Bringing English universities under one department wins support

Calls for the reintegration of university teaching and research into a single Westminster government department have received the backing of a former permanent secretary at the Department for Education.

Sir David Bell, vice-chancellor of the University of Sunderland, said the split in responsibility for teaching and research into different departments since 2016 was causing harm to the sector.

The relationship between teaching and research was the subject of a Higher Education Policy Institute (Hepi) paper by Nicola Dandridge, professor of practice in higher education policy at the University of Bristol, earlier this year.

The paper said that growing separation between the two pillars was happening with little or no attention being paid to the downsides and trade-offs in terms of university practices and government policy development.

Speaking in a Hepi webinar, Professor Dandridge, who is a former chief executive of the Office for Students and Universities UK, said the split between departments – the DfE and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology – was “really unhelpful” and was making some of the challenges to balancing teaching and research equally even worse.

“There was a single minister straddling both departments initially – which was very difficult to pull off and I’m not sure that is the solution – but I think bringing universities back into a single department is the solution,” she said.

There have been separate ministers for higher education and science since 2020, when Boris Johnson split the brief from science for the first time in a decade.

Martha Longdon, faculty education and student experience manager at the University of Nottingham, said one of the casualties of the current divide were postgraduate researchers, who “straddle both of the regulators” and represented a challenge for universities to find where to sit them best.

“Bringing back together research and teaching or the rest of higher education under one department would be pivotal,” she said.

“I think it’s very challenging at the moment to balance both of those things together, particularly when you essentially have departments that are polarised in their views on certain issues. So I really think it needs to be a joined-up approach.”

And Sir David, who was a permanent secretary at the DfE for six years, agreed.

“I would certainly bring higher education back under a single government department,” he said.

“I think it’s highly deleterious now to have split it the way it’s been split, and I think there is a whole set of arguments in favour of that.”

He said that there was ideal balance between teaching and research because the sector consisted of many varied and autonomous institutions – from research-intensive universities to research-active ones, with an “almost infinite variety in between”.

But Sir David questioned whether the sector had been “cloth-eared” to legitimate public and political concern that it did not give enough attention to teaching.

“The recent industrial action in universities doesn’t damage our reputation because politicians think that not enough research is being done; it damages us because there is a perception that we don’t care enough about teaching and students’ learning.”

patrick.jack@timeshighereducation.com