OfS following Atec in developing sector ‘steward’ role – Husbands

Harnessing universities as a “strategic national asset” is increasingly becoming part of the job for agencies that oversee higher education, with the English regulator looking set to follow its fledgling Australian equivalent in taking on more of a “stewardship” role, according to a former vice-chancellor visiting Down Under.

Chris Husbands said institutional autonomy had always sat uneasily with attempts to wrangle universities into a “system” capable of solving societal challenges. It was particularly the case now, amid an “increasing emphasis” on the sector’s strategic importance. This, he said, amplifies the “tensions” in a task that, even in less geopolitically “challenging” times, could have been likened to “herding cats”.

Universities have become accustomed to a “very high degree of institutional autonomy” where “nobody tells them what research to do” and – ostensibly – “nobody tells them what to teach”, Husbands said. “The task for government is…how do you do that in a way that at the same time brings overall coherence to the sector?

“I’ve spent 35 years working in universities. Academic freedom is…absolutely fundamental. But as I’ve done more and more work on policy, I [have seen that] the relationships between institutions and how they can be incentivised to work effectively as part of a coherent system is a really tough nut to crack. It’s easy to get a system, but you lose autonomy.”

An educationist and former Sheffield Hallam University vice-chancellor who was knighted for services to higher education, Husbands’ policy leadership roles have included stints chairing the UK’s Teaching Excellence Framework and Higher Education Statistics Agency. He is a trustee of the Higher Education Policy Institute and a founding partner of strategic consultancy Higher Futures.

Visiting Canberra on the invitation of consultants KordaMentha, he reflected on what the UK experience of oversight bodies such as the Higher Education Funding Council for England and its successor, the Office for Students, could mean for an Antipodean sector bracing for a fully operational Australian Tertiary Education Commission (Atec).

Husbands said the term “steward”, routinely used to describe Atec’s role, had not been applied to UK agencies primarily focused on the needs of students in a higher education market. But that was changing as policymakers realised that students’ needs were unlikely to be met by “incredibly financially stressed institutions”.

“In the long run, the student interest is arguably pretty well served by having confident, well-funded, sustainable institutions…that are [not] having to make short-term decisions on the basis of paying the bills tomorrow,” he said. The new consensus, “written large” in the UK’s recently published skills White Paper, was that “the free market has failed to deliver a coherently planned higher education system”.

Another statement in the paper that caught his attention was in the government’s list of “objectives” for the UK higher education sector. Alongside economic growth, teaching and research, regional impact and international standing was the provision of “national capability through specific research expertise” in areas such as nuclear science, artificial intelligence and the country’s Industrial Strategy.

“That’s language that we probably would not have seen…five years ago,” Husbands said. “We’ve become increasingly concerned with thinking about universities as a strategic national asset.

“The roles that universities fulfil are partly determined by their institutional strategies, and partly determined by what the conditions of the time demand. There’s always a tension…between institutional autonomy and societal expectation; between system coherence and student demand; between curiosity-led research and national priorities.

“We can simplify those tensions but what makes university policy and universities so…endlessly fascinating is that there is never a definitive answer to those tensions.”

Husbands said the “harmonisation” of tertiary education, articulated in Atec’s terms of reference, had also become a focus in the UK and elsewhere as the proportion of young people entering higher education edged into the majority. “As a result, we’ve become more concerned about the trajectories for those outside that 50 per cent. We [need] a coherent, harmonised approach if we’re not going to have people slipping between the gaps.”

But achieving harmonisation is “really hard”, as policymakers strive to forge coherence from different institutional cultures, funding levels and frames of reference. “I certainly know…from personal experience that you have to go the extra mile to get productive relationships.”