we talk about governance too much.  That kicked off an intermittent series of posts in 2026 that I think of as my ‘consciously contrarian’ period.

Of course these posts could fit into other themes, but I’m maintaining my view that there is a distinctive attitude, though not topic, across these posts.  Writing against the role of oversight in governance, and in defence of programme specifications.  Suggesting that the lack of degree apprenticeships is perhaps the fault of employers, not universities.  Questioning whether being values-driven is the right focus for universities.  And bemoaning the neglect of stewardship at all levels of the sector (which if not contrarian, is definitely unfashionable).

I’ve introduced several of these posts with statements to the effect of ‘I know I’m wrong, but I’m going to say this anyway …’.  But that’s just my inherent lack of confidence coming through.  Like the phrase in the sub-heading, I’m trying to deflect criticism by pre-empting it.  And just like the phrase in the sub-heading I’m fooling no-one.  Not even myself. At heart those contrarian posts express genuinely held views.

‘come up for air’

So. 28 posts across 11 months (all 28 mentioned above, save one for which even I couldn’t come up with a tenuous or even spurious link with at least one other post).  And looking back on them now I think I can say that all of them reflect (some of) the things I care about in higher education; and relate to things that matter, though to different extents.

So I think I’ve written with fire.  Whether I’ve written with care and precision is a judgment for others.

The need for both these things is far from all that I’ve taken from the article I referenced at the start of this post.  That piece also described writing as a way for those ‘otherwise terrified of taking up any kind of public space’ [p.31] to express their voice. While I wouldn’t make a claim to be terrified, my writing is a way of gaining public space denied for other reasons.  And the article emphasises the need for writers to ‘come up for air’; create the ‘time to think, and to meander’ [p.35].

All of which feels very fitting at this point, as I put down my metaphorical pen to ‘come up for air’; think about whether the need to express my voice, and the fire about the subjects I write on, remain; and whether, when and how to return to the fray in 2026-27.