Report: Joined-Up Tertiary Education Mostly Rhetoric

The governments of the four UK nations all believe a truly tertiary education system is key to boosting the economy and creating opportunity - yet none of them is close to implementing one, according to a new report.

Edited by Professor Alison Wolf, member of the Augar Review of post-18 education, the collection of essays by sector leaders, including current and former university vice-chancellors, looks at how England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland increasingly differ in their approach to university funding and governance, further education delivery, and tertiary policy more generally, as devolution has bedded in.

The collection highlights that while there is a political consensus across the UK on the need for policies that look at academic, technical and vocational education in an integrated way, the rhetoric and reality have been moving further apart, rather than closer together, in recent years.

Higher education enrolments in English and Scottish colleges have declined. There has also been no reversal of the recent trends towards an ever-more youthful undergraduate cohort.

And in Wales, bringing all post-16 education under the remit of a new Commission for Tertiary Education and Research may bear fruit - but at present there is very little higher education in Welsh colleges, and little obvious sign of a unified sector emerging.

Published by the Policy Institute at King's College London, the collection also illustrates how the funding of modern higher education is highly political, and consistently unstable, in each of the UK's constituent nations.

Financial strains are increasingly evident in all four countries, and indeed in the Republic of Ireland, in spite of its higher recent economic growth.

Universities' favoured source of income growth in recent years has been recruitment of international students, whose fees are not regulated - but this has recently been under strain, because of wider concerns about migration.

Beyond merely calls for more - and more stable - funding for home students, the collection includes calls upon the sector to take more seriously the potential for finding its own efficiencies and sets out some of the key choices facing policymakers.

The contributions clarify the potential and the limits of different options, including central planning of university numbers as opposed to 'marketisation', and centrally driven initiatives to improve access.

The eight papers in the collection follow and build on discussions at an expert roundtable convened in spring 2024 by the Policy Institute.

Planned systems don't provide the stability that they promise

"Planned" higher education systems in which university student numbers are controlled by government should, in theory, lead to stability, predictability and the ability for institutions to plan ahead.

In practice, in the planned systems of Northern Ireland and Scotland, sector leaders experience uncertainty and unintended outcomes. These are the two least well-resourced countries in the UK at a per-student level.

A quarter of Northern Ireland's students leave to study in other UK countries, facing much higher fees than their peers. And in Scotland, annual changes in student number allocations within the controlled system, along with complex "outcome agreements" between the authorities and universities, have made forward-planning very hard.

Support for students' living expenses and support for universities compete directly for political attention and funding

Within the sector, most attention is inevitably given to the funding of universities' and colleges' own activities, whether teaching or research. However, for politicians, direct trade-offs between support for universities and support for students loom large. The extent to which student support emerges as a "doorstep issue" is important in understanding the decisions made by different governments on where to target spending.

Access policies are widely supported but can have unintended consequences for individuals and the sector

The college sector has played an important role in widening access to those who do not or cannot choose to go to university, and typically does so at a much lower cost. However, the pressures on universities to widen participation, whether in a marketised system in which institutions compete for students in a fairly unrestricted way, or a centrally steered one, have combined to reduce college-based higher education provision in England and Scotland.

This heightens financial pressures on the college sector and makes some college courses unviable. More broadly, while rhetoric embraces lifelong learning and flexible provision, the reality around the UK is that choice has generally diminished for the many adults who cannot attend a full-time university course.

Professor Alison Wolf, Professor of Public Sector Management at King's College London, and member of the Augar Review of post-18 education, said:

"The UK now has four higher education systems which share important features, but are clearly diverging. This is very useful for understanding both how different policies may play out and why we lack any easy solutions for current strains. The authors of these papers know just how things currently work, and in my view, their analyses strengthen the case for serious structural change."

The full list of contributors to the collection is: Audrey Cumberford, Principal & Chief Executive, Edinburgh College; Peter Mathieson, Principal and Vice-Chancellor, University of Edinburgh; James Miller, Principal and Vice-Chancellor of University of the West of Scotland; Huw Morris, Honorary Professor of Tertiary Education, Institute of Education, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society; Colin Riordan, Secretary General and Chief Executive of the Association of Commonwealth Universities, and former President and Vice-Chancellor of Cardiff University; Michael Shattock, Visiting Professor of Higher Education, UCL, and Honorary Research Fellow, Department of Education, University of Oxford; Jerry White, Principal and CEO, City College Norwich; and Alison Wolf, Sir Roy Griffiths Professor of Public Sector Management at King's College London.