Influencing Higher Education Policy

A Professional Guide to Making an Impact

Ant Bagshaw, Debbie McVitty

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429793011
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Drawing together a team of expert contributors from across the sector to offer contemporary descriptions and critical reflection of practice in higher education, Influencing Higher Education Policy uncovers the nature of policymaking and interpretation. With a suite of authors whose experiences range from governmental to academic, this book shares insights from professionals working in the field of higher education policy to provide useful, practical, and implementable information.

Placing focus on professional aspects, and with practical examples bringing to light experiences, insights, and recommendations across policy and public affairs, this book is divided into three sections. It covers concepts and theories for policy influence, regulation and the role of government, and institutions' engagement with policy. Furthermore, it considers:

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• what it means to work in policy and public affairs in higher education;

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• the increased complexity and fluidity of higher education politics;

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• regulatory reforms in higher education;

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• the position of the student in policy discourses.

Offering a contemporary representation, Influencing Higher Education Policy is an indispensable guide for all those who work in higher education, particularly those who work in communications, strategy, planning, and leadership roles.

Part 1

Concepts and theories
for policy influence

Chapter 1

Power and influence in higher
education policymaking

Who controls the debate?

Debbie McVitty

Introduction

Traditionally, policymaking – and higher education (HE) policymaking is no exception – has been a tightly controlled process, taking place within a well-defined circle of informed “insiders”: those working in government departments, parliaments in London, Edinburgh, Cardiff, and Belfast, quangos, think-tanks, and formally constituted lobbying bodies. Laypeople typically rely on traditional media and specialist press to find out what policy is being made and how it might affect them and their organisations. Major policy set pieces such as independent reviews or government legislation include in their architecture the potential for the person on the street to express a view, and even have that view taken account of by decision-makers, but in practice the voices dominating the debate are the established insiders and professionals whose jobs require them to be policy-engaged. Academics interested in understanding the ebb and flow of power and influence in policymaking are typically required either to analyse public documentation or be granted this privileged insider status in their own right – and usually only well after the fact, when the key actors have moved into new roles, or retired.

All this may be true; it can legitimately be questioned whether it is right. The most recent calculation of the economic value of universities to the UK estimated the future benefits of research and development conducted in universities in a single year to be worth £28.9 billion to the UK economy, and the annual investment in students receiving their first degree to be £63 billion worth of increased human capital (Oxford Economics 2017). Universities support just under a million jobs and HE exports are worth £13.1 billion annually. Though universities are private organisations they receive public funding and there is a clear public interest in their operations. At a regional level, many different types of organisation depend on universities in different ways: to educate the professionals in teaching, social work, and health, to provide a flow of graduate-level skills into the economy, to provide innovation to business, and often to contribute to the local cultural and arts offer. Students and staff working and studying inside universities have a vested interest in their university’s overall success and sustainability, and in the way external policy shapes the environment for research, teaching, and external engagement in their university. In other words, there are many stakeholders in HE who do not, as a rule, have much of a say in the policies that shape the sector.

Policy engagement is notionally far more accessible to interested laypeople, thanks to new digital technologies. The second decade of the twenty-first century will almost certainly be viewed from the perspective of history as the decade of social media. Facebook was opened up to the public in 2006 and in 2009 achieved 350 million registered users, becoming the largest social media platform in the world. Twitter was launched in 2006 and by 2012 had 100 million active users. At the most basic level, social media give individuals a voice and the capability to publish an opinion without the need for mediation, and allow the crowd to generate popular opinions and organise action using shares and likes.¹ In principle, social media ought to make policymaking more participative and democratic, with people empowered to have a greater say over issues that affect their lives and taking part in identifying issues, then proposing, and testing, solutions. In practice, social media can encourage us to create atomised echo-chambers, reinforcing established opinions and making us vulnerable to malign forces attempting to influence or harden our views.

Conventional media has always had an eye to the views of readers; it is notable that the kind of stories education journalists predominantly report tend to play to the anxieties of the middle classes. The implications are that: ordinary hard-working people are not getting enough access to elite universities because the privately educated or international students are taking up too many places; less-qualified students are lowering standards in universities; student debt may affect young people’s ability to get a mortgage; and (if your newspaper of choice leans to the political right) universities are biased towards the liberal left. One effect of social media is that the mainstream media come under pressure to replicate the sense of immediacy and urgency that comes with social media, and to pursue shares and likes that will amplify the impact of journalism beyond a core group of readers or subscribers. Education journalists are not charlatans; they work hard to bring insight to their readers. But the contemporary media environment has low tolerance for complexity or nuance.

The second decade of the twenty-first century also saw a rise in political populism, with one in four Europeans estimated to have voted for a populist party, defined as a party claiming to represent the interests of the common people against those of an untrustworthy elite (Lewis et al. 2018). The UK Independence Party (UKIP) saw such a degree of success in the early part of the decade that it prompted the Prime Minister David Cameron to promise a referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU, fearful that the Conservatives would lose ground to the UKIP threat in the 2015 General Election. Scottish nationalists dominate Scottish politics, and they were sufficiently powerful to command a referendum on Scottish independence in 2014. Following the 2015 General Election and the resignation of Labour leader Ed Miliband, left-wing radical Jeremy Corbyn swept to victory as Labour leader. It is well beyond the scope of this chapter to consider the causes of the populist turn in politics, but it is probably reasonable to argue that the 2008 global financial crisis, plus the 2009 MPs’ expenses scandal, plus increasing social divisions generated by the period of economic austerity in the first half of the decade all played a role. Social media almost certainly fuelled the trend by enabling like-minded people holding opinions considered marginal to find each other, organise, and find support, and in helping to polarise political views.

As a result of the populist turn, even mainstream politicians are becoming increasingly adept at perceiving the emergence of an issue and claiming ownership of it, in order to win the approbation of the crowd. When Michael Gove said on Sky News during the referendum on the UK’s future membership of the EU that “this country has had enough of experts” (Mance 2016) he captured a public mood that felt that an elite group had seized power and influence at the expense of ordinary people. Universities are especially vulnerable to being portrayed as elitist and complacent, pursuing their own interests at the expense of those of the country at large. Collectively, universities were supporters of the losing side in the EU referendum, and as such were challenged about how out of touch they were with their local communities (Matthews 2016). As Labour peer Andrew Adonis took to Twitter to point out to devastating effect in 2017, the heads of universities tend to enjoy comfortable remuneration (Heymann 2017). Moreover, compared to other public services, universities in England, at least, have been afforded a measure of protection from public sector cuts through the student fee ­system – an indicator of the influence university leaders wielded at the start of the decade. Crucially, universities have not been very effective at anticipating the populist turn and taking steps to protect themselves from attack. As a result, as Mark Leach has argued, the HE sector and its leadership are suffering “a collective crisis of moral authority, a crisis of leadership, and a crisis of identity” (Leach 2018).

For policy or public affairs professionals working in universities, the rules of the game – never especially well-defined to begin with – have changed beyond recognition in a matter of years. The intrusion of populism into HE policymaking tends to obscure, or squeeze out, genuine issues in favour of whipping up controversy. It is not surprising that universities, with their traditions of producing measured analysis and evidence, are nonplussed by this new world order. But if the university sector is unable to adapt, and unprepared to engage in ways which shape the policy environment, it will not survive in its current form for much longer. In an external environment shaped by populism and saturated by social media, meaningful engagement of stakeholders in policy development becomes not simply a matter of moral judgement but necessary for survival. Throughout the last decade, as I will argue in the next section, there has been a noticeable trend towards a populist approach in HE policymaking, with policymakers appealing directly to the public rather than working in collaboration with universities. Universities have been replaced by students as the objects and imagined beneficiaries of HE policymaking. The widespread inclusion of student representation in policymaking processes is a significant shift during this period. However, the effect of this populist appeal in policymaking has, in large measure, been to skew the debate towards controversy, rather than inform and empower the various HE stakeholders.

Policymaking in central government

In England, the primary source of HE reform in the last decade has been the government, through the 2011 White Paper, Students at the heart of the system, the 2015 Green Paper, Fulfilling our potential, and 2016 White Paper, Success as a knowledge economy, culminating in the Higher Education and Research Act 2017 (HERA). The two universities and science ministers primarily responsible for driving these policy agendas forward were David Willetts (2010–2014) and Jo Johnson (2015–2018), supported by their respective special advisors and senior civil servants. Although both ministers had a strong agenda to enhance university teaching quality, there was a noticeable difference in approach.

Willetts was a Conservative minister in a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats. This constrained his ability to put forward legislation to reform the sector, especially since the political fallout for the Liberal Democrats of the undergraduate fee reforms that saw the bulk of public funding to universities for teaching replaced with undergraduate student fees of up to £9,000 a year. Although aspects of Willetts’s agenda were to make a virtue of fees – through encouraging HE to become more responsive to student choice and improve teaching quality (BIS 2011, 8) – the plans attracted significant criticism from some quarters (e.g. Collini 2011). On a number of occasions, Willetts demonstrated that he was an ally of the sector: for ­example, he commissioned evidence on the multiple benefits of HE across dimensions from individual to collective and from financial to social, and argued publicly and within government for the benefits of universities recruiting international students (Willetts 2013; 2014).

Jo Johnson held office across the 2015 and 2017 Conservative governments, a political leadership that became increasingly sceptical towards universities, especially following the outcome of the EU referendum in 2016 and the promotion of former Home Secretary Theresa May to Conservative party leader and Prime Minister. Between 2016 and 2017, Johnson oversaw the progress of the Higher Education and Research Bill (HERB) through the UK Parliament which established in law and practice an enhanced version of the Conservative agenda to foster teaching quality through stimulating competition. In a 2016 speech to Universities UK, Johnson called on the sector to collaborate with him on the passage of HERB (Johnson 2016). At the 2017 General Election the Conservative Party lost ground to Labour under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, whose flagship HE policy was the abolition of tuition fees. A marked shift in government tone towards universities followed. In 2017, addressing the Universities UK conference again, Johnson gave what he called a “realist critique” of HE focused on value for money for students, the risk of grade inflation, and the problem of excessive vice-chancellor pay (Johnson 2017). This hardening view towards universities inside the Westminster government is neatly encapsulated in a Telegraph article by former advisor to Theresa May, Nick Timothy, in which he argued that the university funding system was an “unsustainable and ultimately pointless Ponzi scheme” (Timothy 2017).

Government ministers and departments have a great deal of power to convene resources and attention around policy agendas, even outside the formal legislative process, and they are themselves influenced by changing priorities of central government and their reading of the mood of the public, especially through the media. Inside Parliament, however, behind the scenes, numerous actors attempt to influence and shape HE policy. Her Majesty’s Opposition, individual MPs and peers, and government backbenchers can provide a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributor biographies
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART 1 Concepts and theories for policy influence
• PART 2 Regulation and the role of government
• PART 3 Institutions’ engagement with policy
• Index