Casualty?

The Department of Health has just launched its consultation on changes to funding of student nurses, midwifes and other allied health professions (radiographers, physiotherapists and similar) in England. This is a big deal. What’s the issue?

Currently, such students in England pay no tuition fees, and get a bursary to cover living costs. The NHS contracts with individual universities to provide a set number of training places, and universities recruit and teach these students. As part of the programme, there are clinical placements in real NHS settings.

The contract process has been brutal in some cases: the ending of a contract (and this has happened) means that universities have staff with no students, leading to reorganisations and problems in teaching out cohorts; contract management has involved monitoring students in ways different to and often very much more intensive than for other courses. So you might think that the ending of this process (elements of which, at least, are surely implied by the proposals to end bursaries and move to ‘normal’ tuition fees and student loans) would be good news for universities.

Perhaps it will be. The case for the changes, as argued by Ben Gummer, Health Secretary, is that it will enable universities to take more students, and meet student demand (Gummer claims that two out of three nursing applicants are turned down.) But of course this will only happen if universities are able to find placements for students, and that depends upon the NHS being willing to host students.

An utterly gratuitous carry on 

It’s instructive to compare this with medical education, where (in England) universities have money (SIFT, or Strategic Increment for Teaching) to pay NHS trusts to take medical students. Medical student numbers are also capped, recognising the practical limit on the number who can be accommodated by the NHS. These conditions – a fund to pay trusts the costs, and a cap on numbers) make finding placements workable for medical schools. NHS trusts have an incentive to do activity which is slightly removed from core healthcare, and there’s a practical limit on the costs of this and the logistical burden.

Could the same happen for nursing, midwifery and allied heath students? There won’t be a state-imposed cap on numbers – that’s the whole point! – so it will be down to universities and NHS trusts to manage this. And in the absence of an equivalent to SIFT funding (and I haven’t seen reference to this) NHS trusts will face a real cost in providing the educational supervision to placement students which makes the placement a learning experience, rather than the student simply being an auxiliary in a clinical setting. Will universities have to provide the staff to do this, making the educator part practitioner? Will universities need to pay NHS trusts to take placement students?

There are some big risks in here. The contacts for providing education at least guaranteed placements. Take that guarantee away, and the job of finding placements becomes harder. No doubt the new system will work well in some places, but equally likely, it seems to me, is that there’ll be market failure in other places. Leading to fewer trainee nurses, midwives and allied health professionals in some English regions. And possibly fewer clinical staff and students on wards.

It seems clear to me that the rationale for this is cost: by passing the cost onto students, it enables the NHS to deal with tighter budgets. And maybe that’s necessary. But it’ll be important to have a robust system to guard against the sort of market failure that impacts upon healthcare, and it’s hard to see how to make that happen without more resource somewhere. My guess is that universities will find this bargain less good than you might at first think.

Virtuous necessity

I’m currently doing a project at a Big Northern University, and like many universities there’s an atrium created out of the space between buildings by putting a glass roof on it. And like many glass rooves it leaks when it rains. Which it does quite a lot.

A feature roof

I like the way that they has been dealt with – using sheets of polythene, transparent pipes and water butts to make a pretty stylish water collection system; and it looks like this is used to water the plants in the atrium. Thus making a virtue of necessity.

That’s quite a common need in management and in working life generally – you can’t always control the world or what it does to you, but you can choose how to respond to it. So when it rains, don’t be down, take the chance to water the flowers for free.

Keeping secrets

Today’s reporting of the data protection leak at the University of Greenwich highlights the issues around information security for universities.

The BBC report is not explicit, but it seems that the papers for a university research committee were published on the university’s website, and that these papers included personal data relating to students.

There are disappointingly few
 files like this in most university offices

This highlights the twin pressures universities face in relation to information. On the one hand, the Information Commissioner expects universities to proactively publish lots of information, and this would include committee minutes and papers. On the other hand, universities – like all other bodies – have very clear responsibilities to properly protect personal data. Which would include not publishing it on the web.

Universities are habitually collegiate places. And despite their scale – and some are very large indeed – many decisions are people decisions, meaning that the collegiate bodies which take decisions have to have personal information in front of them. So they have to deal with personal data – and sometimes sensitive personal data – within a notionally public context.

Universities typically have procedures in place to square this circle – classifying papers in accordance with FoI schemes, so that when written, authors think about whether it should be disclosed. And then the papers are published or withheld depending on judgments made. This is, I expect, how the Greenwich situation occurred – a mis-classification, or a correct classification which slipped through the net. Or in fact slipped onto the net.

Some universities – notably the Russell Group – have been campaigning for exemption from the Freedom of Information Act. That argument is made more sharply in relation to research and the commercialisation of research, where the exemptions available under FoI legislation have, universities argue, been found wanting.

At heart this is a question of autonomy, and the extent to which universities are public bodies. Universities have autonomy because that enables them to be better universities. But autonomy doesn’t place them outside the law. The balance to be struck is between removing some of the nonsensical FoI burden – Paul Greatrix is always good value for money on this – whilst enabling public accountability.

If it were down to me, I’d happily see some tightening of FoI exemptions for universities around research, to help protect intellectual property and enable collaboration with industry, but in general openness is a good. A complete exemption will remove the sunlight from university business, and without that disinfectant things won’t always be as clean as one would like.

High finance

Are you sitting comfortably? Good. Then I’ll begin.

Once upon a time universities in the UK were funded by the state, through an arms-length body which was fairly non-interventionist, and received money to cover every-day operating costs and salaries, and money for building projects and other capital costs. Polytechnics and higher education colleges were funded by the state too, though in their case it was through local authorities and later an arms-length body. There was money to give students grants, too, so that they could afford to study instead of work.

More people started to go to university, and polytechnics and colleges got called universities too, but the amount of money they received didn’t keep up with the extra costs. The arms-length body invented some very clever ways to get universities to do a great amount more for a little extra more, and then tell them that it wasn’t a one-off effort, but the new normal. And so, especially in the former polytechnics, resource got stretched very thin. There was still money for recurrent costs and capital, but less than it used to be, given the extra students they were teaching. And the money, being thinly spread by the state, meant that there was less to fund students during their study.

Everyone saw that this couldn’t last. And so after much deliberation a scheme was agreed to ask students to pay towards the cost of their study, and a fund was set up so that students could borrow, at a reasonable rate, to support themselves whilst at university. Did this work? Not really. More and more people went to university; students continued to struggle to pay for their time at university; universities struggled to put in place good facilities; and class sizes went up. It wasn’t right. Another think was needed.

And so another think happened: and this time universities were allowed to charge a lot more in fees, and a much bigger fund was put in place, so that they could borrow to do this. But the government allowed universities to charge higher fees than they had budgeted for, and so paying for the bigger fund meant that universities received less and less in grants, both for particular annual costs and for capital projects. And the whole thing was still too expensive …

It isn’t much of a story, I know, but put some detail in and it’s not far off a history of UK higher education funding since the 1970’s. I haven’t taken up a creative writing course – don’t worry! – the point of this is to illustrate why universities are taking to borrowing money.

The UK HE sector has moved from being directly publicly funded to being publicly funded via a market mechanism. That is, most home tuition fee income comes via the Student Loans Company, which is definitely public money, but depends upon students actually choosing to go to the university in question. This is life and death for some universities, and for all it is critical in determining how much resource there is to spend. Student recruitment matters more than ever, and universities therefore like to present their best face – hence the need for investment in facilities, in staff and so on. Additionally, investment requires a stock of money; tuition fee income comes in flows. So a pile of borrowed cash, which can then be re-payed over time, makes a lot of sense.

There’s two other lessons to be learned from this, which arise from how universities are going about their borrowing.

Universities are borrowing in new ways. Yesterday for instance, Cardiff University announced it had issued a bond worth £300m, at a historically low rate of interest (there may be a paywall on this link, sorry). Other universities have issued bonds too: Liverpool (£250m), Manchester (£300m), Cambridge (£350m) and De Montfort (£110m) – this isn’t an exhaustive list.

Bond issues are long term – 30, 40 or 50 years, typically. Universities pay interest annually on the amount borrowed, and at the end of the period are liable to repay the whole amount. The interest rates are low at the moment – Cardiff is paying 3.1% on its borrowing, meaning that it must repay interest at £9.3m per year – but this will be cheap, particularly if, or when, inflation rates rise. Cardiff gets this low rate because it is regarded as a very safe investment – rated as Aa2 by Moody’s, which means it is regarded as “high quality and … subject to very low credit risk“.

And this leads on to the two other important things about university management which I hinted at.

Firstly, if you’re committed to repaying a lot every year – remember the £9.3m per year that Cardiff is signed-up to – you need to be sure that you can afford it. And that means that the investments you make from the capital need to show a return – additional students with additional fee income; more research grants with additional overheads; reduced operating costs with actual savings in expenditure. These conversations already happen in universities, but they’ll be a little sharper where there’s a loan repayment in mind. And in the larger universities, where perhaps there’s been a little more slack in the past, things will tighten up.

Secondly, stability is the watchword. The low interest rates achieved by universities (you’d bite the hands off a bank offering a fixed-rate mortgage at 3.1% for 40 years) only come about because of the very good credit rating they receive – the Aa2 in Cardiff’s case. This is based on an assessment of the long term risk that the university won’t pay the debt. A more unstable funding scenario doesn’t necessarily mean that loans won’t be available, but they do affect the interest rate. So uncertainties about fee levels, student number caps, research funding, all contribute to difficulties in other universities getting such good rates.

I don’t imagine that many university senior managers started their careers thinking that they’d be engaging in high corporate finance, but it’s an inevitability given the move to the market that we’ve seen. The universities that do best will be those that become the sort of organisations that can deliver in a good business-like way without changing their core values. And they’ll all live happily ever after.

Where you stand depends on where you sit

A former colleague was very fond quoting what I now know to be Miles’ Law: where you stand depends on where you sit. That is, what you think about something depends on your perspective. (A corollary of this is, of course, that we are less objective than we might think.)

Several problems on which I have recently advised bring this phrase to mind. The conundrums have been variations on a theme: how to help people who are not physically close together, work well together.

Rufus E Miles: Lawgiver

In a university context this most often doesn’t mean people who are in different continents. There are plenty of examples of research teams on different sides of the world who work effectively together: meeting every now and again to discuss results; corresponding by email; sharing findings by email or over the web; and talking by phone or Skype. Of course, in these situations there is likely to be an agreed goal and methodology, often tied to specific funding; and the success of the project will reflect on all participants (or at least on all of the Principal Investigators), so the incentives to collaborate are there.

More likely the problems arise when people are on the same campus, sometimes in the same building, but not so close together that they bump into each other habitually. For instance, maybe an academic department is spread across several different buildings; or maybe there’s a problem in getting administrative staff within a faculty office and those in a registry to work well together. And often the answer cannot be to simply move them closer together – the reality of the physical estate, or at the least the cost and relative priority of doing this, make such things impossible.

So what to do?

Firstly, help them to see why it matters. Think about how their working together contributes to a bigger goal. And then tell them the story of this – in newsletters, face to face in meetings, make a short film, however you need to bring it to life. But make the narrative real – not about corporate goals and abstractions, but about the difference that they can make to real people’s lives. Help them to see that they’re involved in a big and noble task. Now this is easy if your team is helping to bring peace to the world, harder if it’s about resolving timetabling squabbles. So sometimes you have to look to a bigger goal (for instance the benefits education bring to people’s lives, and the role of effective timetabling in making this happen in a cost-effective and sustainable manner) to make the story. But unless you’re working for an evil crime lord, there’s a positive narrative in there, waiting to be found.

Secondly, regular information flows about what’s going on help bring people together. You could initiate - or help to initiate, if you’re not the one in charge - a system of team briefing, so that everyone gets the same information, face to face, on a regular basis. Once people have a shared knowledge base its easier for them to make the connections between others they need to work with, and understand why someone else’s problem is their problem too.

Finally, there’s a need to help the people know each other as individuals. An email address is easier to ignore than a voice on a phone; a person who you recognise and meet with from time to time is harder to ignore than an extension number that sometimes you dial. Who’s who lists with photos can help – whether on the intranet, in a printed (or emailed) guide, or a noticeboard, they help to make staff members individuals rather than simply cogs in the machine. Or how about finding an excuse to bring them physically together from time to time - ideally a combination of work (makes the reason to be there compelling) and some social, get to know you, time.

These ideas tie in with John Adair’s thinking on good leadership: which means a necessary focus on task, team and individual. Get these things right, and your problems of disconnect amongst your team or your colleagues will begin to disappear.

Plagiary

The Times today reports on a ‘crisis’ in universities, with high levels of student cheating, disproportionately committed by overseas students. The Times story is here, behind a paywall – I’m loathe to give Mr Murdoch any money, so I’ll summarise from other media sources.

From The Times, 2 January 2016

It seems that the Times surveyed UK universities and found that nearly 50,000 had been ‘caught cheating’ over the past three years, with 362 being expelled. In a subset of 70 universities- presumably those which collated data via fee status – overseas students accounted for 35% of cheating cases, but made up only 12% of the student population.

Thanks to The Guardian for their summary of the Times story.

The story focuses on plagiarism – with Geoffrey Alderman asserting that ‘type 1’ plagiarism (copying someone else’s words) is declining, with ‘type 2’ plagiarism (paying someone else to write your coursework for you) is on the increase. No data are given to support this, but anecdotally it feels plausible.

It is an interesting issue. To understand it better you’d need to discuss the nature of plagiarism detection (much more sophisticated than it used to be) and issues around the nature of assessment, and what it is meant to demonstrate. One thing which I’ve noticed across in dealing with student tissues in a number of different UK universities is that expectations of higher education, and of the role in examinations of independent thought, vary across education systems. In some systems, memorising and repeating back the words of authorities – your professor, books and journals – seems to be considered good. So students who copy may, at first, think that they’re doing the right thing. This seems to me to be an educational issue more than a moral one.

Notice also the emphasis on overseas students cheating disproportionately. Multiplying out the proportions, some 32,500 home and EU students were caught cheating over three years, compared to 17,500 overseas students. Yes, it’s disproportionate. I’d be interested to see how many of these were ‘first offence’ plagiarism as opposed to repeat offences (or indeed other sorts of exam cheating.) If you factor in the cultural/educational differences it doesn’t seem like a crisis or a moral panic. But are we meant to understand that overseas students are somehow lowering standards? If so, it’s all grist to Theresa May’s immigration mill. And very unpleasant bread it makes, as well.

I don’t expect we’ve heard the last of this – I’ll be reading ministerial speeches closely to see whether a ‘cheating foreigner’ theme begins to emerge.

Statuary

The controversy at Oxford over Oriel College’s Cecil Rhodes statue is the gift that keeps on giving. In today’s episode, Oriel alumnus and former Australian PM Tony Abbott has written to the Independent to argue against the campaign to remove the statue. To my mind, there’s (at least!) two different arguments going on here, and it’s important to unpick the issues.

An Oxford statue which is causing offence

The background: Cecil Rhodes, an Oriel alumnus, led activities in southern Africa in the nineteenth century – political, business, colonizing - which played a large part in the development of the British colonies in that area, and out of which grew great personal wealth for him and also a political establishment which morphed into the evils of apartheid. (Note: better and more nuanced historical accounts are no doubt available: I’m not trying to make historical points about Rhodes here.) His wealth supports the prestigious Rhodes scholarships, which fund non-UK students to undertake postgraduate study at Oxford. Tony Abbott was a Rhodes scholar.

An Oxford statue which is not causing as much offence

There is agreement that Rhodes himself did things and caused things to happen which were Bad and Wrong: racist and exploitative, or, in the words of Oriel College’s statement, “…Rhodes was also a 19th-century colonialist whose values and world view stand in absolute contrast to the ethos of the Scholarship programme today, and to the values of a modern University.”

From this two further arguments are derived. Firstly, that the statue should be removed because it symbolises a past which we should abjure. Secondly, that the statue should be removed because it contributes to the oppression of minorities which in turn causes, so the argument goes, the demographics of Oxford’s student population to be skewed against Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) students.

(And on this latter point, the Oriel College statement concedes that there is work to be done to improve the experience and representation of BME students. Amen to that, and please could you have a think about public school bias while you're about it.)

To take the first argument – that we should remove the statue as we no longer wish to commemorate its subject - there are points to be made on both sides. Can history be changed by taking down a statue? Of course not. Further, many British institutions, including more than one or two universities, have pasts which include associations with people and activities which would today be thought of as horrifying, and assets which include the financial gains from these. If we did a thorough historical clear-out, we’d be too busy sorting out yesterday’s wrongs to prevent today’s wrongs from being done. But equally, it’s only a statue, and the logistics of removing it are not insurmountable. And we do have a duty to think about the actions of our forebears, and the part they play in the narratives we shape today about our past. History is not uncontroversial, what we say and do about our history tells others about who we are today.

(Personally, I think the problem is with having public statuary at all. There isn’t the room or resource to make a statue for everyone that someone admires, and history will always cast different lights on actions and consequences. I’d favour portraiture which is actively curated. If a painting is moved every couple of years anyway, then no-one notices if it’s here or there. It’s making the representation a fixed object of note/commemoration which is the problem, and sculptures tend to be bigger and heavier than pictures.)

I suspect the first part of the argument will be dealt with, at some point in the summer when students aren’t around, by a quiet removal of the statue to somewhere less public. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a clause in a trust deed which makes its total removal impossible, given the terms of a bequest or lease, but equally a particular position could be re-thought.

The second argument, though – the one about it contributing to oppression – is harder to make, I believe. And I do find it hard to believe that of and in itself a statue is the real problem. There’s a trend for some in university to argue that there should be safe spaces in which students are free from acts, symbols or words which cause them to feel oppressed. Witness as part of this the hoo-ha at Goldsmiths Students’ Union in relation to the speaker Maryam Namazie, and the disruption by members of one student society of her talk at a meeting of another student society, in part on the grounds that what she said was insulting and oppressive.

If universities are safe spaces – safe in the sense of being free from ideas that challenge a person’s views or understanding of the world – they will become sterile and not worth attending. It’s the process of becoming able to understand and analyse things that are just plain wrong, and provide good and convincing arguments and reasons why they’re wrong, which is part of becoming a graduate. And it’s also learning that a Manichaean view of what is right and wrong is not always very helpful – both in terms of understanding a situation and in terms of working with others. And you’ll find it harder to get these if the intellectual environment you are in does not expose you to contrary thoughts and opinions.

Safe spaces are the bigger challenge to universities than statues. There’s a legal narrative – arising from equalities legislation – with duties to promote better relationships between people, based around protected characteristics. The legislation aims to deal with actual wrongs and I’m not seeking to criticise it. But the argument which goes from a duty to promote equalities to an argument that seeks to prevent all situations in which an individual may be challenged intellectually is not a good one in a university. How to make that argument well enough, and make it stick in the face of activism, is going to be tricky, I suspect.