Good afternoon. It’s a real honour to have been invited to deliver the 2025 AHEP lecture. Thank you so much to the AHEP team for asking me.  And it’s amazing to see so many people here today – familiar faces and new faces! This is a particularly busy time of year – I’m sure you’re all trying desperately hard to finish off an interminable to-do list before the close of the year and the winter break.  So thank you for making the time to come together to listen.

And without wanting to get too “Thought for the Day” about it all, togetherness really is the central theme I want to explore with you, today. My mind has been heavily preoccupied by thoughts about how providers in the English sector respond to the prompts to work together which come out of the White Paper and through the financial crisis.  Much of what follows is my own personal thinking, rather than QAA’s official position, so please listen in the spirit of that caveat!

I have long thought that competition is the wrong paradigm for higher education.  Universities are a social good.  Whether that shows up as scientific progress made for the benefit of humanity through research, or whether it shows up as improved health and welfare outcomes brought about through a better educated population making good choices for their lives, the work that we all do every day is a massive contributor of positive outcomes for individuals and society as a whole.  Those sorts of benefits are usually better achieved through collaboration. 

And of course, we’re facing a demographic shift in the population of 18 year olds, which will peak at 855,000 in 2030, and then fall to 705,000 by 2038 – a drop of almost 17.5%.  If you put that together with everything we know about current recruitment patterns and the financial situation of many universities, it seems inevitable that collaboration will become an increasingly essential model for future HE provision – whether times remain tough or not.

But in order for collaboration to work really well, it needs – for me – three things: communication, clarity and simplicity. 

Any partnership relies on good communication.  I think that’s self evident.  You can’t enter into a relationship with someone if you’re not prepared to communicate what the principles underpinning that relationship are, what you want to get out of it, and where your boundaries lie.  And if that communication isn’t clear, up front, and reinforced in practice, then the relationship is going to be problematic.  I would send you to listen to the new Lily Allen album for an example of what that looks like, but it’s Christmas and you don’t need to be depressed.  Let’s just say that in any relationship, personal or corporate, clear transparent communication is the key to success.

Inevitably, in my thinking about collaboration, my main concern is for the quality of any collaborative endeavour.  I hear a lot from senior leaders about how their attempts to reshape provision is driven by data – about the financial viability of courses and modules, the recruitment patterns of the course over time, the size and shape of the provider and its work force.  But no reshaping of provision can happen without consideration through the lens of quality and standards.

Quality is a shared sector principle.  QAA’s work around quality and standards – indeed, the whole of the UK Quality Code – are not about compliance.  As quality professionals we aim to foster an approach to quality that is permissive, not prescriptive.  We, and the quality teams working in providers, are all about creating a high quality student experience that enables success and progression.  Working collaboratively both forces and helps us to challenge ourselves when we think about what high quality looks like.  It necessitates us to create agile and enhancement-focused systems that *enable* rather than block innovation.  We aim to work together with the sector and to enable providers to work together with each other to produce an inclusive, high quality student experience.

But Higher Education is, in the main, staffed by brilliant people with brilliant minds, which have been trained to think deeply; to critique; to question and to probe.  And all too often we overcomplicate things in our pre-delivery analysis.  We find reasons *not* to do something, rather than ways *to* do the thing.  And that approach is becoming untenable in the current environment.  And when I say untenable, I mean from the perspective of solving sector challenges, from the perspective of delivering government’s policy drivers and from the perspective of meeting students’ needs.

So… Why does collaboration matter now??

I’m sure you’ve spotted that collaboration, not competition, lies at the heart of the English government’s vision as described in the Post-16 Education and Skills white paper – but the government is not addressing the underlying mechanisms to support this. Given the challenges I’ve outlined earlier, we need to drive this from within the sector – and the need is as urgent in the devolved administrations as it is in England.

The combination of the demographic cliff edge, the need for a workforce that can deliver the economic growth government needs, and the potential for less and less well qualified school leavers, it becomes obvious that the skills agenda and workforce planning pressures are not illusory; government is framing this as a lifelong learning model for a reason – as industry’s capacities and demands for workforce change, we are inevitably going to need to train and re-train the same people to adapt and grow with the economy, to support an increasingly aging population.  And indeed if my rather gloomy predictions prove even only partially true, we may well need to think about the profile of higher education – what is it for?  What does it do?  Will we need to provide more ESOL and/or Foundation type programmes to ensure a population of students ready and qualified for higher levels of learning?  Will we need to provide ever greater integration between education stages – from early years to postgraduate?  Will we need to be much smarter about the articulation between levels 3,4,5 and 6 and about people’s ability to move from one provider to another as they make that progression over the course of a much longer and potentially more fragmented period of education?

As a sector, when we pose ourselves these questions, we tend very quickly to overcomplicate—to get lost in “knarly problems” instead of focusing on possibilities – and by way of evidence of this, I offer you the years of debate about the Lifelong Learning Entitlement and credit transfer.

So at the level of practical implementation, current models for collaboration are being driven by funding necessities (or lack of safety nets), rather than by future strategic probability, or any great desire to innovate and transform.  (I am, of course, speaking in a sweeping way at a whole-sector level. I’m sure you can think of providers where work is happing at the truly innovative, transformational level)

I wonder whether, as a thought experiment, regional devolution might become a catalyst for the kind of innovative, vertically integrated transformative collaboration I’m imagining.  I can see a world where a group of providers across FE and HE might think with their regional government structures about local economic needs; might work with their LSIPs and Chambers of Commerce to engage with social challenges such as high populations of non-native English speakers (needing more ESOL provision) or work in areas where school non attendance rates are rising, to reimagine education that meets these challenges and provides pathways for people who don’t fit into the part-time undergraduate model that the lifelong learning policy model currently seems to be designing for.  Might you train someone to speak English to a level of fluency and teach them credit at the level of BTEC or even HND (or whatever that becomes next), so that they become economically active citizens, able to contribute to and shape their communities.  And then perhaps they may progress through a few working years and decide they want to gain a professional qualification at level 4 or 5… And they do this learning through providers in their region who operate to a unified structure of academic standards in a way that allows them to transfer this credit between themselves so that they don’t all have to maintain a full range of courses or modules in the relevant subject area – they can specialise and by having a narrower range of provision which ensures their financial viability, and by working within their regional communities, they can plan in a way that enables their survival – and perhaps even allows them to thrive.  And of *course* we’d have to do this in ways that ensures that there is some custodianship of the full range of academic disciplines (but not necessarily in every geographic region).  And of *course* there would need to be some traditional, research-intensive universities and some highly specialist provision.  There is room for all these things – and more – to be true at once.

For me, then, building collaborations at the regional level, Linking to LSIPs and local chambers of commerce means that we can design integrated education systems which both

• Meet local economic skills needs
• Prevent regional brain drain

And they allow us to cater for stratified populations:

• We can create  offerings for those who stay in education vs. those disengaged early – QAA’s framework for flexible assessment promotes assessment models that are inclusive, adaptable, and aligned with diverse learner needs, ensuring fairness and reliability in non-traditional formats.
• And we can reimagine access provision— tailored, purpose-driven pathways such as the Access to HE Diploma

So… what are the principles for effective collaboration?

As I’ve said, collaboration doesn’t need to be overcomplicated.  But it MUST start with a clear, shared purpose—not just reacting to funding levers or policy pressures. I’m going to give some guidelines and where I use examples, I’ll use international ones, since international collaboration is at this point the most commonly used model.

• Good collaboration has clear boundaries and definitions:
  • Everybody needs to know who does what: Define roles early to avoid duplication or gaps. For example, FE colleges may lead on access and vocational pathways, while universities focus on advanced skills and research. Most failures are not malicious but result from poor initial planning setup and then overcomplication, often created by incremental changes designed to fill the gaps of the initial poor planning. Models need to be kept simple and scalable.  An excellent example of this is University of Lancaster’s collaboration with Deakin University, in Indonesia.  These two institutions are delivering joint degrees in a joint branch campus.  Before they got into the detail of courses, financial planning, recruitment and all of that, they set out at the level of principle and practice, how they were going to take responsibility for every element of delivery.  What would their governance look like?  What about their operating procedures? Who would resource which element of what?  What would they do if they disagreed about something?  How would the governance work? Who would be involved? It is all set out, very clearly, from the very outset.
  • Accountability: Early on, ideally from the outset, you need to establish mechanisms for monitoring delivery and outcomes—shared dashboards or joint governance boards can help. Here, I offer you Middlesex University’s Dubai campus.  This isn’t a partnership as such, but a branch campus where equivalence of quality and student experience is guaranteed by having staff from both campuses on every academic board and laced through every discussion about the university’s provision. 
  • Financial flows: Map how funding moves between partners. This includes clarity on who holds the budget, how costs are shared, and how risk is managed.  Be very clear about who is making money from the partnership and how.  And be prepared to be very transparent about that – students want to know that they are receiving value for money, not paying into a profit scheme.
• Good collaboration sets itself quality standards to prevent failure:
  • Accreditation: Ensure collaborative programmes meet quality assurance standards so learners can progress seamlessly.  In the future model I’ve suggested above, this would need to ensure that there is articulation between different frameworks of qualifications and levels of education, as well as a shared expectation of quality thresholds and how to achieve (and measure) them.
  • Compliance should be seen as a baseline, not a barrier: Regulatory frameworks (e.g., OfS requirements) should be seen as the minimum standard, not an excuse to delay action. Institutions remain autonomous—collaboration is possible within existing rules. If your academic strategy is clear and well founded and your quality processes are reflective and responsive, there is no reason why your collaborations shouldn’t succeed.  If collaboration goes wrong, it often stems from lack of clarity rather than regulatory prohibition.
  • To build government trust, the sector must demonstrate competence and integrity—otherwise, less rational policy levers will be imposed.  But this imperative is not a reason for inaction.  We are a hugely competent bunch, with absolute lorry loads of integrity.  There is no reason why we can’t deliver competent, effective collaborations.

There are already good examples of English regional collaborations which put these principles into practice, and I want to highlight just a couple I’ve been hearing about recently:

• Loughborough University and Loughborough College – this is a validation partnership that includes sharing of facilities and staff expertise (they are literally across the road from one another) ensuring delivery of high-quality education with clear progression routes, while successfully addressing regional skills needs. The Associate Dean of HE quality spoke at the college network this week and this is an incredibly effective partnership – to the extent that the PVC for Sport at Loughborough University was recruited from the college;
• University of Plymouth: works with FE colleges to provide structured progression for learners from ESOL into higher-level study

These models tie beautifully into lifelong learning entitlement (LLE):

• More flexible movement for students, which incentivises adaptation for regional models
• And we have existing infrastructure like recognised credit models tied to the credit framework, which is a tool to help institutions build and deliver programmes and ensure comparability and transferability – it is not meant to stifle innovation and shouldn’t be used as such;
• The financial model is changing and as that change matures, I think providers will find it harder to tie students into a three-year qualification as the norm.  We’re already hearing that government wants to examine meaningful exit options at undergraduate level, building on the certificate/diploma of HE. 

Policy levers and risks

• No perfect lever—stop critiquing, start testing.
• Funding levers (e.g., LLE) may not be ideal, but willingness to try is critical.
• Risks if collaboration goes wrong:
  • Lack of clear rules leading to paralysis
  • Government designing less rational levers
• Regulatory perspective:
  • OfS doesn’t prohibit collaboration; autonomy remains
  • Compliance is baseline—do it well to build trust

Closing

Call to action: Work together, focus on results, and take accountability.

Collaboration is not optional—it’s the route to inclusive, sustainable education.

Challenge: Stop waiting for perfect conditions; start building practical models now.