A barrier gone?

Last week the Chancellor delivered his Autumn statement. There were a number of items of good news for universities but the one I was looking out for was on the possible VAT exemption for cost sharing services. The good news was that the exemption was included, the statement noting that “Following consultation after Budget 2011, the Government will introduce a VAT exemption for services shared between VAT exempt bodies, including charities and universities”. VAT has often been quoted as being the major barrier to the introduction of shared services – VAT is charged on services with the result that any shared service would have to deliver a minimum saving of 20% in order to deliver any saving at all. That is a significant deterrent given that many shared services only become cost effective after a number of years.

So it would appear that the exemption is good news for the sector. But the cynic in me wonders whether it will really make much difference. When I attended a BUFDG briefing with HMRC and Treasury officials, they advised that the Treasury had only budgeted £200 million as the cost of introducing the exemption. In the Autumn statement the cost was put at £25 million in the first year, rising by £25 million in each of the next four years. The exemption doesn’t just apply to the university sector – it includes other VAT exempt bodies such as charities, housing associations and a significant part of the financial sector. Once you start to spread the £25 million over all these sectors, the expected cost is rather less in the university sector. And the expected cost will be reflected in the application of the exemption.

The devil will be in the detail and much of that has still to be determined. The thinking outlined at the briefing noted that the exemption would only apply to cost sharing groups – separate legal entities established to deliver shared services. It would not apply to organisations buying services from other such as one university paying another to host a system. There was some concern at the briefing that the cost of setting up a CSG – employing staff on new contracts, TUPE arrangements etc. – would outweigh any benefit from the VAT exemption. So potentially there is a chance of one deterrent replacing another. It was also proposed that only organisations with taxable income below a threshold amount would be eligible for the exemption. The threshold proposed was less than 15% taxable income. This was seen as a barrier as the proportion of taxable income from third stream activities and commercial research at a number of universities is already greater than 15% and so they would not be eligible for the exemption. With universities being encouraged to diversify their income, it is likely that more and more will fall foul of this threshold.

Unless the rules relating to the exemption are radically different from those outlined in the BUFDG briefings, the exemption is unlikely to bring widespread benefit to the sector. So does this mean that the sector will continue to shy away from shared services? The signs are that it will not – a number of institutions are rising to David Willetts’ challenge to be bold and innovative and are partnering with others to develop new shared services. This is in addition to the services being developed as part of the Universities Modernisation Fund work. The hope is that a number of these will make it through to production services although it is important to recognise that not all will become sustainable services. So there are positive signs. It is important though that the sector actively promotes and publicises the work that is going on. If this work is not publicised it will be all too easy for the sector to be accused of failing to take advantage of the exemption, whether or not its practical implementation will benefit the sector. And that sort of negative publicity is something the sector can do without.

The IT lab – it’s not dead yet

One of the sessions I attended today at Educause discussed whether there was a future for the IT ‘lab’ in universities. The session featured three institutions. One (Temple University in Philadelphia) had opted to invest in a central facility where there were the traditional computer rooms, flexible working space to allow students to work collaboratively, specialised facilities and catering outlets. The building has developed into the hub of the university with ever increasing numbers of students passing through its doors. This contrasted sharply with the experience at the University of Virginia. There the bulk of the IT labs had been ripped out and replaced with flexible learning space or had been converted into standard teaching space. The small computer room that remained was solely for the software that could not be virtualised for technical or licence reasons. The middle ground was represented by George Mason University where there are central IT facilities but there are no plans to expand them. Instead there will be increased investment in virtualisation to deliver services to students.

Three differing approaches but what were the reasons for the differences? Some lay behind the facts behind the headline stories. The University of Virginia has 100% computer ownership by its student body and of those students 95% own laptops. The university is entirely residential. So given the demographic base of their student body and their residential campus, it makes perfect sense to utilise the student brought IT as a resource. However, Virginia haven’t as yet closed down the departmental IT labs where perhaps subject specific software resides. So it is not a total close down of lab based IT facilities. Temple on the other hand is a city centre university. Students don’t want to carry their laptops with them (and not all have them) – they want a secure environment on site which offers them all the facilities they want. And the Tech Club offers them the facilities they want – students are engaged in determining what facilities are available and what they want are more student focused computing space. In between is George Mason – multi-campus and students with a range of demographic backgrounds. Their investment in further virtualisation is tempered with the knowledge that not all of their students will have access to high bandwidth broadband to accommodate delivery of virtualised services.

I took the opportunity to visit two universities in New York before heading to Educause. Both still have central IT labs. Columbia is largely campus based but not 100% – so there is a requirement still for central IT so students don’t have to bring their laptops onto the campus (open wireless access may allow students in Columbia accommodation off-site to access central resources or to print locally – unfortunately I didn’t establish whether that was the case). It was clear from my visit to New York University that students there do not bring their laptops on site. There were well utilised central IT facilities, including specialist equipment such as video editing suites and group working facilities. But there was also a well utilised laptop loan scheme within the main learning resource.

So is the traditional central IT computing lab dead? It may be possible to largely dismantle central facilities in campus based universities that are wholly residential but there are no such institutions in the UK. Facilities like the Information Commons at the University of Sheffield are, like the Tech Club at Temple, very well patronised by students. Laptop loan schemes are increasingly common and allow students to work collaboratively or individually, and to access centrally provided resources. There has been heavy investment in ensuring that much of the estate can be used flexibly – both in providing movable furniture in central facilities and in providing pervasive wireless networking to enable any area in the campus to be converted into working space, be it group or individual. There has been some progress towards a virtual desktop but the issues highlighted in all three presentations of licensing and scalability remain barriers to widespread adoption.

So the IT lab isn’t dead yet and it won’t be until students are comfortable bringing devices that they can use for their study to and from the campus, until all software that they use can be made available in a virtualised environment and until those devices are light enough to carry and have sufficient battery life to get through a full day of study. It may be possible to largely eliminate the central IT lab in campus based institutions where there is close to 100% ownership of laptops (and credit to those institutions that can manage it) but there are few institutions worldwide that fit into that category. Most have a significant body of students that live off campus, who may not have ready access to high speed broadband. For them, some central provision is, and will continue to be, essential.

The IT department says ‘yes’!

I chaired a panel session at the FOTE conference on the challenges of a bring your own device (BYOD) approach. The panel were set the challenge of identifying five top tips for a BYOD strategy but also cover a number of points that were raised in a number of postings on the FOTE blog.

Nizam Udin opened by giving a student perspective. He observed that an institution needs to focus on its core infrastructure when considering the needs of students bringing their own devices. This means that connection to the network and facilities on it should be easy with pervasive wireless (with adequate capacity) and single sign on. There need to be flexible spaces which can be used by students to work either singly or in groups throughout the day and there needs to be advice available to students to assist them in selecting an appropriate device and connecting it. There needs to be good communications between the IT department and the students, to ensure that the facilities available are known to the students and to ensure that the IT department understands how the devices will be used and what their customers want to do with them.

IT departments have a reputation for saying ‘no’ all too often in response to users’ requests so it was reassuring that all three of the panelists from institutions had mechanisms in place to engage with the student body. Examples included surveying the students to understand their requirements and usage of mobile devices through to involving the student body in IT governance. This was particularly highlighted at Imperial where students have been involved in discussions on issues like security. The College sought to adopt a ‘can do’ attitude and implement measures that provided the necessary security for the institution whilst meeting the needs of the students.

The discussion covered a wide range of topics but the overriding conclusion was that there was no need for a BYOD strategy. The likelihood of students and staff bringing their own devices should be embedded into other strategies such as the Teaching and Learning strategy, the Estates strategy, etc. Estates was seen as particularly important, as even with the best technical infrastructure in the world, if students aren’t able to make use of rooms when they are not in use or if the space they are allowed to use is not flexible, then the benefits to the student of BYO are lost. There is a need for engagement with students and staff to identify how they use their own devices to inform design and policy. Part of this engagement is involvement in governance and that will lead to better informed discussion and decisions on policy and procedure. Overall, collaboration with users, be they staff or students, leads to a better understanding of how they use the technology they bring and so allow IT services to provide the services those users need. This may require something of a cultural change within the IT department to encourage all staff to give better consideration of user needs and enable them to use their devices productively. In short, become the IT department that likes to say ‘yes’!

Outsourcing student services – lessons from IT

I read an interesting blog post by Mark Leach (@markmleach) on the possible impact of wholesale outsourcing on universities’ ability to respond quickly to consumer rights issues. Leach opined that the current relationship between student bodies and university management, where issues are generally resolved by negotiation, is at risk in an environment where many student services have been outsourced to commercial organisations. He suggested that the involvement of a third party would drive a wedge between the student and the university – “a wedge in the shape of a vast, monolithic, faceless bureaucracy whose motivation is profit and at best factors student concerns in to unintelligible calculations of risk, and at worst is entirely uninterested in them”.

The first question that came to mind was whether any institution could afford to let that happen. The increase in student fees has brought the student experience to the fore as a key performance indicator in many institutions. Being responsive to customers’ needs is part and parcel of delivering a quality service and that is the case whether or not the service is managed in house or provided by a third party. The difference is that where the service is provided by a third party, the response mechanisms and times need to be set up in a service level agreement (SLA) between the institution and the supplier. That agreement has to have teeth – it the supplier does not meet their obligations then there should be appropriate recompense. The agreement is two way; the institution will also have to make commitments in order to assist the supplier to deliver the service.

This gives rise to the second question – whether the sector has the skills to manage outsourced contracts. Outsourcing is already a recognised way of delivering aspects of IT services in universities but there are challenges. Defining the SLA itself is not a trivial task and will probably need to involve procurement and service specialists in discussion with the supplier. Even then it is unlikely that it will be wholly satisfactory first time around and so regular review needs to be built into the agreement. The goal should be to move the relationship in an outsourcing project from supplier-consumer to one of partnership where both parties understand the others’ aims and objectives. Supplier management though is a skill in short supply. Universities need to invest in developing their staff so that they are able to work with suppliers and move towards partnership. The University of Nottingham (winner of a UCISA Best Practice Award in 2010) is one that has made that investment and is now reaping the rewards.

There are a couple of further points that are relevant in the debate on outsourcing student services from the experience of higher education IT departments. One is that the main reason for moving to an outsourced solution has rarely been to reduce costs. Improvement of service has often been top of the list with resolving staffing issues (either addressing skills shortages or to free up staff time to reinvest elsewhere) also featuring strongly. In any case, it is often difficult to accurately assess whether an outsourced service will save money as few institutions know what it actually costs to run a given service*. The other point is to consider what your options are at the end of the contract. It would be rare in IT for there to be a single supplier for most applications/services so there is likely to be choice (in addition to bringing it back in-house). It is not clear that the same will be true of some aspects of student services although it is possible that if some institutions look to become providers of student services to others then there will be alternative options.

There will be some outsourcing of student services but I doubt that it will be wholesale in the immediate future. I don’t believe that the market is currently mature enough for any institution to take the risk of making that step. In IT the focus has tended to be on commodity services (such as email, storage, desktop) or on improving service (resilient data centres, 24 hour support). It is perhaps harder to split commodity from added value student services which may prove to be a barrier to outsourcing. Shared services set up by universities may provide a viable alternative to commercial companies and we are already seeing increasing collaboration between institutions in areas such as overseas student recruitment. It is important though that, where outsourcing is being considered, the lessons learned from the IT side of the business are applied to other projects. Institutions need to know what they are looking to achieve from outsourcing, they need to invest in their supplier management in order to build partnerships that deliver the quality of service they are aiming for. And with student experience becoming ever more critical, quality of service is key.

* UCISA is running an event in December looking at cost of services. See www.ucisa.ac.uk/ucprice

A poor performance indicator?

The National Student Survey (NSS) results were published today showing the level of satisfaction of final year undergraduates with various elements of their degree course. Whilst the headlines are focused on the overall satisfaction figure, within institutions there is greater analysis of the component questions. A poor score in a given area may highlight issues with given courses which may not have surfaced earlier. Three of the questions are on learning resources – one each on the Library (“The Library resources are good enough for my needs”), IT (“I have been able to access general IT resources when I needed to”) and specialist equipment and resources (again the measure is the ability to access when required).

The NSS ratings are used as key performance indicators in many institutions and a low rating in any one of the component questions is likely to trigger an investigation into the cause. IT services are no different in that respect but whilst a low rating may be indicative of a particular issue, does it necessarily follow that a high score indicates a good overall performance? Part of the problem is that the questions are very generic and so are open to interpretation. What do students interpret as general IT resources and when I needed to? Participants in one study I have seen considered general IT resources to be computers and printers, the VLE, or hardware support for personal equipment. Only a small proportion of the respondents considered the broader aspects of service provision such as speed of connectivity and logon, availability of wireless networking and helpfulness of support staff. Consequently the NSS rating is likely to be influenced by individuals’ perceptions of a subset of the service. Those who regard computers and printers as key will probably be satisfied if they can get on a PC in a computer room most of the time. Others may be satisfied if their laptop connects seamlessly with the wireless network. Those who focus on the VLE on the other hand may well consider the availability of teaching material within the VLE, something beyond the control of IT services, as important as the availability of the system itself when considering their response. So overall a good NSS score, whilst pleasing, does not give the overall picture. For that IT services will have to invest in a range of activities to obtain feedback on their services and input to their planning.

Looking forward, there is no easy solution to refining the NSS questions and it certainly isn’t a function of the NSS to replace more specific feedback mechanisms. Nonetheless the student spends a significant amount of time away from their institution or accessing resources from their own devices. This is a clear division and one that could perhaps be tested. A possibility we have discussed at UCISA could be to have two questions – one which asks for a view on general IT facilities within the campus and another which asks about the ease of access to resources such as e-journals and the VLE from off campus or from personal devices. Although this would not be perfect by a long way, it does distinguish between campus and remote access and could give a clearer picture of where resources might need to be targeted. Otherwise the responses to the Learning Resources questions within the survey remain good indicators of poor service but poor indicators of good.

Impact of complying with the new immigration system

Yesterday saw the publication of a review of the impact on higher education institutions of complying with the points based immigration system for students. The report makes ten recommendations and has been forwarded the UK Border Agency, Universities UK and Guild HE for their response. Although most of the recommendations relate to policy, procedure and advice, there are a number relating to the underlying IT systems and data.

The interviews carried out in forming the report, together with discussions on various forums have identified a number of operating difficulties but also potential solutions to alleviate them. However, UKBA were only resourced for the implementation of the Sponsor Management System (SMS) which underpins operation of the points based immigration system; there was no commitment to its ongoing development. Consequently there has not been a mechanism to collect and prioritise enhancements which means that opportunities to refine processes, to become more efficient and so deliver savings are perhaps being missed. The recommendation to reinstate the future enhancements register and to establish a mechanism to monitor it is welcomed. It is hoped that, if the recommendation is accepted, a permanent test environment will be resourced to facilitate testing by student records systems suppliers.

Following the launch of the system there has continued to be changes made to criteria and rules, often with short lead times. Whilst these have not (as yet) had any impact on systems requirements, if changes did require changes to the data transfer files, it is unlikely that student records systems suppliers would be able to develop and test any required changes before the change was scheduled to come into effect (even if they had a system to test against). It is desirable that changes are scheduled where possible and known well in advance. The recommendation of an agreed annual calendar for the timing of changes makes sense and will hopefully allow suppliers to schedule developments. However, given that change will generally be driven by the needs of Parliament and political imperative, it is likely that there will still be changes outside any agreed schedule.

Finally, the SMS contains a significant amount of data on the preferences and behaviour of potential international students considering studying in the UK. UKBA have no real interest in this data and so there was no mechanism specified to allow reporting on the data within the SMS or to allow wholesale extraction of the data to allow analysis by third parties. The potential use of the data, which could inform the ongoing development of the international reputation of HE in the UK, has been recognised through the recommendation that the feasibility of extracting data from the SMS for subsequent analysis on behalf of HEIs should be examined.

It is hoped that the responses from the various parties allow these recommendations to be taken forward. HEIs have incurred and continue to incur significant costs in order to comply with the points based system. In these financially constrained times, it is imperative that both UKBA and the HEIs are able to operate efficiently and that opportunities to ease the burden of compliance are taken.

Open all hours?

Providing a quality, resilient service was the third ranked issue in UCISA’s 2011 Top Concerns survey. The issue of out of hours technical support was hightlighted recently in a thread on one of UCISA’s discussion lists.

There is much that can be done to improve the resilience of systems but things do still go awry and IT staff are then needed to fix the problem. And with the expectation that systems will be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, making arrangements to ensure that you have the right people available can prove challenging.

In many universities out of hours technical support is provided by the staff within the institution on a goodwill basis – if they notice that something has failed (and many staff do monitor the services for which they are responsible when they are not in the office) or if they are alerted to a problem, they will tackle it as a matter of pride. However relying on goodwill is not sustainable; individuals’ circumstances change and if there is over-reliance on a few people, goodwill evaporates. So what are the alternatives?

Some institutions have formal agreements with technical staff. Typically these provide a lump sum as a responsibility allowance for being on call backed up in some circumstances with overtime payments or expenses for call outs. Overtime is not paid in all cases with some instituions only paying overtime for staff below a certain grade. One of the common themes is that such agreements with staff are on a voluntary basis – staff need to be aware of what the commitment is and be able to opt in to (and out of) the scheme. This in itself presents some challenges as it may be the case that the number of volunteers is insufficient to provide adequate cover. Clearly the package presented to staff needs to be attractive enough to make sure there are enough takers.

Others have tackled this by building in out of hours cover into the terms and conditions of their staff. This is fine for new staff joining an organisation as they will be the only terms and conditions they will have had at the institution, but there will need to be some negotiation and discussion with those already in post to ensure a smooth transition to the new terms.

Outsourcing support is another option but this has a number of difficulties too. There are many interdependencies between systems in universities and colleges which complicate support. It may be possible to correct issues with a given system but not necessarily if the reason for a system being unavailable is that a component of the service that depends on another system has failed. For example, I know of a university which outsourced the out of hours support of the VLE to their provider. Although the provider was able to fix problems with the system, software and underlying database, the VLE was still unavailable on occasions when there was a problem with the authentication server which was developed and maintained in house. Clearly there would need to be clear documentation and training in order for an external agency to have maintenance of that system that within their remit. One solution to this would be to standardise the software being used. Using vanilla commercial products makes it more likely that an external agency would be able to support it.

There is the question as to whether you really need 24 by 7 support. Hardware is more reliable than ever and there are many technical solutions that provide failover and resilience. That said, the cost of providing that resilience may well exceed the cost of providing out of hours cover. Assessing the impact of failure, using the methods outlined in the UCISA Cost of IT failure work, will also help determine whether out of hours cover needs to be applied to given services or systems. It could be though that the risk to reputation and student satisfaction of the failure of a key student facing system, no matter how unlikely that is, is too great not to consider out of hours technical support. With students paying significantly higher fees, IT directors and their colleague will need to balance those sort of issues with the demands of running a cost effective service. That will be quite a balancing act.

Driving efficiencies

I spent a significant part of yesterday providing input to the Universities UK review of modernisation and efficiency. The main purpose was to provide evidence of the contribution IT departments make to improving the efficiency and overall modernisation of their institutions. I’m certainly aware of a lot of activity led by IT departments that is making a major contribution to their institutions but one thing that IT departments aren’t good at is promoting their successes. It was a lengthy but productive meeting as Chris Sexton and I highlighted the range of activity within IT departments.

 

IT directors have been used to running tight ships and so are perhaps ahead of the game in looking at alternative ways of delivering their services. One reason for this has been the lack of recurrent funding to support capital investments; all too often spend on new applications or services has not been backed up with recurrent money for the posts to support those applications or replace related hardware on an on-going basis. So IT directors have had to juggle their resources to continue to support new services whilst continuing to maintain existing ones. This has been one driver behind the migration of email and storage services to Google or Live@Edu, the intention being to lose the effort of supporting commodity services and reinvest the staff time released in other activities that support the core business of the institution. The challenge has been exacerbated by the need to meet the demands of the student body and those demands will increase as fees rise. The incoming students have a high expectation that IT within their institutions will be pervasive and available 24/7. IT directors have sought to introduce new services and infrastructure to try and meet those expectations. This demands greater investment in new services, always something of a challenge when many institutions spend over 80% of their IT spend on keeping existing services running.

 

Another area where IT has led has been the adoption of standards. Institutions now use structured project management methods across the piece, whether Prince2 or a lighter alternative, and the principles of good service management have spread from adoption of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) to other areas of the institution. IT departments have led on business process review and improvements – the introduction of Lean as a process improvement methodology has often started from within business improvement sections within IT.

 

There have been a number of successful shared and managed services introduced in the IT area. A growing number of institutions make use of managed services. These range from VLE hosting to email filtering and virus detection to data centre provision. IT has led the way with recent shared services with the NORMAN out of hours IT support desk and the ESISS Shared Information Security Service both evolving from the HEFCE Shared Services feasibility studies. Others shared services have grown out of collaboration where one institution is providing services for another or where consortia have been formed to procure and support services from a third party. One thing is clear though. Many of these shared and managed services have been enabled by the existence of JANET, itself a successful and valued shared service.

 

There remain challenges though.

• Perception – the mantra from the Government regarding shared services has largely been about cost. It isn’t just about cost and in any case the savings aren’t always there to be made. More often the drivers are to deliver a better service or to free up resource for activity that delivers better value in the core business areas of teaching and research. Once it is recognised by staff that managed or shared services offer ways of changing and enhancing their role, then there will be greater acceptance and less fear of alternative methods of provision.  
• Leadership – institutions’ executive boards need to grasp the nettle and drive through standardisation in their own institutions. This will only succeed with strong leadership – without it academic departments in individual institutions will continue to operate in different ways with the resulting loss of efficiency. There is no chance of sharing services (as opposed to systems) between institutions if there are not standard processes within institutions. Sharing services is where real efficiencies lie.
• Understanding – all too often an assessment is made that a particular system cannot be outsourced or shared because it is critical for competitive advantage. There are a number of points here. Firstly, it is unlikely to be the system that gives competitive advantage but the way it is used, the processes around it. Secondly, the vast majority of processes are not radically different from one institution to another. Once it is understood which processes deliver real competitive advantage then greater consideration can be made of sharing those processes that do not.

There is no doubt that IT can and does play a significant role in delivering efficiencies in higher education institutions. What IT Directors need to do is be more proactive in celebrating their departments’ successes and highlighting the contribution IT makes to their institutions.

 

Leading the student experience

The prospect of undergraduate fees of £9000 in England has focussed attention on to the student experience. A recent event run by the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education brought together delegates from a wide range of roles within universities to discuss the topic and share experiences.

It was recognised that an impact of higher fees will be increased expectations of both teaching and facilities. Janet Beer, Vice-chancellor of Oxford Brookes University, noted that students wanted clear definitions of what to expect from their courses and would not tolerate second rate facilities. This will certainly present a challenge to IT Directors who will need to ensure that the facilities and services they provide meet the needs of the student body whilst their budgets are declining in real terms.

The discussion and presentations throughout the day made it clear that HEIs will need greater engagement with their students at a broad range of levels. It was reassuring to hear Beer’s positive comments on the role the Students Union had played at Brookes in the discussions on the level of student fees. She and other speakers noted that students were engaging with their institutions in a more professional way than in the past and were fully contributing to debate and discussion. It was important to create organisations where the student is listened to and to deploy a range of techniques to get feedback. This is one area where social media can play a role through simple mechanisms such as the use of Twitter by service departments through to bespoke social networks with chat rooms and bulletin boards. Ben Whittaker from the NUS observed that early engagement with the future students in their schools would allow HEIs to gain a better understanding of the next generation of students. Again this is an area where social networks can play a role.

Improving the student experience cannot, however, be done on the cheap. It was clear that the institutions need to invest in the estate, services and infrastructure but this should not just be restricted to central facilities; academic departments will also need to ensure that their facilities meet the expectations of their students. Investment is only part of the solution – it needs to be backed up by commitment. The policies and actions aimed at the student experience will need to be understood and followed by all those who come into contact with students across the institution whether they are a professor, help desk advisor, student finance officer or departmental secretary. And it is equally important to ensure that the same principles are applied to the whole of the student body and that groups such as distance learners are not left out. This is not a quick process. The presentations from Queen Mary and the University of Sunderland both described programmes of work that started some years ago. With the first intake of £9000 fee paying students just eighteen months away, many do not have the luxury of time.

It is important to be able to demonstrate that the measures being put in place are improving the student experience. Institutions need to make sure that they make use of the information available to them wisely to inform decisions. They should not just look to deliver against the indicators without embracing an overall philosophy of improving the student experience. There will be a need for collaboration between CIS departments and their planning colleagues to ensure that appropriate measures are defined and correctly interpreted.

There were a number of references to institutions having a senior member of staff dedicated to ‘the student experience’. Whilst it is important to recognise that with many students in England at least paying £9000 a year for their courses the student experience will be critical, it is equally important that it cannot be a specialist discipline. Like IT, it should be embedded in everything that the institution does and whilst there will be specific policies and strategies designed to enhance the student experience, it is perhaps as much about ensuring that the student is considered in all aspects of the institution’s operations. IT has a critical role in delivering quality services to students. Consequently IT Directors need to ensure they are involved in those activities and initiatives that enhance the student experience and ensure that their staff are committed to putting the student first.

The future of Higher Education

I attended the Guardian Future of Higher Education symposium earlier this month and heard a number of varied and interesting presentations including two from Government ministers in David Willetts and Simon Hughes.

There were a number of key points that arose during the course of the day.

• There is an expectation that most institutions will seek to charge the maximum fee for their courses (and this is being borne out in the numerous announcements in the last fortnight). Aaron Porter, President on the NUS, noted that failure to charge £9000 for a course would almost suggest that it was of a lesser standard. This will bring some challenges to the Government who have based their calculations on an average fee of £7500 but David Willetts noted that the key factor was the cost to the Treasury, not the fee (notionally) charged. So if all institutions provide subsidies or fee waivers that reduce the average to £7500, then there is less likely to be an impact. If this is not the case then BIS will have to find savings. A number of options are under consideration including reducing student numbers and reducing the teaching grant further. The picture will be clearer once all institutions have declared their position and the White Paper (scheduled now for June or July) has been published. Simon Hughes delivered an impassioned plea for institutions to consider lower fees (and it has to be said that he has always been an opponent of higher fees) but the evidence is that few will respond to his call.
• Early engagement with potential applicants was a recurring theme, particularly when widening participation was discussed. It was recognised that the choices school children make at 14 and 16 can have a decisive effect on making them credible candidates for leading universities so there is a need for universities to engage at a much earlier stage to provide guidance. There was much mention of a careers for life service which I understand was one of the victims of the cuts so there may be a void that universities need to fill. The value of early engagement is perhaps illustrated by an example from Europe. The Italian system had a high drop out level and they sought to rectify that by engaging with applicants and identifying the courses that were most suitable for them. The drop out rate is falling as a result.
• Further evidence for the need for engagement was highlighted in the session on marketing courses. Both Peter Slee and Tricia King identified that a key factor in a student choosing to go to university was the opportunity to sample university life through visits and open days. King observed that engagement with applicants is an important part of retention as you are introducing the experience and managing expectations (although as one delegate pointed out, it is important to ensure that support is available throughout a student’s time at university). For all the Government’s talk about providing better information through the key information sets, the consensus was that decisions are largely made with the heart, not the head so although the KIS might provide assurance for parents, the open day or visit is more likely to be influential on the students themselves.
• It was also recognised that there needs to be greater engagement with employers. A number of leading accountancy companies have established relationships with some institutions and will, for certain courses, pay individuals students’ fees for the duration, pay them a salary whilst they are studying and give them a job on graduation. This is perhaps evidence that the sector does provide good value for money when compared with the cost of training graduates. This will clearly be an attractive option to applicants when fees increase but not all industries are in a position to offer such incentives. Graduates in STEM subjects are unlikely to command large salaries and the high salaries available in the financial sector are leading to a drain of STEM graduates from their preferred discipline. It was recognition that the Government needs to look at ways of providing incentives for graduates to stay in STEM disciplines.
• Finally the conference looked at the alternatives for delivering higher education. It was recognised that the Further Education sector has a role to play and the success of the 2 + 2 scheme in Scotland (where the FE college delivers the first two years of the course before students move to a HEI to complete) was cited as a good example of an effective partnership between the two sectors. It was recognised that FE Colleges have stronger links to their local community and to industry than their HE counterparts. Commercial providers have also go strong links with commerce and shape their programmes to meet companies’ needs. They have had to be lean in order to survive and live with challenges of variable student numbers and income.

Overall the event was rather more upbeat than I had been expecting. The consensus was that the sector was well placed to see through the turbulence over the next couple of years and couple look forward with a reasonable amount of optimism. That said, there is no space for complacency. It was clear that there is a need for the sector to be more efficient and also the need for greater investment in engagement with both potential applicants and employers. IT can clearly play a role in these areas but I suspect the bigger challenge will be the change in culture required.