How can collaboration unlock greater efficiencies for universities?

When the Education Secretary toured the Millbank broadcast studios in the wake of her announcement on the 2025 fee uplift in England, a question repeatedly asked was what the government had in mind when it said it wanted universities to transform and operate more efficiently. What would this look like in practice and where would the savings come from? She didn’t find it an easy question to answer – but it isn’t an easy question to answer. Nor is it one government should be answering alone.

A Transformation and Efficiency taskforce was a key recommendation from UUK’s blueprint for change. Alongside the need for a stable environment and sustainable funding, the blueprint recognised the sector itself must also demonstrate it is willing to adapt and to deliver more efficient and productive working. The rapid formation of this taskforce is evidence we are prepared to think radically about transformation to tackle the challenges we face.

Let me be clear - the sector has been working hard to address the multitude of challenges heaped upon it over the last decade, most obviously the impact of a decade-long near freeze in tuition fees in England, set against rising costs and the high student expectations that were driven by the introduction of the £9,000 fee. This challenge has been even more acute in the devolved administrations which have been managing diminished resources for far longer. 

Transformation programmes and cost saving initiatives by individual institutions can only take us so far. To truly unlock the most effective and efficient ways of working, universities must collaborate and think creatively together, whether that’s locally, regionally or nationally. 

This is not unchartered territory for the sector. Indeed, there are many success stories of improvements made through sharing expertise, facilities or services, and we can learn from these and build on them. We already have well-established sector-wide organisations like Jisc, UCAS, and the UK University Purchasing Consortia which leverage the combined purchasing power of universities. 

Geographical partnerships between universities (and sometimes their local authorities and other local partners) were most recently showcased by the launch of Universities for North East England. Excellent joint work already exists to support student mental health and wellbeing by the city partner universities in Bristol, Cardiff and  Manchester.

We have the potential to explore more collaborative teaching models, as already demonstrated by the multiple partners at the University of London collaborating to deliver a modern foreign languages MA which they would be unable to sustain individually. 

A recent, comprehensive report by Jisc and KPMG celebrated more examples – but also made a compelling case for the sector to keep pushing itself on this. 

As chair of the taskforce, I will be ensuring we take an ‘all options on the table’ approach. Our discussion will include everything from systems and process sharing, to shared delivery of some student facing services and operational and business model change. 

At the same time, I recognise change on this scale is not easy. Transformation usually comes with considerable cost. Systems change brings technical challenges. And critically, UK higher education is a marketized system and a university’s ability to differentiate its academic offer (surely one of the great strengths of our system) is crucial. But so is taking action to control the future strength and success of the sector – and demonstrating to both government and the wider public that we are doing so. 

Our taskforce members are experts from across the sector, bringing expertise on operations, estates, people, finance and more, to be complemented by external expertise and scrutiny. We will explore opportunities for others in the sector to feed into the process and UUK will be running a summit on this topic this spring.

The outputs of this work will include evidence-led recommendations and high-level business cases to make a qualitative and quantitative assessment of the benefits associated with each initiative. We want to challenge ourselves but will do so within the parameters of the possible. There will be no as-yet-undiscovered magic bullet. But this is our chance to think about how the sector can transform and drive meaningful change, helping to put it back onto a stable footing to deliver the kind of growth and opportunity that is at the heart of what we do.

This piece was originally published by Times Higher Education on 19 December.