We put 27 statements to 250 senior leaders across UK higher education and asked what was already true of their institution. Join us on Wednesday 21 October for the first look at the answers.
The Office for Students has said it plainly, and more than once. Too many institutions are basing their forecasts on expectations of growth that are unlikely to materialise, and the regulator has warned the sector about persistent over-optimism in its own planning.
So in September we explored it further. Through Censuswide, we put 27 statements to 250 senior leaders at UK universities, across finance, IT, digital, operations, procurement, strategy, information security, and university leadership. Not what they aspire to. Whether each statement was already true of their institution.
Three of the answers sit uncomfortably together.
- 83.6% say their financial plans remain viable if student recruitment, UK and international, comes in below plan. On the face of it, a sector that has stress-tested itself and is holding.
- Nearly one in four will not say that their governing body rigorously challenges the assumptions behind those forecasts. The plans are sound. The challenge that would prove it is thinner.
- 79.6% also agree that their current financial response prioritises short-term control over structural sustainability. Which is a different account of the same institutions, given by the same people, in the same survey.
Why that matters more than any single number
A dataset in which leaders agree with all three of those statements is telling us something about how the sector reports on itself, and it is the reason we built an index rather than writing another report.
Confidence is easy to state and hard to evidence. A benchmark settles it. The Higher Education Transformation Index scores an institution against the 250 leaders who answered, not against an abstract standard. It does not rank universities and it never names one. It shows a leadership team where they actually sit, and which condition is theirs to fix first.
Join us on Wednesday 21 October (11am)
We are taking the full findings through in a live session on Wednesday 21 October (11am-12:30pm) before we publish our full report. We’ll go through what the 250 said, where the sector’s confidence, and the sector’s evidence part company, and what the pattern means for institutions under real financial pressure this academic year.
There will be time for questions, and we would rather be argued with than agreed with.
Or start with your own institution
You can now benchmark your institution’s financial resilience against the same 250 leaders. Nine statements, about three minutes, and a score you can take into your next planning conversation.
