HIGHER EDUCATION: CHALLENGES FOR THE FUTURE

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HIGHER EDUCATION CHALLENGES FOR THE FUTURE
Martin Williams Department for Education and
Skills November 2005
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HE OBJECTIVES

• Teaching and learning
• Access and opportunity increasing and widening
• The STEM and vocational agendas
• Effective use of technology
• Quality and flexibility credit transfer
• Research
• World-class basic research
• Applied research

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• International
• The UK in the global economy the HE
  contribution
• Economic development employer engagement
• Employer-driven curricula through SSCs,
  Foundation degrees etc
• Cpd
• Collaborative applied research

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• Student support
• grants and loans where needed best student
  experience
• Shape, structure and funding
• funding, sustainability, supporting a diverse
  system (including HE in FE)

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• The effectiveness of delivery
• Regions
• Sub-regions
• Cities urban regeneration

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2020 VISION THE CHALLENGES FOR HEIs
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TEACHING AND LEARNING

• Curriculum
• Meeting the challenge of the new
• Faster responses?
• Avoiding ossification through discipline and
  professional associations?
• Multidisciplinarity
• Connecting to employers

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• Technology
• The development of e-learning
• - Multiple platforms, shared protocols, open
  systems, middleware?
• Research networks
• Partnership development T and R third arm

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• Delivery
• Towards 50 widening as well as increasing
• Equalising the academic and vocational pathways
• Lifelong Learning/Continuing Professional
  Development
• Flexibility part-time, credit transfer, WBL, APL

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RESEARCH

• World class and (where appropriate) critical mass
• Research and scholarship
• Achieving world-class research by region through
  collaboration?
• With each other the Scottish experiment
• With everyone else applied research

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EMPLOYER ENGAGEMENT

• supply of graduates and postgraduates
• cpd
• applied research
• joining up the qualifications

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Lifelong Learning/Continuing Professional
Development

• Need for enhanced HEI-employer partnerships e.g.
  to accredit cpd that employers are already paying
  for the co-funding argument.
• Need for more experiments
• Huge opportunities insufficient mutual
  understanding

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STUDENT SUPPORT

• best student experience
• students as consumers
• information for students NSS

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INTERNATIONAL - EUROPE

• Lisbon
• Positioning universities at the centre of the
  knowledge economy and, hence, the
  employer-engagement argument
• Bologna
• Quality assurance and lengths of courses
• Credit transfer
• Mutual recognition of qualifications

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INTERNATIONAL - GLOBAL

• International students Prime Ministers
  Initiative
• Development contribute to Africa and other aid
  programmes co-funding
• The challenge of India and China

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EFFECTIVE DELIVERY

• Regional development direct support to the RES,
  RSS, RSP,.. SSCs
• Different delivery agents a contestable
  landscape
• Urban development the ideopolis argument

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THE HEI MANAGEMENT CHALLENGE

• Cultural/radical transformations needed? Or at
  least extensions? Excellent for conventional
  teaching and research, but..
• Teaching a more imaginative approach to the
  curriculum needed? Interdisciplinarity
• Widening Participation will come through from
  the schools/FE/14-19 agenda

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The HE in FE picture

• Physical access to HE
• Progression through the qualifications
• No single model
• Partnership and competition co-exist

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CONCLUDING COMMENTS

• excellence with multiple objectives
• autonomy each provider needs to be strong in its
  own terms
• a more competitive market, with more
  partnerships?
• should institutions specialise? diversity,
  playing to strengths etc how do we secure a good
  collective outcome?