It’s Time for a Higher Education Commissioner

Just as Batman regularly calls on the support of Commissioner Gordon, so the HE sector now needs its own Commissioner.

The reasons are twofold. First, is the recognition of the limitations of the market paradigm that was allowed to dominate following the removal of student number controls in 2015. David Maguire, VC of the University of East Anglia, and his Chief of Staff, Alex Bols, summed up the argument succinctly in a recent article: “left to their own forces, markets can make the wrong choices for the common good. The system really needs careful curation: a guiding hand to nudge providers back into shape and alignment with national and regional priorities – cultural, economic and social.” (THES 28/11/25).

The second is the deteriorating financial position of the HE sector. While a sticking plaster has been applied by the government through raising the tuition fee cap and promising to legislate to link future rises to inflation, the continuing rise in the costs of running a university, plus the introduction of a levy on international student recruitment, mean that many HEIs still face an uphill struggle to remain financially viable. Financial health is fragile in many parts of the sector, and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

One answer is to strengthen HE regulation. Following the Post-16 White Paper, the OfS is already due to get stronger powers in relation to university governance, financial monitoring, franchising, and academic standards, including a commitment to legislating to enable it to impose recruitment caps where low-quality teaching provision is detected.  Some commentators not only support this more muscular regulation, but have suggested yet more areas where the OfS should be the sector referee, such as introducing limits on the proportion of first class degrees universities can award, or requiring them to meet strict space standards for on-campus teaching.

But the OfS can only intervene when there is evidence of institutions failing to adhere to regulatory conditions. Like all regulators, it tends to respond to specific situations retrospectively and reactively, rather than having a focus on developing and improving the overall system. The HE sector is facing a structural crisis, not a set of individual accidents. And hyper-regulation risks making it worse by clogging up decision making, adding unwelcome administrative costs, and stifling innovation.

Consideration should therefore be given to adopting successful practice from the FE sector and creating a team of HE Commissioners, whose role would be to support providers well before alarm bells go off, and to work with institutions to develop improvement strategies in relation not only to financial health, but consistency of academic standards, and other  systems issues.

The make-up of an HE Commissioners office would need to be carefully considered to ensure understanding and expertise around FE College Based Higher Education as well as HEIs. Although it would need to work closely with the OfS it would sit best in the DfE, which has responsibility for both sectors. There are important roles an HE Commissioner could fulfil with regard to structural options for partnership, including FE/HE collaboration and merger.

Last summer’s KPMG report, “Radical Collaboration: A Playbook”,  quotes comments by Colin Booth, CEO of the Luminate College Group, about the reluctance of many leaders and governors to enter into a merger where their own roles might be at risk. This is no doubt based on his experience of the FE Area Review process ten years ago, where active intervention was frequently needed from the DfE’s FE Commissioners. They worked behind the scenes to facilitate discussions between prospective merger partners, and broker access where necessary to government financial support. Their continued diplomatic work over the past decade has been a significant factor in creating the more resilient colleges we have today.

Establishing an HE Commissioners team to encourage structural changes in the HE sector – including where appropriate the option of merger - would be to adopt a proven mechanism for overcoming the potential reluctance of senior leaders to engage with a challenging process. Beyond the issues of money and merger, an HE Commissioner would play an ongoing role in addressing issues of access “cold spots”, as well as the uneven geographical distribution of HE provision in particular subject areas. Based on the FE experience, they would also have a beneficial impact, over time, on the quality of institutional governance, so often a critical factor in poor performance.

This is the kind of curation Maguire and Bols have called for, and if, as in the FE model, Commissioners are respected ex-practitioners, it would be more likely to receive widespread acceptance and support. This model would also preserve a vital degree of autonomy and self-direction for an HE sector that is in danger of being stifled by over-regulation.

An HE Commissioner team that worked closely with the FE Commissioner, could play a key role in achieving a more coherent Post-16 education system. Provision delivered by colleges and universities, including Apprenticeships, could be better coordinated to create clearer and better supported pathways from Level 2 to Level 7. Most importantly, if intervention was clearly based on the goal of widening access, an HE Commissioner would be of direct benefit to learners, particularly from disadvantaged groups, by helping to open up new opportunities and to distribute the benefits of higher education more evenly across England. From a lifelong learning perspective, this should include a strong focus on re-opening access to HE for adults throughout their working lives and beyond.