Politicians and colleges – the question of governance

Colleges in Scotland are having a pretty tough time. Government has imposed huge cuts in their teaching and capital budgets, and is pressing them hard to achieve significant savings through mergers and other economy measures. Not surprisingly, relationships between government and colleges have been rather frosty recently. But they have taken a new turn for the worse in the last fortnight, with the chair of one Glasgow college claiming that the Education Secretary effectively forced him to resign.

The basic facts of the dispute are accepted by both sides. Kirk Ramsay, chair of the Stow College board, attended a meeting for senior staff and board members, and recorded a speech by Mike Russell, the minister responsible for education. Ramsay then circulated the recording to other colleagues in Glasgow, and was called in to see the minister, who took the view that no “secret recording” should have been made, let along circulated. Ramsay meanwhile claims that the meeting was hardly secret, and that he wanted an accurate record of the speech.

What happened when Russell met Ramsay is not entirely clear; but the minister subsequently wrote to all colleges suggesting that Ramsay’s behaviour was incompatible with senior office, an allegation repeated publicly throughout last week. Anyone interested in the details can read the accounts in the Glasgow-based Herald. And the question of whether politicians’ speeches (or my lectures) should be taped is also not what concerns me right now. I’m more interested in the light that this episode sheds on the governance of Scotland’s system of further and higher education.

In principle, Scotland’s colleges are independent bodies. They are governed through boards whose members are appointed by the existing board; at least half must come from outside the college. But each college is largely funded by the Scottish Funding Council, an ‘arm’s length’ body whose governing body is also appointed by the Scottish Government, which also supplies its budget and sets its broad strategy goals. The row over Kirk Ramsay’s behaviour must lead many people to ask whether the Scottish Government is now exercising a stronger control over the sector than has previously been the case.

I put the question partly because there is a back story to the row. The Scottish Government has asked the SFC to take forward a process of college mergers, and Stow College has refused to play ball. Moreover, some will spot party politics at work. The Nationalist Party controls the government; but it also controls most of the committees by which the Scottish Parliament is supposed to hold ministers to account. Unsurprisingly, the convener of the education committee has refused to debate the issue, even – entirely absurdly, given the size of the fatal instrument – claiming that Ramsay used a “spy pen” to record the minister’s speech.

This aspect of the story should concern anyone interested in the autonomy of Scotland’s universities and colleges. Beyond that, we might also wonder how the row will affect wider views of the sector. Will colleges find vigorous and independent-minded individuals to join their boards, or will they instead settle for sockpuppets who voice a script provided by the government of the day? And how will the row affect the morale and behaviour of staff and managers in the colleges? Will they be able to take decisions on the best interests of learners and their college, or will they feel obliged to keep misgivings to themselves?

To avoid stupid decisions and generate innovation, whether in colleges or universities, we need independent voices who can put difficult questions at an early stage in any debate and are confident in expressing awkward ideas and new proposals. People, in other words, who are a bit like Mike Russell when he isn’t being a minister. Any organisation that is run by compliant governors, frightened managers and cowed staff are unlikely to be particularly effective.

Boffins, bureaucrats and blokes: senior staff in the modern university

Are our universities over-run by bureaucrats and jobsworths? Last week, Jack Grove reported on a sharp rise in the number of managers in British universities over the last few years. Writing in the Times Higher, Grove calculated that the number of managers in 2010/11 had risen by almost 40% since 2003/4, compared with a 19% rise in the number of academics. Readers were quick to weigh in, complaining of these ‘deadbeats’, ‘charlatans’, and of course ‘bureaucrats’, who are ‘irrelevant and mostly ineffective’.

I’ve worked in universities for over three decades and academic hyperbole is no stranger to me. So I thought I’d take a look the data that Grove drew on for his report, first to see what lay behind them, and second to find out how Scotland compared with the rest of the UK.

The data are easily available, and appear on the Higher Education Statistics Agency’s website. HESA reports on a whole number of different categories, including the numbers of professors in the sector; its figures for ‘managers’ cover non-academic managers only, not academic managers such as heads of department.

As it turns out, there is a story behind the figures for the professoriate. Half of this story is that the number of professors rose over the same seven year period by 34% – almost twice the rate of growth for other academics. This interesting figure is almost certainly one of the many unintended consequences of research assessment.

The other interesting story is that, despite this exponential growth in the professoriate, women still only occupy one chair out of five. Yet women account for 44% of all academic staff, so the persistence of this protected enclave for men is rather scandalous.  Interestingly, women outnumber men among the non-academic managers

Where do the Scottish universities stand? Our professoriate grew between 2003-4 and 2010-11, but by 29% as compared with 34% across the UK. Shamefully, we are as male-led as anyone, with women holding 18.3% of professorial posts, and 42% of academic jobs, though females do account for over half of non-academic managers.

And how about those managers? We like to outperform everyone in higher education, and we duly top the Four Nations bureaucracy championship. Our number of non-academic managers has risen by 62.9% – far more than the weedy English at 42% and the feeble Welsh at 31%; Northern Ireland, at a growth of 12%, wasn’t even trying.  

So something is happening to the shape of our universities. Academics have become a clear minority of staff – 57% of staff in Scotland’s universities are now non-academics – and the numbers of senior academics and non-academic managers are both on the rise. This is the product of several different trends. The first of these is a creeping seniority among academics, as more universities decide to award the title of professor to a wider range of people.

In turn, this reflects the demands of research assessment, and the competitive pressures to recruit the best, or at least the most plausible, talent. It also reflects the decision of some universities to give the title to senior academic managers, and occasionally to senior non-academic managers. As for the growth in non-academic manager numbers, this is surely partly a result of legislative requirements, as well as the wider trends towards managerialism that have infected the entire public sector.

We can anticipate that these pressures will increase rather than diminish, whatever the government of the day (or nation) may tell us. But will they be good for the sector? And more importantly, will they benefit the wider society? I think not, on both counts.

Should the Scottish Government legislate on university access?

In leap years, the last day of February has always attracted superstitions. Traditionally, in Scotland it was believed a day of bad luck. Some people in Scotland’s universities clearly felt particularly hard done by when Mike Russell, the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning, announced that his plans for post-16 reform included a stronger legislative base for promoting wider access. He also made a number of other proposals, all of them worth discussing, and some far-reaching. But the idea of legislating for wider access is a new one in these islands, and that is my focus here. 

Universities Scotland replied that it saw no ‘pressing need for new legislation on widening access’, and suggested that any new law might lead to young people entering university courses for which they were poorly prepared. The University of St Andrew’s was, predictably, more assertive, describing access as ‘not an area for legislation, but for specific projects and partnerships’, adding for good measure that ‘statutory force may lead to bad practice’. This is classic avoidance-speak, as familiar to us as the clouds in the sky, and about as fluffy. Anyone who has watched university administrators collating data to demonstrate compliance with targets will understand why any new law needs to be drafted with a beady eye on possible unintended consequences. If we want to avoid state regulation of the sector, we need to engage with Scotland’s serious problem of social inequality as it affects our institutions.

First, let’s look quickly at some of the data. We can start with the proportion of young entrants from Scotland who come from families with managerial and professional backgrounds. The figures will surprise anyone who has bought into the myths: 73% of new Scottish undergraduates came from socio-economic classes 1, 2 and 3, compared with 68% from Wales and London, 67% from Yorkshire, and 64% from Northern Ireland; the South-east of England was ahead of Scotland, at 76%. In other words, the affluent middle class account for a larger share of university entrants in Scotland than any other UK nation, making us closer to the South-east of England than to Yorkshire, the Midlands or northern England.

Next up is the proportion of young people entering undergraduate degrees who do not come from state schools or colleges. Over 12% of new entrants from Scotland are privately indicated, compared with 8% from Yorkshire, 5% from Wales and 1% from Northern Ireland. This indicator suggests that Scotland’s university entrants are more likely to be privately educated school-leavers than in the other UK nations; of the English regions, only the South-west, London (with its many minority faith schools) and the South-east come ahead of Scotland.

These data, published annually by the Higher Education Statistics Agency, are significant. Universities Scotland challenges the use of the multiple deprivation index to measure inequality, and HESA publishes data on neighbourhood disadvantage for Northern Ireland, England and Wales only. But both charts, showing university degree entrants by socio-economic classification, and by type of school, suggest a sector that might be seen by UK standards as relatively closed and elitist.

Of course, this is not the full picture. Many school-leavers in Scotland (and a fair few adults) enter full-time higher education in a college, taking one- and two-year Higher National Certificates and Diplomas. So the system as a whole is more open and inclusive than appears when looking solely at the university sector. And then there are all those adult returners and part-time students.

But here’s the rub: this is precisely what Mike Russell and the Scottish Government are trying to get at. If you take an HND, after two years of full-time study, then a lot of people – Mike Russell included – think you should be able to go on to a university and complete an undergraduate degree without having to go back to the first year. After all, every single HEI in Scotland has fully signed up to the national credit and qualifications framework. But in practice, students who ‘articulate’ from an HNC or HND into the second or third year of a degree tend to find themselves almost entirely in the so-called ‘new universities’ or ‘post-92’ institutions. In this, the university sector is at least consistent, as most students from disadvantaged backgrounds and state schools are similarly found in the post-92s.

And what about adult returners? Within the UK, Scotland’s universities are marked by their low proportion of part-time students (only Wales has a lower proportion of part-time students). Again, part-time HE students tend to gather in the colleges, as do other students from non-traditional backgrounds. The cruel fact is that under the Government’s policy of consolidation, overall funded student numbers are restricted; if a university can fill its places with full-time students, there is no incentive to take part-time ones. So although some institutions, mostly post-92, do attract part-time adult students, the university sector as a whole does not seem well-placed to support lifelong learning alongside working life.

Faced with such stark inequalities, the Government’s position looks quite cautious. The possibility of legislation was floated in the Government’s green paper on post-16 education, and the Minister’s proposals are quite modest. What he said was that the consultation seemed to show ‘clear support for legislation to support the current activity on access agreements that is being led by the Scottish funding council, and that is the route that I will pursue’. In other words, he is proposing to strengthen the current direction of travel, and give it some sort of legal basis, which is yet to be determined – after, no doubt, the usual heavy lobbying. Hardly the stuff to give even the most nervous registrar nightmares.

Instinctively, I am not an automatic supporter of state regulation of universities. But it seems to me that in many ways, our universities are slithering away from their social contract with the wider community. In Scotland, the Government has chosen to protect university budgets, at least for the time being, but other sectors have been raided in order to fund this protection; young people at risk of unemployment face uncertainty over the availability of skills training in colleges, and pre-school education has fallen well behind standards elsewhere in the UK. And there are anxieties and shortages aplenty in the schools sector.

Which brings us to the wider problem of educational inequality across Scotland’s education system. In its response to the consultation on post-16 education and training, Universities Scotland made a very good point about the roots of inequality in higher education. Put simply, universities are simply dealing with what the schools send; while over one in every two pupils from the most advantaged ten per cent of neighbourhoods in Scotland leaves with five Higher Grades or equivalent, only one in fourteen from the most deprived ten per cent crosses this hurdle. Undergraduate participation rates are higher among qualified entrants from the more deprived neighbourhoods than in more affluent areas. This is a very important finding, and Universities Scotland tactfully suggests that this should give the Minister something more pressing to worry about than the universities.

Yet even if Mike Russell dealt with inequality in schools tomorrow, the universities would still be hanging from a hook, in spite of all Universities Scotland’s wriggling. Put simply, a weak schools system requires a strong lifelong learning system, with abundant opportunities for people to return later in life, ideally without leaving their jobs. In so far as we have such a system, it is based in the college sector, and movement from college into university is highly problematic. Bluntly, it is confined to those universities that are keenest to recruit, and even there it is contingent on the number of places left over once conventionally-qualified first year entrants have been placed.

Finally, could legislation work? In fact, there is some relevant experience elsewhere, in one of the small open Nordic nations. Sweden has legislated on university access, with particular respect to mature students: all over-25s meet the eligibility requirement provided they have basic Swedish and English, plus at least four years’ work experience, and are only rejected where they do not meet the specific demands of specialist courses such as chemistry or maths. Studies by Agnieszka Bron, Martin Hällsten and the Swedish National Agency for Higher Education suggest that Swedish universities contribute significantly to lifelong learning and equity. I have yet to see convincing, or even unconvincing evidence that the quality of teaching or research has suffered as a result. So the Government does not have to look far to find signs that legislation might work; if Scotland’s universities have their wits about them, they will make sure that it is not needed.