William Syms, Advance HE Head of Communications, reflects on the third session of our (Re)Designing Higher Education programme
The third session of our ‘Member Benefit’ (Re)Designing Higher Education programme brought together two experienced institutional leaders for a wide-ranging conversation about the future of higher education.
Chaired by Alistair Jarvis CBE, Chief Executive of Advance HE, the session drew on the insights of Professor Zoe Radnor, Interim Deputy Vice-Chancellor Academic at Aston University, and Professor Nic Beech, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Salford. Together, they challenged participants to think beyond institutional survival and ask harder questions about what universities are ‘genuinely’ for.
The question of value
Zoe Radnor opened with a provocation that many in the room will have recognised. A 19-year-old contestant on the popular television programme, Race Across the World, had declared to a national audience that his experience on the show was worth more than a university degree. Zoe’s point was not to dwell on the anecdote itself, but to ask what it reveals: that the perceived value of higher education is under genuine pressure, and that the sector has not done enough to counter that narrative.
This is not simply about marketing. Zoe identified two compounding factors that make the current moment feel different from previous periods of disruption. The first is generational: the cohort now approaching university age has grown up in a world of on-demand content and expects something very different from the learning experience. The second is reputational: universities that produce vaccines, generate billions in economic value and transform individual lives are nonetheless widely perceived as self-serving and commercially driven. Rebuilding that trust, she argued, requires the sector to be much more deliberate about communicating its worth, and organisations such as Advance HE have an important role to play in shaping that shared brand.
Resilience as a frame
Throughout her remarks, Zoe returned to the concept of resilience, applying it at three levels: the individual, the institution and society. For students and staff, resilience is about developing the capacity to manage uncertainty, and universities have a responsibility to build that capacity actively rather than assume it. Crucially, she emphasised the importance of belonging and community as foundations for resilience. People who feel valued and connected are better equipped to navigate difficulty.
For institutions, resilience is not simply about surviving the next financial shock. It is about structural and curricular adaptation. Zoe drew on examples from her own career, including the creation of a new business school, the diversification of a specialist law institution and the development of London campuses through international partnerships, to illustrate how sustained change is possible when vision is clear and stakeholders are brought along in the process. Her operational background in lean management informed a consistent theme: that the real gains often lie not in portfolio expansion but in how processes and systems are designed and run.
On curriculum specifically, she was direct. Micro-credentials and modularisation have been debated for years without delivering the transformation once anticipated. The more important shift, she suggested, is in how universities design learning itself: preparing students through varied methods, engaging them through small group and peer learning, and assessing them through applied work that demands critical thinking. That, she argued, is what AI cannot replicate, and it is where universities should be focusing their energies.
Starting from learners, not institutions
Nic Beech took a complementary but distinctly different angle. He began with governance, noting that traditional board structures have struggled to keep pace with the pace and scale of change now facing institutions. The more fundamental issue, however, is the question that governance asks in the first place. Too often, he suggested, the dominant question is: how does the institution survive? That question, while understandable, risks becoming self-defeating.
Nic argued for a shift in orientation: starting from learners and from the outcomes that universities and their partners can generate together, rather than from the institution as a given. Sometimes that will mean the institution remains as it is. Sometimes it will mean radical change, including merger or transformation. But the logic of the decision should flow from what produces the best outcomes, not from what preserves the existing structure.
This framing led him into a series of practical examples that illustrated what a genuinely outward-facing institution might look like. Salford’s participation in the Greater Manchester Institute of Technology, its work with the Tutor Trust to support young people at risk of disengaging from school, and its energy house laboratories, where competing construction companies share data in pursuit of common sustainability goals, all pointed to the same idea: that the university’s value lies in what it does and contributes, not in its name or its buildings.
He also drew on changes in the school system to make a broader argument. The new curriculum and assessment review in England places a far greater emphasis on interdisciplinarity, project work and critical thinking from an early age. Rather than treating that as a threat to traditional forms of higher education, Nic suggested it is an opportunity to ask how universities can connect more effectively with the wider education ecosystem, from primary schools through to further education and into employment.
Partnerships: potential and pitfalls
The question of partnership drew out one of the session’s liveliest exchanges. Both speakers saw significant potential in new collaborative models, whether between universities and employers, across further and higher education, or in shared research ventures. Zoe was enthusiastic but cautious. She has seen enough partnerships fail to know that good intentions are not sufficient. What is required, she argued, is genuine capability maturity in how institutions enter into, manage and sustain partnerships. Understanding clearly what each partner brings – and what the arrangement means for learners at its heart – is not optional.
Nic was similarly measured. Not every collaboration needs to be radical, he noted; some of the most valuable work is relatively prosaic. But he also raised more structural questions, including whether employment models might need to evolve to enable staff to work meaningfully across more than one institution, and whether a genuine commitment to lifelong learning requires universities to think of students as part of a shared ecosystem rather than as their own.
The role of the arts and humanities
Several participants raised the growing pressure on arts, humanities and social sciences in an environment that increasingly favours STEM. Both speakers pushed back with conviction. Nic made the point that the boundaries between disciplines are more recent, and more artificial, than they appear, and that the very tools of logic and inquiry that underpin technological progress have deep roots in philosophy and the liberal arts. Zoe, drawing on her background in engineering and her involvement with a performing arts institution, argued that creative practice produces capacities that technology cannot replicate, and that the sector needs to hold its nerve on this rather than concede the argument to those who would reduce higher education to a narrow vocational offering.
Governance: the need for sharper challenge
When participants asked what single change to governance would make the biggest difference, Zoe was unequivocal. Too many boards, she said, remain too comfortable and too close to the executives they are meant to hold to account. The sector needs governance that is genuinely challenging and competence-based, not merely collegial. Drawing a parallel with changes in the banking sector, she argued that higher education is overdue a similar reckoning with the rigour and independence of its oversight structures.
Nic took a different angle. He questioned whether more experimental structural arrangements, including job shares in senior leadership roles and greater involvement of students as genuine co-leaders rather than token representatives, might help disrupt some of the more embedded cultural assumptions about what leadership looks like.
On costs, debt and what to stop doing
One of the most candid moments came when a participant asked about student debt and whether universities should be asking not just what to do differently but what to stop doing altogether. Nic acknowledged that most universities are far better at adding activity than removing it, and that genuinely reducing costs in ways that could affect fees is a conversation the sector has largely avoided. Zoe spoke from her operations management background about the gains available from examining processes rather than programmes, citing work at Aston to eliminate redundant administrative forms and use AI for routine internal tasks. The point was not that such changes are easy, but that they are possible, and that they start with a willingness to look honestly at how institutions actually operate rather than how they imagine themselves to.
Building resilience for what comes next
The session closed with a question that resonated throughout the room: how do institutions and the people within them sustain resilience when disruption has become the permanent condition rather than the exception? Zoe’s response was direct. The window of calm that might once have been used for recovery is unlikely to return. What institutions can do is create the conditions – the spaces and the culture – in which reflection and renewal are built into how they work, rather than reserved for quieter times that never quite arrive.
Nic returned to the same theme he had opened with: that the purpose of higher education, at its best, is to develop citizens and thinkers who can engage with complexity rather than retreat from it. That purpose, he argued, is both the sector’s greatest challenge and its most enduring justification.
