UK universities face biggest shake-up for decades

UK universities face their biggest shake-up in decades under plans for a further shift towards a market approach announced in a government consultation on 6 November.

A new regime designed to reward good teaching will allow high-performing universities to increase their tuition fees by the rate of inflation, according to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills Green Paper Fulfilling our Potential: Teaching excellence, social mobility and student choice.

Fees have been frozen at a maximum of £9,000 (US$13,550) a year since 2012, when the government raised the cap from just over £3,000. Surveys show that all but a handful of universities are applying the maximum fee to all their courses.

The Department says the proposals will “put students at the heart of higher education”.

Under the new Teaching Excellence Framework, universities and their departments will be graded, using published data from surveys of student satisfaction, student retention rates, and graduate employment rates, and other sources.

Universities and Science Minister Jo Johnson said: “Our ambition is to drive up the quality of teaching in our universities to ensure students and taxpayers get value for money and employers get graduates with the skills they need.”

The proposals include the abolition of the Higher Education Funding Council for England, or HEFCE, and the Office for Fair Access, and the creation of a single regulator of universities called the Office for Students, or OfS.

The Green Paper says that the new body will have a statutory duty “to promote the interests of students to ensure that the OfS considers issues primarily from the point of view of students, not providers”.

The “majority” of HEFCE’s current functions would transfer to the new regulator.

HEFCE, the successor to the University Grants Committee, established in 1918 to create a buffer between individual universities and government, has had the role of distributing teaching funds to the universities within a total amount determined by government.

While ministers have indicated the government’s priorities, the decisions have been taken by HEFCE operating at arms’ length from Whitehall.

The OfS would be an “arm’s-length public body” with duties including “operating the entry gateway” to the sector for private providers; “assuring baseline quality”; running the Teaching Excellence Framework; “widening access and success for disadvantaged students”; “ensuring student protection”; and “assuring financial sustainability, management and good governance”.

OfS will “protect the institutional autonomy and academic freedom that has underpinned the success of English higher education", the Green Paper says.

How the teaching grant will be distributed is fundamental to the principle of ministers’ separation from allocation decisions and is crucial to the credibility of the proposals.

One proposal is for officials from the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills to “determine a formula for allocating teaching grants”, while the alternative is for the OfS to take responsibility for the allocation formulas, with the Student Loans Company or “another funding body” making the payments.

The first option, the Green Paper says, will “enable ministers to strengthen incentives for higher education provision that supports the needs of the economy".

“A duty to protect academic freedom and institutional autonomy would ensure that ministers and officials could not single out specific institutions and this could be supported with an independent advisory committee.”

This may not be enough to satisfy suspicious academics who fear government interference.

Dame Julia Goodfellow, president of Universities UK and vice-chancellor of the University of Kent, said: “We welcome the Green Paper’s emphasis on protecting the interests of students and demonstrating the value of a university education.”

But she added: “With a wide range of issues covered in the paper, we will be considering carefully the complex, but vitally important, areas such as how funding and regulatory powers are integrated, the future of the sector bodies and their relationship to government, and how the Green Paper protects the autonomy of our world-class university sector.”

And Wendy Piatt, director general of the Russell Group of leading research-intensive universities, said: “The autonomy of our universities is crucial to their success. It is vital that any regulation is risk-based and proportionate and does not add to the current burden or stifle innovation.”

Control of fees cap

The proposals also include removing the control of parliament over the cap on tuition fees and handing it to the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, the senior minister responsible for universities.

The Teaching Excellence Framework, which mirrors the Research Excellence Framework, will encourage a greater focus on high quality teaching and graduate employment prospects, and is intended to drive up teaching standards and give students more information.

The government also seeks wider participation for students from disadvantaged backgrounds and encourages providers to increase focus on supporting all students through their course and into employment or further study.

A new social mobility advisory group, reporting to Universities and Science Minister Jo Johnson, would be tasked with drawing up a plan to meet Prime Minister David Cameron’s ambitions to increase the proportion of disadvantaged students entering higher education and increase the number of BME students by 20% by 2020.

The government is keen to see new players in the higher education market and the Green Paper would make it easier for them to establish themselves, with quicker access to student funding and “no cap on student numbers”.

New players in the market

The requirement for institutions to have a certain number of students before they can become universities could be ended, so that it would be quicker and simpler to get degree awarding powers.

Johnson said: “We must do more to ensure that the time and money students invest in higher education is well spent.

“The new Office for Students would have a clear remit to champion value for money and the student interest in its decision-making. And by opening up the sector to new universities and colleges, students will have more choice than ever when they come to apply to university.”

A consultation on the proposals in the Green Paper opens today and will run for 10 weeks, closing on 15 January 2016.