Cutting courses is dismal, but only collective effort will find a better way

The declining value of tuition fees in UK higher education is not a new issue. It has been apparent for many years that there is no political appetite to raise fees in line with inflation even when inflation is at historically low levels, never mind when, as recently, it has been historically high.

So university leaders have had a lot of time to think about what to do about income levels that are falling in real terms. Yet the spate of recent course cuts and closures, accompanied by redundancies and disgruntled letters to newspapers by discontented staff, suggests that instead of using that time wisely, those university leaders simply asked the same unimaginative external consultant what to do.

Before anyone else takes that dismal advice, should we not try a little harder? Should we not take a step back and reflect, first, on how we have allowed costs to skyrocket even as budgets have effectively plummeted? Could it be that it was unwise to refurbish campuses so frequently in pursuit of fashionably open study spaces? Maybe chasing new teaching business all the time, rather than improving or fixing current business, was unwise given the demand it creates for both more niche staff to teach a fragment of the new courses and (usually) new middle-management jobs and executive posts to be “strategically responsible” for them. Perhaps it was misguided to run endless projects that come with rafts of business cases for specialists, seconded admin, project managers and chunks of the time of existing staff, to the point of needing new or temporary staff to pick up the slack.

The list goes on and the costs mount up. Simply declaring that certain courses are no longer financially viable almost amounts to misdirection if we don’t also ask who dreamed up and approved these unsustainable and unnecessary cost hikes and ask: “What were you thinking?”

We can’t lay all the blame at the feet of vice-chancellors, as academics typically like to do. They cannot possibly know or be expected to know what’s happening across their entire institutions. They have to place trust in their proxies (and even their proxies’ proxies) to make the right calls. But if those proxies were the ones who got us into our current predicament, the question remains as to why they should be trusted to make the right calls to get us out of that predicament.

The problem is not as simple as axeing arts degrees. Yes, staff costs are the biggest expense of any university, but – recognising the limited impact of spending less on printing or lunches or travel – cutting back on closing courses and triggering redundancies and early retirements is not the only way to reduce them. Nor is freezing hiring and stretching existing staff ever thinner the only alternative.

Surely a sector full of bright minds can do better. Indeed, many of the solutions already exist, but solely as thought exercises. To realise them and the savings they offer, we need to stop relying on high-level financial overviews and take a real deep dive into every aspect of our practice and delivery as institutions – and not just in the classroom.

It is within our power to change not only what we do but also how we do it. We do not have to continue working the same way as we have for decades. We can take nearly all of our processes and digitise them, connect them and automate them to give admin and academic staff the time and headspace they need to deal with the problems that processes can’t solve.

We need to streamline the way we do marking, admin, resource allocation, people management, all of it. We need to use the myriad datapoints we naturally collect on our students across multiple disconnected systems to identify risk and support them much earlier to improve their outcomes and reduce withdrawals (and lost fee income). We need to take a much closer look at exactly how our space is being used, bearing down, for instance, on modules that claim to be running as multiple tutorials with multiple staff when, in reality, they’re just doing the same lecture five times to small groups, with no tutorial aspects to them at all. These flaws in teaching design and management of staff use surely contributed significantly to calls for more staff, stretching salaries and pension contributions further than our income can handle. The list of places to look and practice to innovate goes on.

But to access that list, senior leadership should look beyond their immediate and usual circles of advice. They should look to the talent their institutions contain, regardless of individuals’ institutional position; everyone potentially has something to contribute.

Equally, that talent needs to rise to the challenge and come up with suggestions. We shouldn’t just expect senior leadership to come up with the solutions by themselves: this is, in part, what has led us to where we are. If we don’t work together to come up with some better ideas for change, the delicate reparative surgery that the academic business model needs will simply not be possible – and the hacksaw amputations will continue.

Chris Moore is a senior lecturer in anatomy at the University of the West of England, Bristol.