“The Governor View” – The Post-16 Education and Skills White Paper

The White Paper, produced by the departments of education, work and pensions and science, innovation and technology, contains a raft of policies aimed at higher education, covering everything from tuition fee levels, quality assurance and research, to international students, skills and collaboration.

It points to a new focus on “strengthening” governance capabilities and refers specifically to the need to improve the effectiveness of governing bodies.

Boards, it says, need to deliver diverse skills, strong financial planning and management and robust challenge to the executive.

Ensuring the right mix of people on the board has been a major preoccupation in recent years, with institutions drawing up skills matrixes and hiring specialist agencies to help with diverse recruitment.

As the vice chair of a new university in central England puts it, it is a “continuous endeavour”.

“We are always asking ‘have we got the skills we need?’ and we do that more formally about twice a year. There is churn on the board and we are always looking at filling our gaps in expertise.”

This governor points out that unlike big city institutions, her university, and others like it, might not have a surfeit of skills on their doorstep, although the ability to run remote meetings has helped cast the net wider.

The White Paper emphasises the importance of “challenge” on boards – a word that the Office for Students uses frequently in relation to governance.

One governor described relationships on her board as “convivial” but insists this is not a barrier to challenge. She cites a board member from the banking industry who regularly questions the university’s pension provision.

“She is really challenging us on why are we still in the Teachers Pension Scheme and why we don’t create another one,” she said.

The expectations of governors has changed “massively” in recent years, according to one governor. Another noted that not a week goes by without “some kind of meeting about some kind of paper or policy”.

“That is fine, but it wasn’t always thus and the question is, will it become unsustainable?” she said. “If the government and OfS focus on governance leads to increasing demands then that is a conversation that is going to be had.”

One area of particular interest and some concern in the White Paper is the plan to tie future tuition fee uplifts to institutions meeting “a higher quality threshold” through the OfS quality regime.

The details of that regime are yet to be fixed. An OfS consultation on reforms to quality regulation, which brings together the B3 conditions and the new iteration of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), closes on 11 December.

What it proposes is an assessment of quality based on two aspects: student experience and student outcomes. All institutions registered with the OfS would receive a rating of gold, silver, bronze or requires improvement for each aspect, and an overall rating based on the lower of the two ratings. In the previous TEF, the bronze, silver and gold categories signified degrees of excellence above the minimum. In the new regime, bronze means a provider is only delivering the minimum level of quality.

A board member of an institution with a very good employability record fears that the proposal to include salary levels three years after graduation in the “outcomes” measure will penalise the provider.

“We train a lot of nursers and teachers and some of our primary school teachers don’t even reach the threshold with their starting salaries,” she said. “These are local jobs, many in the public sector. We have to make sure that the quality regime does not get reduced to a salary metric, otherwise what is going to happen to regional universities and the public sector?”

While there is undoubtedly a reputational risk around the gold, silver, bronze and ‘requires improvement’ rating system, the bigger problem is the linking of the fee uplift to the quality regulation – not only in potentially reduced fees but also in its possible impact on student recruitment.

One governor commented: “If you are student, noticing a gold, silver or bronze is probably not a huge part of the decision making,” she said. “But if you notice that the course you want to do is suddenly cheaper somewhere, you might go “oh, that will link to quality and what does that say about this course?”.

The possible financial repercussions of receiving a poor quality rating will focus minds like never before, according to a Russell Group institution board member who has recently stepped down.

“Quality assurance can depend on how academic board/senate and the governing board get on. Do governors get good reports and is there monitoring, for instance,” he said. “But there are a lot of boards which have concentrated on appointing lay members for their financial, labour market or strategic acumen who don’t necessarily understand the process of teaching and learning. This link between fee levels and quality will make board members sit up and take notice of that aspect.”

Research is another key focus of the White Paper. The document says, among other things, that research grant cost recovery will be improved, which may result in” funding a lower volume of research but at a more sustainable level”.

It asks providers to specialise more and says that, over time, there will be fewer broad generalist providers and more specialists, including specialists in teaching only, specialists in research, and some institutions who specialise in teaching with applied research in specific disciplines.

Some governors were worried and confused by the call for greater specialisation.

“This depends on how you define specialisation and the white paper does not offer a definition,” said one board member. “What we don’t want to see is the kind of specialisation which means the research intensives are the ones that government funds and the rest are not. Here, we see ourselves as a specialist in our region, which needs that broad sweep of disciplines, because where will students go if we don’t do it?”

She said the fear is that the government is trying to put universities into different kinds of boxes.

“We might never be a Russell Group university, but it is important that our researchers get to work on areas of law and business, for instance, which could perhaps be the types of courses that the government wants to see phased out of those universities,” she said. “We have a civic duty and if the government really believes in equality, it doesn’t just stop at students getting into university, it also means that these students, who are paying the same tuition fees, have a right to be taught by research informed lecturers. This is important if you care about quality too.”

There is little explanation in the white paper of how the sector brings about a landscape with “fewer broad generalist providers” and what its impact on ‘cold spots’ would be, for instance, says a former governor.

For one governor though, more specialisation could be worthwhile if “the government is prepared to incentivise what it wants to see”.

“It’s probably an area where it makes sense for governors to understand where the opportunities might be,” she said.

Incentives are also likely to be needed for institutions to fully embrace the skill agenda and the lifelong learning entitlement (LLE).

At a recent board development session on the white paper at an institution in central England, governors had a “very pragmatic discussion” about what the provider could realistically explore.

“What we do very well is FE partnerships; we work with a number of colleges and we think there is potential there to do more,” said a board member. “But as governors of a small university, we have got to realise we can’t tick all the boxes and you have to concentrate on what you can do and do it well.”

She said that the LLE “excites the board” but there are concerns. Will the professional bodies that accredit many of the providers’ courses, do the same for level 4 and 5 courses, for instance?

A governor of a university in the north is also cautious. She said that for institutions with a big focus on skills and combining vocational and academic, there may be some natural alignment and mission fit, but at others, governors have to be measured in responding to a policy “where there is no financial or reputational gain.”

The LLE and lower level skills are unlikely to “mean much to research intensive universities”, according to a former Russell Group governor: “They are still mainly concerned with full-time, three year undergraduates and I can’t see that changing – particularly when there is no shortage of supply of these students for these institutions,” he said. “It may hold some opportunities for lower tariff institutions and present them with some capacity to reinvigorate.”

Collaboration, which the White Paper promotes, is yet another area that governors identify as one that is being talked about, without much evidence of action.

“A lot of institutions are waiting to see how it plays out elsewhere,” says a governor at a post-1992 institution. “It introduces a level of risk in an environment that is risky anyway at the moment. There may be a few careful moves underway but the system is still set up as a market so it is a case of explore, but carefully.”

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