A Stupid Idea

Why the UK university crisis needs something politically impossible

This is a stupid idea. Or at least, it should sound like one. It asks for a level of coordination, restraint, and long-term thinking that our current politics tends to avoid. It cuts against institutional autonomy, disrupts established ways of working, and would likely be dismissed quickly in favour of something more immediately shiny and announceable. It’s also underdeveloped but maybe together we can turn it into something workable. Or tear it down and come up with something better because the alternatives we are currently pursuing are not working.

The UK’s university sector is a critical national infrastructure. There are some big numbers involved. Hundreds of thousands employed by the sector, making tens of billions for the UK economy, and since I’ve worked in the sector the return on investment for every £1 of public money spent has never been lower than £8.

Universities achieve this by creating and sharing knowledge. The creation of knowledge through amazing people doing amazing research and solving problems. The sharing of knowledge through teaching and getting ideas and innovation out into the real world. For simplicity I’m going to call this Research and Teaching, and admit the lost nuance in that approach. Public money should be spent on this.

The problem is that the University system in the UK is broken. From whichever lens you look through there are stresses and strains that did not exist even five years ago. We are living through the ‘everything is fine’ meme; the one where a cartoon dog, holding a mug, sits smiling while everything around them is on fire.

What’s changed, and what is driving that fire, is not especially mysterious. The unit of resource for teaching has been eroded in real terms for years. Research is structurally underfunded and relies on cross-subsidy. Costs including estates, pensions, and pay (National Insurance) have risen. International student income has become both essential and volatile. In short, the system only worked when growth papered over the cracks, and that growth has stalled. The underlying model has been exposed.

If you’re not in the system and don’t recognise the crisis, talk to someone who is or search for ‘universities’ with anyone of the following terms: crisis, bankruptcy, collapse, redundancies. The financial model no longer matches the system’s cost pressures.

However, this crisis is not being recognised as urgent by the government, nor is the UK’s university sector being treated or governed as the critical national infrastructure that it is. Instead, we have a collection of independent organisations, universities, operating within a market, resulting in a fragmented, dog-eat-dog response to what is, in reality, a system-wide crisis. Decisions are being made on an institution-by-institution basis without a whole system approach. We have nothing to prevent regions from entirely losing critical research and teaching in subjects fundamental to their local economies. Redundancies, closures and deficits across the UK at different Universities are being treated as separate issues. There is no join up.

This is exacerbated by different government departments having responsibility for different aspects of the university system. Creating knowledge (research) sits with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and the sharing of knowledge (teaching) sits with the Department for Education.

We are living in the ‘everything is fine’ meme with two separate fire-fighters pouring small buckets of water on individual fires rather than working together to remove the dog from the burning building.

If we continue with the small tweaks in response to this omni-crisis then we are going to continue to cause harm at scale. Individual institutions may “optimise” locally within a system that continues to deteriorate globally. There are alternatives, of course. We could increase tuition fees, top up research funding, diversify income streams, or let the market run its course and accept mergers, and failures. But each of these increases different risks and assumes that a functioning market exists where, increasingly, it does not. Even if more funding were available, without structural change we would simply be stabilising the same incentives that created the problem.

We will continue to do harm if solutions don’t address both the creation (research) and sharing of knowledge (teaching) simultaneously. They are intertwined and interdependent. Great teaching is build on the cutting edge knowledge of reserachers. Any intervention that treats them as separable will fail in practice, even if it works on paper.

We need a national (cross four-nations), joined-up response. A response, I suggest, that should be considered stupid and naive by the political classes because no government will have the appetite for it. It shouldn’t be a ‘shiny announceable’ that plagues our system. You know the ones, the big ideas that get splashed on the front of newspapers, that make it to the six o’clock news, but in the real world make little to no difference. The shiny announceable that give the minister or prime minister something positive to say to give the appearance that everything is moving forward, that there is momentum.

My suggestion is not that. This is my proposal.

We accept that a sector contraction is required but that this must be managed in a co-ordinated, nationally strategic, and choiceful way. That it is a contraction that covers both teaching and research and considers them as a mutually beneficial pairing. It is done with an overlay of geographic (place) to ensure that regional perspectives are integrated, and that we don’t accidentally create research or teaching cold spots. It is deliberate rather than accidental.

We start by taking Higher Education out of the Department for Education, and bringing it back together with Research and Innovation. Either into DSIT or let’s call it something new like Department for the Knowledge Economy. A pre-2016 model that aligns Universities closer to business than to primary schools.

The new department (and a new Minister for Universities) asks each University to put forward 3-10 preferred disciplinary areas that it intends to prioritise in both teaching and research (including underpinning capacities e.g. doctoral and infrastructure provision). It may put forward up to 5 secondary areas for consideration [these numbers need robust crunching].

The evidence as to why they are the best disciplinary areas for each University, including quality and capacity information will be gathered via a ‘dip-stick’ selection from existing information e.g. publications, and HESA data etc. This must not create a new hoopla of processes and teams that each University must run individually to produce.

The submissions will be reviewed and considered through a geographic lens as well as quality. This isn’t just in response to the politics of place but for widening participation, and accessibility reasons that strengthen research and the university sector, alongside the benefits to regional economic security. Where there are gaps, capacity is protected or built.

Every university will be assigned c.5 of it’s preferred disciplinary areas and given a hypothecated block grant (stability grant) for research and teaching in those disciplines. In return each university will have to guarantee a minimum number of researchers, key infrastructure, doctoral students and undergraduate places in those disciplines.

Universities are not restricted to their agreed disciplinary areas but they will only receive stability grants for the agreed areas. Funding follows agreed focus, not spread. Over time, this shifts the system away from thinly funded provision and towards depth, scale, and sustainability.

By running the stability grants system for five years we release the pressure valve for the community, enable universities to concentrate on recalibrating to a new system. We create five years in which to work with other partners to design a financially sustainable, smaller system, which has a reduced reliance on cross-subsidies to enable outstanding research. The stability grants would need to be materially larger than current REF allocations, because they are buying certainty, not just rewarding performance.

REF is cancelled as the exercise is no longer a priority in the immediate to short term.

Practically, this would need to be staged. An initial year of data gathering and negotiation. A second year of provisional allocations and funding agreements. Then a managed transition period in which institutions reshape provision, staff are supported through change, and students are protected. None of this is frictionless, but nor is the current path we are on.

This approach would deliberately disrupt some of the defining features of the current system. It would reduce institutional autonomy by introducing a level of national coordination that many universities would find uncomfortable. It risks misjudging disciplinary potential by relying on imperfect data and central decisions, potentially constraining emerging or interdisciplinary fields. There is a real risk of reinforcing existing hierarchies if not designed carefully, with already strong institutions consolidating advantage.

Some departments and roles would contract or disappear entirely, creating real human harm and regional consequences for which care and support would need to be centred. These are not trivial losses, they are the trade-offs of choosing managed stability over unmanaged decline.

It must give universities the breathing space they need to recalibrate, enabling them to devote more time to the creation and sharing of knowledge including the full breadth of translation activity which I’ve so far overlooked. To be able to continue to add value through partnering with industry to translate research into new products and services, working with local communities and public services to address social challenges, supporting start-ups and spin-outs, providing specialist advice and consultancy, and delivering professional training and continuing education.

To make this work, incentives would have to be real. The stability grant is the lever I’m proposing but it could be joined by others such as student number caps/growth, capital funding, or elements of visa policy. This cannot be a polite request to coordinate; it must be a reshaping of the system.

But I don’t think there is appetite for anything this radical, which is why it is a stupid idea.