The organisation and administration of research and teaching in universities depends upon daily consultation, cooperation and negotiation, shared management and input of specialist and organisational skills and expertise. Universities conduct staff surveys which reveal significant worries about certain person-management aspects of everyday…

The accountants Grant Thornton (GT) do a welcome and nice piece of pro bono work by analysing the annual accounts of the UK's 160 (sic) HEIs and compiling a report on "The Financial Health of the Higher Education Sector"--this year entitled "The calm before the storm"! GT duly note that, if the US Department of Education's "ratio-based…

This paper assesses the growing UK private sector in education and questions whether it is, as its supporters suggest, a valuable addition to an already diverse national system. An earlier "Perspectives" paper (Woodfield et al 2011) explored the emerging partnerships between public and private sectors. This follow-up explores the roles that the…

Since 1998-99, when the Scottish Parliament, National Assembly for Wales and Northern Ireland Assembly were established, higher education policies appear to have diverged across the four "home countries" of the UK. This divergence is most visible in the contrasting tuition-fee and student-support arrangements for students entering HE in 2012, and…

The author has been asked by the Editor-in-Chief to write about the impact of fees on the sector. He does so with concern for the impact on and implications for applicants, students, graduates and their families. Home and European Union undergraduate tuition fees are of course only part of the fee picture for higher education institutions (HEIs),…

Inside the academy there is a cultural perspective that it should run itself, in the sense that "business as usual" should be done with no one's hands obviously on the levers. This theory reaches its high point in the "self-government" of Oxford and Cambridge colleges. In this article, the author explores the question, "who runs our…

Perhaps more than any other country in Europe, the UK has well-established equality law and practice, originating with the Race Relations Act of 1965, but based on a longer history of struggle for equality. In 2011 public bodies, including higher education institutions (HEIs), were required to respond to the implementation of the Equality Act…

In a rapidly changing external environment, for many universities, restructuring of the academic organisation is the most important leadership challenge. In this article, the author provides an analysis of academic restructuring in UK universities. Using the "Commonwealth Universities Yearbook", he looked at the changes in academic structures…

The author argues that a Higher Education Bill will be lacking in the future, as promised in the 2011 White Paper on HE; and hence the regulatory framework for English HE will, for the immediate future at least, have to evolve within the law as it is rather than via new legal powers. The essential issue is how to extract the benefits of market…

The student experience in higher education is firmly placed at the top of the strategic agenda for the majority of higher education institutions (HEIs) in the UK at present. In the current climate of public cuts, universities increasingly have to strike a delicate balance between cost efficiencies and delivery of the high-quality university…

Last October Lord Browne of Madingley published the long-awaited report of his "Independent Review into Higher Education Funding and Student Finance" (Independent Review 2010). Browne and his colleagues recommended the removal of the "cap" on the tuition fees chargeable for first degrees by taxpayer-funded universities in England. This cap,…

In a previous paper, this author argued that the present governance arrangements for UK universities and colleges, and in particular the preferred official model for governing bodies, were no longer fit for purpose (if indeed they ever were), and that some fundamental reforms were needed. This paper sets out some reform proposals. The author goes…

Scenario planning is a tool which can help organisations and people to think about, and plan for, the long-term future. In basic terms, it involves creating a number of in-depth scenarios (stories), each of which tells of a different possible future for an organisation or issue, and considering how each different future might influence…

This article represents a lecture given by Professor Steve Smith at the Association of University Administrators Annual Lecture on 20 October 2009. There has been considerable change in the sector since the lecture was delivered, however, the Editor and author felt that the issues still pose significant challenges to higher education (HE), and…

This article arises out of responses to a survey of three management trainee schemes, analysed by the author in response to a request by the scheme organisers, and builds on the work of Bolton (2008). Based on four responses from two pre-1992 institutions, and three responses from one post-1992 institution, some clear themes emerged from the…