King's College London

Michael Shattock is a Visiting Professor of Higher Education, UCL, and Honorary Research Fellow, Department of Education, University of Oxford.

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The UK approach to governing/administering higher and further education is running out of road. A continuing process of centralising governance has extended over a period of 100 years, beginning with the establishment of the University Grants Committee in 1919 to the later transfer of the polytechnics from local authority control and the ‘nationalisation’ of further education. From 1992, however, we have seen decentralisation to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland (populations of 3.3 million, 5.5 million and 1 million respectively, leaving 56 million, 85 per cent of the population, governed as a single entity in England). It is now time to consider decentralising the policy decision-making process in England, and for the following main reasons:

1. Management/policy overload

Demography tells us that over the next six or seven years we may expect, on current trends, for post-secondary numbers to expand by 150,000.[i] According to the precedent of the mid-1980s, numbers will not then necessarily fall in line with demography but, on the contrary, may be maintained by rising participation. The fate of the forecasts in the Department for Education and Science green paper of 1985 should be enough to warn the Treasury not to plan on ‘tunnelling through the hump’ as it mistakenly attempted to do then. If there is a sense of policy overload now in the central bodies, the Office for Students (OfS) and the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA), it will be greatly increased, with serious consequences for the two sectors if no action is taken. Even now the House of Lords and most commentators would suggest that the HE sector is too heavily and bureaucratically regulated and insufficiently independent of central government. The same criticisms could be made in the FE sector. In both cases the decision-making bodies are too distant to be effective in the local or regional situation.

2. Tertiary education

The needs of the country both economically and educationally have changed since the 1990s and require more diversified HE/FE systems working together. The development of apprenticeship education provides a good example. The OfS and ESFA operate entirely separately and have shown little signs of creating joint policy initiatives. The situation points strongly towards jettisoning the concepts of HE and FE and substituting that of tertiary education, where the two sectors are governed/administered together (with the individual institutional status and legal identity of universities and colleges retained). Research evidence suggests that there is a growing collaboration between institutions in the two sectors. Shattock and Hunt[ii] show that on a 45 per cent return, 89 per cent of UK colleges had joint arrangements or direct partnerships with at least one university and that 95 universities, over half of UK universities, were involved.[iii]

The strongest argument for unifying HE and FE is the national need for reducing local and regional inequalities. The English Indices for Deprivation for 2019 show that, of 317 Local Authority Districts in England, 260 have at least one of the 20 per cent most deprived areas within their boundaries.[iv] Pockets of social and economic deprivation are thus spread across the country. FE colleges have a much better reach into these communities than universities and can make more flexible education offers. They and the universities should be strongly encouraged to deliver together to the diversified workforce needs that are on the horizon, as well as to a ‘levelling up’ of communities. This process could only be managed successfully in a regionalised system – a merger of HE and FE in England on a centralised basis would perpetuate the stifling of local and regional vitality and initiative.

3. Regional policy deficit

The regional economist Professor Philip McCann, in a much-quoted statement, says that ‘the UK has the greatest spatial inequality in Europe’,[v] a view endorsed by IPPR North[vi] and the Levelling Up White Paper.[vii] Both main political parties in England have committed themselves to new regional governance structures with Labour promising ‘full devolution’; around 15 or so metro mayors and combined authorities are already established or are in gestation. This structure provides a constitutional framework for a revision of the role of regions in respect to HE and FE. Labour’s plans, however, are to concentrate devolution on infrastructure, transport, skills and employment support, thus maintaining a divisive separation of skills training from further and higher education and ignoring the desirability of integrating educational planning and development into regional economic strategies. This may be a reflection of the previous government's mistaken view that ‘levelling up’ is simply a question of making capital grants to ‘left behind’ towns and cities or perhaps of opposition within Whitehall. The disparities of participation in education will not be addressed with any chance of success unless they are tackled at the local or regional level and unless concerns about the provision of human capital are integrated with capital investment in infrastructure.

It is easy to forget that we already have workable precedents for decentralisation in the devolution to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. It is no accident that Wales has already gone tertiary, Scotland is moving in that direction and even Northern Ireland is talking about it. In 1992 there were all sorts of doubts voiced about how this would affect HE but it could be argued that in all three cases the institutions and the systems are now stronger (though steep reductions in government funding are currently a concern in Scotland). The populations of Greater Manchester or the West Midlands, with West Yorkshire only a little behind, are analogous with that of Wales; London, of course, is far greater. There is no reason to think that these and other regions, not yet established, do not have the capacity to take responsibility for a regionalised tertiary education system as being established in Wales or in prospect in the other nations.

Realising the changes

Realising the changes implied by the above, urgent though they are, cannot be achieved overnight. Let us start with the universities themselves: the UPP Foundation rightly says that ‘universities have lost some of their tangible connections to their place’ and ‘that UK policy has been relatively agnostic territorially for many years’.[viii] The centralisation of bureaucracy in England (particularly under the OfS), the reputational effects of national and international ranking tables, the impact of the REF and, over an even longer term, the influence of UCCA/UCAS have reshaped the priorities of universities which, except for the 1960s New Universities, were all founded directly by local communities. On grounds of ‘efficiency’, and under pressure from central bodies (eg the 1985 Jarratt Report[ix] and 1997 Dearing Report[x]), universities have abolished meetings of their courts (annual representative meetings with members of local and regional communities) and reduced their governing body membership by discontinuing local representation and concentrating on ‘professionalising’ membership by importing members with relevant national experience in finance and legal affairs. Many universities have been energetic in addressing local or regional projects but these have not necessarily been integrated with regional economic and social development planning. Regions have no locus in FE or HE national planning at a time of widening disparities in regional wealth and productivity.

The establishment of a network of regional authorities with real decision-making powers offers a constitutional framework within which the decentralisation of tertiary education can be developed. It does, however, offer a complex reorientation of the current governance structure. In two respects there need be no change: research should remain under central policy control and a regulator with quality assurance functions would continue to be necessary. The transfer of other central responsibilities would, however, need to be phased: only a minority of combined authorities have yet to be established and some may be too small in population terms to justify on their own the management of a tertiary education system. Moreover, some time will be required to assemble appropriately experienced staff. There would thus be advantage in proceeding with two or three of the largest regions first to iron out any difficulties. These would certainly include finance, transfers from the Department for Education budget and the adoption of some Barnett-type formula. New machinery would also be necessary at the regional authority level to establish intermediary committees to interface with the regional authority and to protect the autonomy of the institutions. There would also be a good case to establish a joint regional authorities committee, analogous to the joint Lander committee in Germany, to represent the common interests of the authorities to government. There are undoubtedly other ways in which regions might be given responsibility for the implementation of tertiary education in their region, but this seems to me to be the most straightforward.

A concern among many universities in England about decentralising responsibility for a tertiary system to regions might be that it would be a threat to the profile of their institutions internationally and would weaken their roles nationally and at Westminster. On the first, there is no evidence that this has been the case in respect to universities in Wales and Scotland. Indeed, it could be argued that the Russell Group universities in these nations have benefitted because of the greater identification with their location. On the second, the roles of Universities UK and the ‘mission’ groups would be unchanged, but on some issues the support of a powerful metro mayor might carry more political weight.

Regions are key in reconnecting HE and FE with society on the ground. It is their vitality and initiative that can be crucial in giving new purpose to the divided systems we have at the moment. In political terms we are in what we might describe as a ‘plastic’ period, where a change of government has just occurred and policies are more open to review. The opportunity to raise the importance of the regional role in a tertiary system should be seized upon and plans to legislate for regional devolution should be flexible so that FE and HE can be incorporated in due course. The danger is that with other priorities the present structures in FE and HE will remain frozen and ideas for change will lack purchase. The establishment of an effective tertiary education system and the regionalisation of the system in England would be transformative educationally, socially and economically.

[i] London Economics. (2023). Forecasting the potential Exchequer cost of the English HE funding system. Summary of findings for the Association of Colleges. https://d4hfzltwt4wv7.cloudfront.net/uploads/files/Forecasting-the-cost-of-the-English-HE-funding-system.pdf

[ii] Shattock, M. and Hunt, S. (2021). Intersectoral relationships within higher education: the FE/HE interface in the UK. Centre for Global Higher Education Working Paper Series (no. 70). Centre for Global Higher Education, Department of Education, University of Oxford. https://www.researchcghe.org/wp-content/uploads/migrate/publications/workingpaper70.pdf

[iii] Shattock, M. and Horvath, A. (2023). Universities and Regions: The Impact of Locality and Region on University Governance and Strategies London: Bloomsbury.

[iv] Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. (2019). The English Indices of Deprivation 2019. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/english-indices-of-deprivation-2019

[v] McCann, P. (2019). Perceptions of regional inequality and the geography of discontent: insights from the UK. Regional Studies, 54(2), 256–267. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2019.1619928

[vi] Webb, J., Johns, M., Roscoe, E., Giovannini, A., Qureshi, A. and Baldini, R. (2022). State of the North 2021/22: Powering northern excellence. Institute for Public Policy Research. https://ippr-org.files.svdcdn.com/production/Downloads/1642509678_sotn-2021-22-jan-22.pdf

[vii] Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. (2022). Levelling Up in the United Kingdom, Policy Paper CP 604 London, para 1.2.1. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/levelling-up-the-united-kingdom

[viii] UPP Foundation Civic University Commission. (2019). Truly Civic: Strengthening the connection between universities and their places. https://upp-foundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Civic-University-Commission-Final-Report.pdf

[ix] CVCP. (1985). Report of the Steering Committee for Efficiency Studies in Universities. https://education-uk.org/documents/jarratt1985/index.html

[x] The National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education. ‘Higher Education in the learning society.
Main Report’ Dearing Report (1997) (education-uk.org)