How to read the Green Paper

This is written before I have had sight of the immanent “green paper” on Higher Education from BIS. It is an attempt to spot what might be interesting within the paper in advance, and maybe something of a “wonk’s guide” to making sense of the thing when it eventually comes out.

First up, a “green paper” is an early stage consultation paper. It’ll be tempting to treat it as a “white paper“, but the choice of colour is a very important signifier. A “white” paper could be seen as analogous to a research paper – we’ve done the research, here are our findings and conclusions, do you agree with them?

A “green” paper is more like a hypothesis – we think that these ideas are the correct ones, we wish to test these with some research. In this case, the research will be a full consultation, with much more scope for responses to shape policy direction than with 2011’s “Students at the Heart of the System“. (Eager wonks will recall that much of the contents of the 2011 paper had already been implemented before the “white paper” consultation began).

We already know, and can infer, a great deal about what we can expect within the green paper. There have been two key speeches from Johnson Minor, one in July and another in September, that offer clues. Though most speculation (and god, has there ever been a lot of speculation…) has been about the TEF, it is not by any stretch the most important aspect.

To go through things in the order I am interested in them:

Regulatory and structural reform

That James Wilsdon (big fan!) was party to a fascinating leak from BIS concerning the spending review. The scale of cuts (looking like Osborne’s aspirational 40% for a non-ringfenced department) is now clear, as is the concept of a “bonfire of the partner agencies” – the usual response to calls for departmental cuts, and one that is usually followed by a realisation that the partner agencies were invented primarily to shunt staff numbers out of the main “Whitehall” count whilst keeping key jobs done.

I don’t rate Sajid Javid as a minister, not least because he seems to  want to make cuts rather more than he wants to run services. And it is his influence that saw Johnson Minor saying palpable nonsense like “much of the higher education system is ripe for simplification.” in September. (Compare his more conventional new-junior-minister structure-building speech in July, which neglected to mention the more recent horror of the “day 1” slide).

Of the 40+ partner bodies named by BIS, 10 are associated with Higher Education, suggesting that at least four will likely perish. Which ones are for the chop depend entirely on choices made around the issues below.

Changes to research funding in England

Merging the seven research councils must look like an easy win for Javid – surely back office functions and branding could be combined with minimal disruption and significant savings. Sir Paul Nurse’s review of research funding is now overdue (expected Summer 2015), and given he is on record as claiming that a government that to cut research spending would be “Neanderthal“, one has to suspect that the delay may be due to rocks being banged together concerning the gap between this recommendation and Javid’s small government instincts. (free social media tip for @bispressoffice – launch the report with the words “guh ruh guh urrrgh rahr Sir Paul Nurse” 🙂 )

Although it is likely that Nurse has recommended efficiencies around research support (his review was tasked with examining the split between project and strategic funding, ominously) it is unlikely that a recommendation to merge the councils directly would feature – indeed he’s been reported as saying this would “not be on the table”.

The other option would be to look at the non-project end of research funding – which would mean QR (basically research funding given to institutions to support general research-y activity) and the REF, both currently managed by HEFCE. Earlier this year Javid’s favourite think-tank, the IEA, called for both to be abolished. The regulatory environment upshot of this would be to get shot of HEFCE.

In the past, HEFCE’s responsibility for teaching funding would have stymied this approach – but post Browne/Willetts their teaching funding role is vestigial, to say the least. Widening participation is now under the auspices of OFFA, and the quality assurance remit is a whole other can of worms (see below). QR is much loved as a means of supporting blue-skies research and scholarship, as opposed to the more direct economic benefits often returned from research council projects.

Data requirements/”transparency”

A central plank of the Browne review was to offer students more information in order to make the market work better. It was a neo-classical economics admission of failure – the “sticker price” was obviously not conveying all the information (as free-market zealots like to believe it does), so more data was needed to give the market at helping hand.

HEFCE research (yes, them again) back in 2014 suggested that students don’t much use even the existing data in making course application decisions. And even the venerable NSS is currently under review . This consultation was released last week by HEFCE as kind of a data collection review version of leaning out of the window of a Passatt in Hull requesting a “bare knuckle”. In happier times for HEFCE, this release would have been a part of the green paper release and flagged as a sub-consultation within it- alas these days releases of HEFCE consultations tend to happen a day or two before a much bigger BIS announcement that renders them largely meaningless.

So, precise details on how universities spend student fees will likely be the order of the day. Bonus prize for anywhere that officially notes that they spend £9,000 per student on “running a university”.

Widening participation

A year ago, Westminster politicians used to swagger past Holyrood ones, kicking (45%) sand in their faces and claiming that their HE funding system was more progressive than the Scottish one, despite having £27,000 worth of fee loans. This was possible because until this parliament students from less monied backgrounds got maintenance grants.

Alas, in northern primary school terms, George Osborne is now the “cock of the school” and his need for insignificant budgetary fiddling to preserve the twin lies that austerity is working and our economy is in good shape has trumped Caledonian bragging rights. Forget for a moment that most of the loans will never be paid back, Osborne has never been a long term thinker – indeed I think “cock of the school” at St Paul’s meant something different.

So “widening participation” once again becomes an issue for England, but not in an egalitarian sense. Basically there are votes in promoting white working class ambitions, but not many, so Johnson’s speech suggested a bit more data and maybe a university might deign to offer a scholarship or two. Boring cynical stuff, but the mention of OFFA in the September speech makes them safer than the HEFCE institutional structure they sit in.

The TEF

Ah, the ****ing TEF. Friend to the second-rate HE commentator. There’ll be no surprises here, basically a grab-bag of the likely indicators (NSS, first destination, maybe some widening participation/POLAR numbers and anything else HESA have up their sleeve for next academic year) and a commitment to explore other data sources for a more refined TEF2 in the years to come.

The 2015 budget added spice to the long rumbling debate by allowing institutions that had been judged to have excellent teaching to raise their fees in line with inflation each year. To put that in perspective, the sector saw £9bn of home and EU fees last year. Inflation (RPI) currently sits at a tumescent 0.1% after many months of deflation (thanks, George!).  So English universities could be looking at sharing a maximum of just under an extra £9m a year if all are judged to have excellent teaching. (That’s £45m over 5 years – compare the £315m over 5 years devoted to the CETL programme)

New providers, DAPs and quality assurance

The gun has already been fired here regarding new providers. The doors are open and new “market entry” guidance has been issued. Surely new providers, and of a higher quality to those reported on by Dr McGettigan and others. It has already been indicated that the barriers to degree awarding powers and university title will be lowered, obviously because the initial experiments went so well. The only surprise here will be how little safeguards will be included.

Finally, expect nothing at all on QA. HEFCE’s consultation is being hung out to dry in the most exquisite way possible – via a parliamentary committee hearing.

In conclusion

So there we are. The news before the news, as they say. On downloading my own copy of the green paper I will first look to see whether HEFCE are toast, and then figure out what a mess has been made of the dual support system.