Say hello, wave goodbye

UCAS release regular statistics on applications and entry to UK universities, and there’s some really interesting data available to download.  One aspect that caught my eye recently was the growth in the number of institutions which recruit through UCAS:

Year of entry	Institutions
2008-09	307
2009-10	306
2010-11	306
2011-12	302
2012-13	320
2013-14	361

Aha! I thought – that’ll be the growth in alternative providers. But I looked at the data more closely and found that it wasn’t as simple as that.

Firstly, the data show more entry to and exit from the UCAS sector than I’d expected:

	2013-14	2012-13	2011-12	2010-11	2009-10
Total institutions	361	320	302	306	306
Total new this year	45	24	7	12	8
Total gone from year before	4	6	10	12	9

In total, 402 establishments had recruited through UCAS in the period.

Secondly, the new entrants and leavers were quite varied:

	Coming				Going
	Renaming	FE	HE	Alternative	FE	HE	Alternative
2009-10	1	2	3	3	3	2	1
2010-11	6	6	2	1	4	1	1
2011-12	1	2	0	3	5	1	1
2012-13	2	11	0	8	4	0	0
2013-14	2	36	1	6	0	2	0

(The numbers don’t quite tally because some of the changes happened over several academic years, with parallel running in the UCAS lists)

My conclusions? Firstly, the growth in ‘HE in FE’ Colleges having direct entry through UCAS is likely to be connected to the legislative and regulatory changes which came about in 2010-11 as a result of the coalition government’s changes.  But I suspect that it is too early (and the data set here is too small an evidence base) to make any larger prognostications.

Secondly, there is a real growth in alternative providers.  Here is a little more data, showing total UCAS acceptances by providers for the past five sessions, with providers analysed into higher education institutions, further education colleges offering HE, and alternative HE providers:

	2009-10	2010-11	2011-12	2012-13	2013-14
HEIs	451,040	461,305	482,035	428,115	465,380
FECs	18,155	16,735	19,710	18,675	20,235
Alternative	705	1200	2560	2095	3090
Total	469,900	479,240	504,305	448,885	488,705

And in percentages:

	2009-10	2010-11	2011-12	2012-13	2013-14
HEIs	95.99%	96.26%	95.58%	95.37%	95.23%
FECs	3.86%	3.49%	3.91%	4.16%	4.14%
Alternative	0.15%	0.25%	0.51%	0.47%	0.63%
Total	100.00%	100.00%	100.00%	100.00%	100.00%

And my final conclusion? There’s a real opportunity for the Times Higher to run a ‘births, marriages and deaths’ column: only 267 of the 402 establishments hadn’t stopped or started using UCAS during the period.

Who Pays?

Q: What’s green, five inches long, and takes an hour to drink?
A: A grant cheque!

I was reminded of this student joke from the 1980’s by Universities UK’s establishment, announced today, of a Student Funding Panel “to consider the design of the current student fees and loans system in England, and to make recommendations on its future development.” The underlying story: universities know that the current system is unsustainable, certainly politically and possibly economically, and want to play a part in fixing the problem.

And it’s obviously a big problem. Before the 2010 election universities also had concerns about finances, but it was individual mission groups that did the lobbying, not the sector as a whole. Perhaps that is one lesson from 2010, Browne and where we ended up with the fees system. Long-term matters are too important to be left to the randomness of coalition negotiations, and universities speaking with one voice have a greater chance of being heard.

A lot was made on the Today programme this morning about the problem of cost to the public purse, so I thought I’d take a look at what the issues are. It isn’t as simple as finding the cheapest option.

There’s a long history to this question. Go back to the 1970’s and there were no undergraduate tuition fees. And local authorities provided grants to students at universities to cover living costs. By the mid 1980’s the effect of cuts in local government funding meant that student grants were worth less and less (hence the joke I opened with), and as a student you faced three options: rely on your parents or family for funding; get a job; or go into debt. Or all three, as I managed to do.

The introduction of student loans in the early 1990’s provided an alternative to relying on funding from families, which will have helped some people, but another problem was brewing. The UK Government was pursuing a policy of expanding higher education, but on the cheap, meaning that for some universities – and especially for the new universities – the amount of funding they had per student (the unit of resource) was declining.

To address this, tuition fees for home undergraduate students were introduced in 1998, at £1,200 per year. This means that state funding via the national higher education funding councils was supplemented by money from students themselves. (A cautionary note about devolution: different arrangements apply in some respects to the devolved administrations. Another post, another day, I’ll look at this in detail. But the underlying issue – how much do good universities need to operate, and who pays? – affects all parts of the UK.)

And a few years later it was clear that this hadn’t solved the problem. Students were still in debt and finding jobs whilst studying; universities’ finances were in a bad state. In 2004 the government again passed legislation, amidst much controversy, to grow the student contribution, to £3,000 per year. This took effect from 2006.

And then guess what? A few years later universities were saying that the problem still wasn’t solved. And they were right. Further student expansion had again eroded the unit of resource; and universities needed investment in their buildings and other infrastructure to keep standards high. Following much lobbying Lord Browne was asked to chair a group to think about it, make recommendations, and report after the 2010 election. Thus, supposedly, removing student fees and university funding as an electoral issue. Nick Clegg can tell you how well that turned out.

So what was the 2010 settlement? Dramatic reductions in direct state funding to universities, coupled with increased access to loans for living costs, and much higher maximum tuition fees. And, significantly, an accounting trick which took state-backed student borrowing out of the government’s current spending. This is what the current hoo-ha about default rates is about: estimates of non-repayment by graduates are higher now than they were when the system was introduced, meaning that it costs Future Us more than Past Us thought that it would. But this depends on forecasts based on current levels of graduate employment and salary, which are subject to change. Present Us doesn’t really know how much Future Us will pay. And some Present Us-es would like other Present Us-es to be the Future Us-es that pay more. While other Present Us-es think that Future Us shouldn’t bear the cost, but that Present Us should. And a lot of those Present Us-es are the Future Us-es that the other Present Us-es think should bear more of the cost. Clear now?

And now let me bring in an expert view. I was fortunate to attend, a couple of weeks ago, a debate organised by the Institute of Welsh Affairs. You can see the debate again here. The panel included Professor Nick Barr of the LSE, who knows more about the topic of student fees and loans than anyone else in the world. Probably. And he was very erudite on the topic. (In a nutshell: the 2004 system was well designed, the 2010 system cannot be described using words which are fit to write in this blog a least.) But what I thought was interesting was that he went beyond the economic into a political judgement: the reason universities need to be able to charge fees is that they can’t rely on governments to fund them properly. And looking at the history, you can see his point: four attempts to reform student and university finance, and none of them lasted for more than a few years. About the life of a parliament. Short-term solutions don’t work very well for long-term issues.

The hope is clearly to have a grown-up conversation about how to fund universities. The UUK panel has VC’s from old and new universities, and is inviting contributions from any interested parties. It is only focused on England, but will have an effect on Wales and Scotland. The Institute of Fiscal Studies, whose research underpins the launch, is on board. These are good signs.

But my prediction is for another fudge: a solution which works for a few years and then leaves a mess for the next parliament to deal with. Why am I so cynical? You can’t get consensus without all political parties coming on board. There’s an election coming, there’s the unpredictable factors of UKIP and the fall out for the LibDems following their tuition fee promise in 2010. Who’d believe a politician now about student funding? David Blunkett, as Education Secretary in 1997, cherry-picked from Lord Dearing's recommendations, which were presented as a coherent package. The current coalition cherry-picked from Lord Browne's recommendations, which were presented as a coherent package. Do we really think that third time round government wouldn't do just the same?

And the sad thing is that this really matters. To lots of individual students. To the quality and sustainability of lots of UK universities. To the prosperity of the whole country. I’ve no solution in this blog post. Perhaps another day.

Why are students so hard to count?

A common phenomenon in universities is the argument about data, and in particular differences between the number of students a department thinks it has, and the number of students that ‘the university’ thinks the department has. Let’s set aside for a moment the unworthy suspicion that such arguments are a smokescreen to disguise other issues. Why is it so hard to get student data right?

One reason is the specificity with which student data is defined. If you’re counting students to work out what size classroom to put a course in, then you need to know how many people it is (headcount) and how many are following that course. If you’re counting for budgeting purposes you might prefer full-time-equivalent (fte) and only those that are enrolled and paying fees. (And, by the way, there are students who are following courses who haven’t enrolled or haven’t paid fees.) The perspectives about the right data differ depending on need. And if you think about students who might be re-sitting a module or a year; or who might be undertaking placement work for all or some of their study; or who might be part-time at the moment but in a broadly full-time pattern of study; or many other possibilities, then you can see that there’s a lot of detail to be argued over.

Another, related, reason is that data is often collected by a university to satisfy the demands of an external return – from HESA, for instance, or from a funding council. The definitions used in such collections can be abstruse, to say the best. For instance, a few years ago there was a change in the way that taught postgraduate students were counted for funding purposes, meaning that students might be very present in a university – enrolled, having tutorials, using library facilities – but would be counted as zero fte for funding purposes. They weren’t being ignored – they’d have been accounted for in a previous year’s return – but a data set used for an external return is not then comparable directly with the reality of the institution. Sometimes an almost theological attention to the detail of definitions and rules is needed.

A third, big, reason, is life itself. The model whereby a cohort of students enrols in September and pursues study diligently through the year is just that: a model. In reality people come and go – because of funding, because of family reasons, because they themselves are not sure if the course they are following is right for them. Universities ask students to inform them when they have a change in circumstances or attendance, and so students sometimes do this. And it makes the record a fluid thing. A count of students in the morning may not be the same as a cont taken that afternoon – it isn’t a data problem, it’s life.

A fourth reason is that data systems are complex things. In any reasonably large university there will be many people who interact with students and who record the transactions on the student record system. These record systems have a lot of fields (check out the HESA list of fields for the student return if you don’t believe me). There’s a lot of scope for errors. Nowadays systems do have checks within them, but they aren’t foolproof – the human capacity to find new ways to input data is truly wonderful. (For instance, I once was supported by a temporary PA, who was ordering stationery for me. The finance system required cost codes and account codes, and as this person didn’t have access to the manual, the approach used was to put in random numbers ‘til it worked. I got the stationery, for sure, but it probably didn’t help the management accountants ...)

So what to do about this? Here are three approaches which can help.

Firstly, get in the habit of specifying exactly what data you need. Precisely. Planning and data teams can help by giving menus of data, so users have the knowledge to ask precisely. You’ll reduce apparent data errors this way, but more importantly you’ll promote the idea that precision of specification matters. More sophisticated data users can then have more sophisticated arguments.

Secondly, and related, don’t make data collection and submission the business only of a few people. It can be easy for those who make external returns appear as the guardians of secret and arcane knowledge. (Is a countable year one of my three score and ten?) Not everyone will want to engage with the detail of the HESA return, but if more people know that there is a specific coding, and that it can be found (HESA are very good and transparent) then more people might recognise that what they input does matter.

Thirdly, help the people who collect and own the data in your university to work together. Data quality isn’t about doing a hard sum, it’s more like weeding a vegetable patch. Unless you check regularly and are willing to get your hands dirty, then data errors will occur. Give someone the role of overseeing data quality (often the planning function will do this) and ensure that they bring the data owners together regularly. The more a sense of team develops here, the better your data quality will be, and the fewer arguments you will have.

Happy Birthday, Janet

(Or, five things you need to think about to make a shared service idea work)

Janet – the Joint Academic Network – is thirty this month. There’s a website giving some of the history of Janet, and fascinating it is. (I particularly like the second upgrade to a whopping 256kb/s. At the time this would have been spectacularly fast – but my! how things have changed.)

It’s a good example of a shared service. Undoubtedly Janet provided staff with connectivity on a uniform and high quality basis which they wouldn’t otherwise have had, and thereby enabled collaboration between universities. This makes it very important: the UK’s universities are very impressive internationally, and it’s only by making the most of our strengths that they can continue to be so.

Janet’s just one of the shared services in higher education which makes a positive difference. Other examples of sector-wide shared services include UCAS and the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education. And smaller groups of universities collaborate: internal audit services such as UNIAC or the Kingston City Group; and there’s a fascinating development in Wales: the Wales Higher Education Library Forum (WHELF), which includes all HEI’s in Wales, the National Library of Wales, and NHS libraries in Wales, is jointly procuring a library management system. These are all good things which grow the capacity of individual universities, and which enable more value to be had for less money – what’s not to like?

And for this reason shared services have been very popular with governments and funding councils. But it’s felt to me that the promise has never been fully realised. The 2012 Finance Act included provision for cost-sharing groups to have VAT exemption, which removed one barrier. But there are others, more practical, about managing the transition to a shared service. Here are five things which you should think about, if considering whether a shared service approach might work for you.

How core is the service to your operation? If you share the service you inevitably lose some control, whether it’s over the details of things are managed and prioritisation when things get tough, or whether it’s in the specification and working out what matters in designing the shared service in the first place. If the service that you’re thinking of sharing is critical to your offer – because it’s a fundamental building block, or because the specific quality, price or location matter to those who you serve, think hard about whether sharing is right for you. It’s an expensive mistake to rectify later.

How stable is the environment for the service? Sharing is a long-term activity, and if there’s foreseeable disruption round the corner, you need to factor this into your considerations. Many shared services have at their heart a common database or IT system for managing processes. How would the model look if the technology underpinning it changed completely? In the same way that cloud computing changed fundamentally the business model of many organisations in the field, so other technological (or legislative) changes will make a difference too. This need not be a show stopper, but time spent thinking about the core of the shared business model and how stable this is will be time well spent.

What is the business model? There are many activities in universities which get cheaper and better by being larger – think about the many processes which involve bulk handling of data, and once you’ve got the workflow it doesn’t cost much for a computer to repeat a calculation or a process. But if this is true for universities it is true for other sectors as well. Take payroll, for example: if several universities shared their payroll operation then the unit cost of managing a salary payment would certainly be cheaper. But banks and other commercial providers are managing payroll systems which pay millions of people every month: that’ll be cheaper still. Unless a shared service provides a benefit which is unique to the sector, then it’s quite likely that the financial savings will be outweighed by those available by looking at a different sort of provision. And that’s a big impact upon the business case.

Are you doing it for efficiency or for service quality? Shared services can deliver either, but if you’re thinking of sharing an existing service then you need to be very clear about this. You’ll have staff, buildings, customers and systems involved in what you currently do, and thinking about the change that a shared service will mean for them, thinking about how you’ll manage this, and whether the efficiency savings will really materialise is an important exercise. You’ll get more buy-in from staff and customers if you’re talking about making things better; you’ll have a stronger business case if you’re talking about efficiencies and cost saving. And it’s really hard to do both at the same time.

Do the sharers have the commitment to learn to trust each other? The human dimension is really important, and easy for management teams to overlook. Put simply, the people who will make this work come from all of the different sharing organisations, and unless they trust each other enough to work openly, honestly, and without a hidden agenda, then even mighty efforts can be frustrated. Time spent at the outset of a shared service project in bringing teams together, letting them get to know each other, and learning to work well, is critical to the project’s success. Remember the forming, storming, norming and performing model for team-building? You need to go through all four stages, and do so consciously. Make sure that it’s someone’s job to see that this happens, and listen to their concerns.

Don’t let these issues put you off – the benefits of good shared services are real and long lasting. But if it was easy, there’d be more of them.

Don't tell him, Pike

A couple of wise souls I follow on Twitter observed last week that there was a lot of activity from HEFCE and on Higher Education generally:

@registrarism: There really are a lot of #HigherEd posts being pushed out today

@SophieBowen1: Are staff at HEFCE about to go on hols? Large number of reports out today ...

And it seems to be true. One recent HEFCE post that caught my eye – but not picked up by the twittersphere that I could tell – was Circular Letter 06/2016 – Supporting Public Accountability: presenting income and expenditure income to current students.

This is the outcome of some work done by HEFCE, BUFDG and the NUS on students’ desire to know more about what universities spend their money on, and a finding that

of 2,400 current students conducted by NUS Research Services ... there was significant interest in this type of information but that:

• Of the students who looked for this information, 40 per cent were unable to find it.

• Once the information was found, 44 per cent of students reported that the format it was presented in was difficult to understand.

Not a surprising finding – I have often wondered at the number of staff in universities who aren’t familiar with financial statements, so why should the students fare better?

The guidance is clear enough:

The research identified several priorities for improving the presentation of financial information for students:

• It needs to provide a useful but not overly complex level of detail.

• It needs to be accessible to students who may not have expertise in interpreting financial information.

• It needs to be up-to-date.

• It needs to be clearly signposted on institutional web-sites (which are where students look for it), with technical language clearly explained.

And the actions also admirably clear:

Institutions are asked to identify their solution by the end of October 2014, ready to publish information from their 2013-14 audited financial accounts by January 2015. 

It’s unquestionably a good thing that universities are encouraged to work with their students’ unions to agree an approach. But I found the examples interesting.

Four approaches were suggested:

• Actual numbers and a narrative
• A pie chart of expenditure, by category (no figures)
• A bar chart of expenditure
• An infographic

These range from minimal data but really clearly presented for accountability (that is, the actual numbers and narrative) through to confusing presentation (the infographic) but with a lot more detail and granularity in there. I’m not clever enough with pdf to export the contents to the blog post, but have a look and see what you think. To me, the guidance presents clarity and content as if there’s a trade-off between these two aims.

Why are students interested? Well, my guess is that it isn’t idle curiosity but all because students want to understand the value that they’re getting. A Sir Humphrey quote from Yes Minister is apposite here:

We should always tell the press freely and frankly anything that they could easily find out some other way

It’s all in the annual accounts anyway. My message to universities would be, work sincerely with your students’ unions, agree a format which makes sense, but don’t try to conceal anything with a fancy chart. Authenticity and transparency with your students will be better in the long run, even if you don’t like it now.

The Customer is Always Right

My Student Power post on Monday gives me a bit of theme for today – the student as consumer. There have been a couple of straws in the wind about changing habits and expectations. And my expectation is that universities will have to adapt.

Firstly, the Office for Fair Trading (OFT), with its recent report into Universities Terms and Conditions. This looks at how some universities use academic sanctions (ie non-progression between years; or withholding exam results) as part of their strategy to deal with debt owed by students for non-academic matters (eg halls fees; library fines). Another day I will post on the report itself, and implications for ‘the student contract’. What is interesting for me, on this occasion, is the focus on student as consumer, and the clarity with which consumer protection legislation applies.

The report identified the following legislation as relevant:

• the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999 ('UTCCRs')
• the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977 ('UCTA')
• the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 ('CPRs').

That’ll be some new acronyms for university administrators to get their heads around. And consumer protection legislation is a long way from academic matters not being justiciable in the courts.

The OFT also commented:

Generally undergraduate students can be considered vulnerable and in a relatively weak position compared to the university. Some are likely to have limited experience of contracts, and contractual obligations are unlikely to be at the forefront of their minds at a time when they are seeking to enrol at university.

Universities often fall back on the line that students are adults and must be responsible for their own decisions: a lot of practice in relation to exam irregularities, for instance, rests on this assumption. The need to take into account the imbalance of power between the university and the student is clear.

The second straw in the wind is the consultation by the Office for the Independent Adjudicator into Higher Education (OIA) about a new framework for managing student complaints and appeals.

This is a really good document, the work of some great collaboration between sector bodies and students. And the draft guidance is clear that in managing student complaints and appeals universities need to raise their game to meet more challenging timescales, to resolve complaints sooner, and to treat students more fairly. It reads much more like a consumer complaints regulation than any previous framework.

How will universities react to this? Seriously, I’m sure: I haven’t yet come across a university which doesn’t take student complaints this way. But might we see, in a few years, student complaints teams being called student care or (eek!) customer care? That is what it is, after all.

Just straws in the wind, but there’s a definite breeze picking up. See Registrarism’s blog post today about the changing role of the NUS too. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that The Student is the Customer Now, and we’d all better get our Corporate Smiles going. Manifestly in the classroom the student isn’t a customer but is a learner. And so it should be. But universities need to get more used to the notion that robustness in working with students needs to be tempered by considerations of power.

Eight things that a new line manager should know

A couple of interactions today – an email from a former colleague, and a conversation with a fellow consultant – got me thinking about line management, and what advice I’d give my younger self.

Line management can feel overwhelming, particularly if it’s the first time you’ve taken on that role. It’s also a very important job – we spend so much of our time at work, and often invest in our work so much of our persona and values, that the quality of our management can have a dramatic impact upon our well-being. So, no pressure then.

Here’s eight things I’ve learned which might help.

Be yourself. One of the hardest things to do when managing someone is to get really good and clear communication with the person you are managing. One important thing you can do is remove the layers of artifice that a stilted relationship can bring. You don’t have to be mates with the people you’re managing (and a bit of distance is not a bad idea) but equally you don’t have to be a robot. If you can be authentic in your relationship with your team, there’s a better chance that they’ll hear you, and trust you enough to tell you things. Authenticity doesn’t have to mean baring your soul to the world, but it does mean remembering that you’re a person as well as a role holder.

Set direction. If you don’t get the job done there’s no point in the whole thing. So be clear in your own mind what it is that you’re trying to do, and then make sure that your team know too. And use this as a fixed point to steer by: how are you doing, has the need changed; is there a better way you could do it. But always know what it is you need to achieve. Remember also, if someone hasn’t heard what you’re trying to say, the best thing is not to blame them for not listening, but see if you can explain it some other how.

Remove obstacles. Your team are doing the work, you’re managing them. That means delegate, let them do the work, and focus on removing the barriers that can get in the way. That might mean helping your team develop skills; that might mean holding a mirror up to your team (I probably mean that figuratively); that might mean making sure that they have the tools to do the job; that might mean a pep talk so that they don’t make an impassable mountain in their minds. But look at yourself as the coach, the sweeper, the resource finder and the problem solver, and they’ll be free to do a great job. Which people mostly do want to do.

Listen. Carefully. It’s easy to get wrapped up in your own view of the world and not see other ways of looking at things, and your team can be a great help to you. But you have to have ears to hear, and the listening skills to hear what isn’t being said, or is being said elliptically, as well as what is being said. My experience was that as I got more senior in my career, two things happened. Firstly, my jokes seemed to get funnier, and I’m pretty sure that wasn’t true. And secondly, very few people just chatted with me. And it’s in these conversations that you can find out a lot of useful things. I don’t mean that you should be an eavesdropper: no one will trust you then, which is pretty much fatal to a managerial relationship. But equally don’t think that your words are the only important ones to hear.

Good enough is good enough. This is a tough one. We all want to do things really well, and we all will have personal and professional standards about what we want our work to look like. But if you stop when something is good enough – when it meets the need, when it ticks the boxes – then you’ve got more time to do other things. The quest for perfection will bring you long hours in the office, and you’ll get less done than others. Is this what you set out to do?

Tell the truth. Always. If people know that you’ll be straightforward with them, they’ll by and large do the same for you. And that is a huge blessing. It doesn’t mean be cruel (you should never do this), or be too blunt, or lack tact, but it does mean make sure that what you mean is what you say, and that you say it clearly. It doesn’t always make for comfortable conversations, but it does build respect and trust.

Say 'thank you'. When someone has done a job for you, thank them. When you see something being done well, say so. When someone has gone the extra mile, tell them, thank them, and try and do so in front of their manager. People are predisposed to hear bad things and to be aware of problems - I suspect it's part of our basic survival instincts - which means that you have to say a lot of thank-yous for them to be noticed. But they are one of the most powerful tools that you have, and can help a team achieve the impossible. Don't save 'Thank you' for someone's retirement speech.

You will make mistakes. You will get things wrong. You will feel like you don’t know the first things about people or your job, and that there’s no hope for you as a manager. Don’t worry – everybody does this (and if they say otherwise they are lying, to you and possibly to themselves.) And when you make a mistake, fess up. Say sorry if you’ve wronged someone. Tell your manager, and say what you’re going to do to put it right (managers love it when their team do this bit). Ask for help. But stop beating yourself up about it. There’s plenty who’ll be happy to beat you up, and there’s no need to help them.

This isn’t all the things that you need to know and do – but when I reflect on my experiences, and when I’ve talked to others, these ideas always come up. And remember where we started: you’re doing an important job; it’s hard; but it’s definitely worth the effort.