The power of Coronavirus versus crystal ball gazing

The power of Coronavirus versus crystal ball gazing

Just over 6 months ago we gathered in Birmingham for the HESPA conference and I co-delivered a session with Sophie Crouchman on “Planning for the unknown: the what, why and how”. Who would have thought that only a few weeks later, the face of higher education would change, possibly forever? And no amount of scenario planning had prepared us for that. So, I thought it would be interesting to go back and review our slide deck from February where we posed a number of scenarios that might come to pass over three timescales.

Remember we are only 6 months on from these slides….

I’ll start by looking back at what we said might happen in the next five years. There was general agreement in the room that these were the prevalent issues affecting the sector.

Six months on, we are not much further along in the top three. The pandemic has caused a whole bunch of things that we were waiting for with bated breath to be put on hold.

• I can’t remember the last time the impact of Brexit was considered or even mentioned in discussion about sector’s future. The issues that will arise from Brexit have not gone away but they are less significant in the short term as we deal with the pandemic. But just six long months ago they were top of everyone’s agenda.
• Augar? We are still no closer to understanding what, if anything the government will do with the report.
• Office for Students – well obviously the regulator hasn’t gone away but many of the things we were expecting them to push forward on in the short term have been paused because of the pandemic – we are still no closer to finding out about the future of TEF (and we considered it to be late/delayed in February!). And who would have thought in February that we would potentially have two new conditions of registration by the start of the 2020/21 academic year. But as things start to return to a new normal, the Office for Students will drive through new changes, we get a hint of what some of them might be in a good piece on Wonkhe about this.

Now let’s look a little further out .. the next time period we looked at in our presentation was 5-20 years hence. At this point, we started to get a bit more disagreement in the room. I know why. We are always so busy dealing with what is right in front of us that it is hard to think about and plan for a future that we might not be part of…but guess what - some of this just happened IN SIX MONTHS

Let’s pick out some of the things that are happening now that six months ago were just something to muse on for the future:

• Student number caps have been introduced – just like that. Whether or not they will make any material difference remains to be seen but the fact is, there is now an element of government influence on our provision, we don’t get to choose how we might expand because this could be at the expense of other providers. Fair enough, if the expansion was “planned” (or even just a balancing number in the financial forecasts) then this growth is included in the caps but if expansion was going to be serendipitous to secure financial stability in the short term, providers no longer get to choose that business model.
• Recent speeches from the Education Secretary and the Universities Minister should cause us to reflect on how government influence might come to be exerted over our provision – a move away from 50% participation, stronger FE partnerships, different types of provision, a focus on employability and meeting regional shortage skills are all on the cards if you believe the these speeches will lead to policy reform in the future. It’s looking more likely now than it did a few months ago.
• If any of you have read the policy paper on the higher education restructuring regime then you can clearly see that in the not too distant future, government will have influence over subject provision in some instances – this looks like it is going to happen. The Additional Student Numbers available were subject specific, another signal that government want to influence areas of growth.
• And of course, technology and modes of delivery have seen the most monumental shift – in February we are talking about this becoming a possibility 60-300 months into the future, in fact for most this had to be achieved and delivered in less than 60 days! My goodness, for organisations usually described as being like oil tankers to change, this showed some fleet of foot. Sure, we haven’t got it all right yet, but we can learn from our mistakes and make improvements. In fact, I wonder whether the speed at which we have had to deliver, seeking feedback with the intention to revise and improve has actually been a more efficient and effective way to deliver this change. We are listening to staff and student voices (albeit after the event) and through this gathering information and insight to inform future change. Would we have got that depth of insight through years of consultation, modelling and focus groups? This is what they call agile working and we are doing it.

Now this is where it gets really interesting. Pan out 20+ years and the outlandish things we were suggesting in the workshop were met, by some at least, with some level of incredulity.

But guess what, some of these are actually present in what is happening right here right now:

• International travel has all but stopped and people are finding different ways to collaborate and engage with one another, opening up a whole host of opportunity that we wouldn’t have considered a few months ago.
• The China economy hasn’t crashed but the prospect of large economies going to the wall is much closer to home than it was a few months ago. And if for “China economy crashes” you read “a serious reduction in Chinese students for UK providers” then that is happening and it is happening now. The HESPA led international response to Covid-19 session has some really interesting viewpoints on how long these markets will take to recover (and actually there is also some interesting discussion about modular credit accumulation – another outlandish suggestion) and is well worth a listen if you haven’t already.
• In the same speech referenced above, the Universities Minister states that she is “determined to look at is how we can do more as a Government to enable universities to offer more modular provision” and comments “Sadly, the three-year bachelor’s degree has increasingly become the predominant mode of study. But that doesn’t suit all students.”

Admittedly the scenarios in our 20+ year time span are still pretty far-fetched in the main but I bet if we were in the conference today and we asked whether these things could be on the horizon for the sector, we’d be having a different conversation than we did in February.