Donald Gill’s 1937 map of University of London members that hangs in the institution’s imposing Senate House headquarters contains several names that have long since disappeared from the UK capital’s higher education landscape.
Most are unfamiliar today because at some point they were subsumed into other entities. Bedford College, the UK’s first higher education provider for women when it opened in 1849, is now part of Royal Holloway, University of London. The Institute of Archaeology sits under the megalithic UCL.
As a financial crisis grips English universities, talk has once again turned to mergers and acquisitions as a way of shoring up institutions.
An alternative gaining traction is to replicate the federated model of the University of London itself – allowing collaboration and service-sharing within a formal entity while retaining the autonomy of individual universities.
“Universities could explore new structures and operating models that enhance quality while increasing efficiency,” says the recent Universities UK blueprint, which suggests federations as a potential option.
Supporters of the idea point to the near 200-year-old London model – which includes 17 universities after the recent addition of Brunel University London – but also the “systems” approach of institutions such as the University of California in the US, as well as examples outside the sector in schools and the NHS. Some say it could even extend internationally, with a federation potentially boasting members based in several different countries.
But London – which itself is less collegiate than it used to be – is a rare and historic example in the UK sector that only otherwise features the universities of Oxford and Cambridge – both ancient federations of colleges – and the University of Wales that once oversaw most of the major institutions in Wales but, although notionally still in existence, is no longer a federation.
Recent announcements of closer regional collaboration, for example between five universities based in north-east England and between the universities of Liverpool and Manchester, have so far stopped short of any formal integration, and critics believe it would be very hard to do with the bureaucracy involved potentially adding to costs, not saving them.
Current University of London vice-chancellor, Wendy Thomson, however, agreed that the current climate had brought the federated model back into the limelight. She said her own members have recently started to consider closer collaboration and felt the same could be done elsewhere too.
“The networks are often already there but it is about moving them into territory that is sometimes closely guarded; programme collaboration is a real must,” she said.
“It is silly to have two or three universities in the same region all looking at rationalising their courses; that doesn’t serve the population well. They could get together and look across the piste.
“We have managed to do it with hospitals which have specialised in different areas. Even in local authorities which do share some services. There is scope in a regional model to do it.”
London already offers a collegiate degree in modern languages, taught by members across the federation.
It also provides centralised services such as careers support, housing, libraries and help and advice on what can be costly areas such as cybersecurity. Professor Thomson saw scope to extend this by, for example, procuring joint IT contracts and merging other back-office functions.
In recent years, London has also massively expanded its international education offer, allowing universities that are part of the federation to have their courses taught across the world, either online or via partner teaching centres.
This takes much of the risk out of expansion for members and means they can teach at scale quickly, ultimately leading to new income sources.
Andrew Jones, Brunel’s vice-chancellor, said the advantages of joining extended beyond teaching to research, with new opportunities to collaborate across institutions a key draw.
But while there may be many good reasons for universities to federate, for it to make a difference to the bottom line it needs to address the structural reasons why so many universities are in crisis, said John Rushforth, executive secretary of the Committee of University Chairs. “The key issue is the mismatch between the levels of funding available and the costs of the current models of delivery for research and teaching,” he said.
Trying to set up a federation would also inevitably involve some “tricky discussions”, Mr Rushforth added. If, for example, it involved a big Russell Group institution, a post-92 and a further education college in the same city, there would inevitably be issues with hierarchy as well as different approaches to managerial control.
Federations could therefore work better as a model for specialist institutions to come together, he said, or those that do not compete locally for students.
Either way, to save money, every member must be prepared to accept the same systems, and that was “not the tradition in HE”, said Mr Rushforth, who pointed out that even within individual universities, faculties often wanted different things.
“The purpose of a federation over a merged system is to retain the branding and reputations of individual institutions, which gives them a strong reason to say our needs are different,” he said.
“It wouldn’t be surprising if a federal model cost more. It would crucially depend on the balance of power between the centre and the federal entities and if the centre could dictate to them what they were going to do.”
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Print headline: Is a federated model universities’ future?
