Redraw ‘core model’ to avoid ‘repeated restructurings’ – Husbands

Universities need to rethink their business models for core research and teaching work or face having to undertake “repeated restructurings”, according to a former vice-chancellor.

Chris Husbands, who ran Sheffield Hallam University from 2016 to 2023, said there had been “major strides in rethinking operating models, particularly for professional services” in recent years but less focus on institutions’ “core delivery model” including staff-student ratios, the structure of staffing and estate use.

“Without a secure and deliverable core academic model, institutions are simply going to be forced into repeated restructurings on other aspects of their activity. And that’s not going to be healthy for institutions or the sector,” Husbands told a webinar on sector collaboration hosted by the Higher Education Policy Institute (Hepi) and Jisc.

With institutions on their own “struggling with change” and little prospect of significant funding coming from central government, Husbands said the sector needed a “shift in the culture of leadership”.

While the competition that has defined higher education for the last 15 years had brought “real benefits”, said Husbands, it had also “delivered homogeneity, duplication, over provision and overlaps and that needs to change”.

Hypercompetition – reflected in the regulation and funding regime – had also driven the management culture in the sector, said Husbands, but what leaders now needed to ask was “how they work effectively with others in terms of thinking about the institution in the context of its place”.

More collaboration and service sharing has been repeatedly raised as a way of ensuring English institutions can get themselves onto a firmer financial footing after suffering from a long-running fee freeze and dwindling international recruitment.

Sam Sanders, advisory lead for education, skills and productivity at accountancy firm KPMG, told the event that this difficult context had allowed conversations “to be had that until now sometimes haven’t had the airspace they need” and it was an opportunity “to really explore options that I think logically we’ve all known are entirely feasible for a long time, but really haven’t had the impetus behind them”.

Sanders said “we should assume everything’s in scope until we find a good reason for it not to be”, especially given many services universities offer are not “unique selling points”, as they do not differentiate the experience they offer to students compared to other institutions.

This allows “a very, very long list of things you could look at” for universities “including things that have traditionally been completely out of scope” and seen as being part of the academic domain, Sanders said.

Panellists, however, agreed that in collaborating on services, there was a risk that the sector would become too dependent on single suppliers.

This “could hand huge power to a private contractor”, said Husbands, while Sanders flagged the risk that this one singular service on, for example, student record-keeping, could “stifle innovation and stifle the competition required to keep that thing up to date”.

“We’ve seen in some areas with a very small number of credible competition options, the investment over multiple decades in key products hasn’t been there, and that’s one of the challenges”, he said.

tom.williams@timeshighereducation.com