Memorandum from Professor Gareth Williams,
Centre for Higher Education Studies, Institute of Education (HE27)
INTRODUCTION
1. During the past ten years the size, scope
and profile of UK higher education has changed dramatically, probably
more than any other country. An elite and exclusive club became
inclusive,diverse and differentiated mass higher education in
less than a decade. The "elite" component is certainly
still there but it now coexists with a much wider range of institutions,
courses and activities. British universities and colleges compete
successfully in a global context in leading edge reseach and they
provide worthwhile access to young people and adults whose earlier
educational experiences have not been very successful. These changes
have taken place against a background of sharply falling costs
and rising productivity.
2. The critical public policy challenges
for the next decade are:
(a) to set acceptable ground rules for institutional
differentiation so as to continue to meet the claims of the internationally
recognised excellence in research and teaching while increasing
social inclusion and encouraging lifelong learning;
(b) to seize the opportunities offered by
information technology to improve quality of learning and reduce
unit costs further while maintaining and enhancing appropriate
standards and enhance across the sector; and
(c) to improve the funding arrangements and
to promote better understanding of the relationship between public
and private funding.
DIVERSITY
3. Massive expansion in the early 1990s
was based on market principles. For over a decade resource allocation
has encouraged, and been dominated by, the competition between
institutions. This has resulted in most universities and colleges,
and often each member of staff within them, to adopt a risk-averse
strategy of attempting to be active in everything in case the
funding priorities change.
4. In particular there have been powerful
incentives to build up a research capacity. Funds available to
universities are heavily dependent of scores in the research assessment
exercises but otherwise "mission" has little direct
effect of funding.
5. In its first chapter the Dearing Report
on Higher Education "a compact between higher education and
society" which would take account both of the many contributions
of universities and colleges to individuals, to the economy, to
our culture, and to society generally. In our view the implications
of such a compact have not been sufficiently explored.
6. We believe the compact might usefully
take the form of an explicit, mission related rolling contract
between the Funding Council and each university and college, renegotiated
probably every 5-10 years which takes account of the overall research/teaching/reachout
profile of the institution. As well as permitting a more coordinated
development of the system and enabling national priorities to
be more systematically addressed, this would help to avoid excessive
competition between institutions that was a feature of the 1990s.
7. The Dearing Report also recommended that
much of the expansion into the early years of the next century
should be in "sub-degree courses taught in further education
colleges and the Government is in the process of putting this
into effect. The arrangements we suggest could help to ensure
that such courses are developed in a coherent way.
8. Both funding related to mission (paragraph
6) and the selective development of associate degrees (paragraph
7), should be backed by a much more active system of credit accumulation
and transfer that makes it easier for individual learners to take
advantage of different institutional missions at different stages
of their learning career.
9. In this connection the Education Sub-Committee
should consider whether there needs to be a formal relationship
between the Higher Education Funding Councils and the new National
Learning and Skills Councils.
RESOURCES AND
FUNDING
10. There can be little doubt that the efficiency
of universities and colleges has increased enormously during the
past decade. However, there is ample evidence that the system
has now really been squeezed to breaking point. From being one
of the most generously funded higher education systems in the
OECD area in the early 1980s, British higher education has slipped
to one of the least well funded.
11. Staff recruitment is difficult in areas
where there are high demands in the private sector, such as electronic
engineering, information technology, applied economics, financial
management. There are also concerns about whether the productivity
increases are occurring at the cost of the quality of student
learning experiences. For example there is now a new concern with
the number of students who fail to complete their courses. United
States studies have suggested that unless new types of students
are supported by appropriate resources they may be wasting their
time. British higher education can no longer evade the problem,
common in most other countries with mass participation, of low
course completion rates. This is inefficient both from the point
of view of the students concerned and of the use of public funds.
12. The introduction of fee payments by
students has brought additional funds into higher education. These
payments, which are justified by the much-increased income of
most graduates, are not made by students from the least affluent
families. After a thorough review the Cubie Committee in Scotland
proposed some change to the incidence of the timing of payments
by students but fully endorsed the principle. What is now needed
is a consideration of the case for moving a stage further. The
case of universities being allowed to set their own fee levels
needs serious thought. Certainly some universities and subjects
would be able to charge higher fees than others. But for the most
part this is because their graduates can expect higher average
incomes. It could be a requirement of eligibility for a university
to receive public funding that a percentage of its places must
be free or made available on a realistic means tested basis. Higher
should also be underpinned by higher loan eligibility. Again the
higher prospective lifetime earnings of these graduates would
make them attractive to the financial sector. The issue needs
serious policy consideration because flexible fees should be introduced
as a conscious act of public policy that enables extra income
to be available across the sector, rather than being blundered
into in an ad hoc way that is the most likely long term outcome
of a chronic shortage of public funds.
13. Consideration should be given to the
desirability of bringing student fees and loans within the ambit
of the recently introduced scheme of Individualised Learning Accounts.
This would give students much greater control over their own learning
patterns and could also help in integrating higher education with
other components of further and continuing education.
QUALITY AND
STANDARDS
14. Concern about the quality of provision
of financially squeezed mass higher education has led to the development
of an increasingly bureaucratic system of quality enforcement
that takes insufficient account of the inevitable diversity of
the system. The Quality Assurance Agency has been given a near
impossible task in imposing a single quality framework that is
appropriate for all subjects and all universities and colleges.
15. Furthermore the separation of Teaching
Quality Assessments from Research Assessments has resulted in
an intensification of unproductive competition between research
and teaching in many universities.
16. Quality needs to be considered also
in its social context and take more explicit account of mission.
Many people question whether quality assurance procedures partly
borrowed from manufacturing industry or from secondary school
inspections are really appropriate to the complex social of higher
education at its best. The relationship between quality assessments
and the benefits students' take forward into adult life, including
their subsequent employment is not at all clear.
17. The recent Funding Council performance
indicators are a useful first step, in establishing meaningful
benchmarks for universities and colleges. They are already helpful
for strategic institutional decisions and with further development
they can make a major contribution to the development of mission
based funding we are proposing. However, there is very strong,
and justified, feeling in the sector that it must be recognised
they are indicators which will change and improve and will never
encapsulate in simple numbers everything that is valuable in higher.
18. Another important recent development
is the establishment of the Institute for Learning and Teaching.
We see it as a potentially beneficial influence in increasing
the professionalism of the academic community, but it needs to
remain under the control of the academic profession and it should
not become excessively bureaucratic. In our view the ILT is the
appropriate focus for educational inputs into curricular developments.
It is to be hoped that within a few years it will become as important
to the profession of university teaching as are the Royal Colleges
in Medicine and Surgery and the various professional associations
in Engineering Law, Accountancy and many others. A Charter from
the Privy Council would help boost the standing of the Institute.
Professor G Williams,
Centre for Higher Education Studies,
Institute of Education
January 2000
| 
