On and off during the day I have been writing some notes on the HEFCE meeting I attended in London yesterday.  Since September 2009 I have been a member of the Strategic Advisory Committee on Taching Quality and the Student Experience, which advises the main Board of the Higher Education Funding Council for England on key issues around students.  I cannot, obviously, go into details here about some of the issues discussed yesterday, since they are subject to further consultation and may yet change in relation to government policy (or may even, just possibly, influence policy itself). 

But the HEFCE meeting has its own intrinsic interest because it is one of the few occasions when the breadth of the higher education landscape really comes home to me.  Most academics exist within a very particular corner of higher eduation.  We have our disciplinary links that stretch across institutions, but in many cases those links are to other universities that are roughly similar to our own.  As a geographer working in a British university my research links over the years have been with colleagues in Oxford, Liverpool, Sussex, Dundee, Glasgow, Queen Mary, UCL and similar places  - almost all of them pre-1992 universities.  Outside the UK my connections have been similar - Paris I, Paris IV, Lisbon, the Humboldt in Berlin, Amsterdam, Utrecht.  A research partnership with a colleague at the Portuguese Open University (Universidade Aberta) has been an exception.  As PVC for Learning and Teaching my connections have been primarily with other Russell Group universities (although having taken on a more recent role as co-chair of the Higher Education Academy's PVC network I have increasing numbers of contacts in other parts of the sector - although almost entirely with universities that are structrued rather like us).

In 2005 I was sent by our then VC to attend my first HEFCE annual conference, and found myself in conversation with someone from an institution I had never heard of.  The wider world of UK higher education started to open up for me.

The HEFCE committee reflects that breadth.  The person I know best on the committee is, perhaps inevitably, a DVC from another Russell Group university.  Other committee members include PVCs DVCs and VCs from a number of post-92 institutions, and colleagues from the 94 group,  But there is also representation from the specialist or 'monotechnic' sector of conservatoires, art schools and similar institutions, as well as a representative of a further education college that delivers higher education programmes.  In addition we have attendees from the National Union of Students, the Higher Education Academy, JISC, and the Quality Assurance Agency.  To look round the room, on the 12th floor of the Centrepoint Building in London where our meetings are held, is to recognise the diversity of higher education and the broad numbers of stakeholder groups involved.

However, without this recognition of breadth there is a danger that individual mission groups and other interests seek to pursue their own agendas to the disadvantage of other parts of the sector.  I think there is a growing recognition that these fragmenting pressures meant that higher education did not speak clearly enough with one voice over recent months in the fees debate.  And there is now a clear danger that we will not provide a broad view on the forthcoming White Paper. As a sector we need to present robust and coherent arguments on the value of the future of all higher level educational activity: we need to celebrate the broad portfolio of opportunities presented to potential students, and to do so without appearing to disparage parts of the sector other than our own.  Leadership in these endeavours needs to come from HEFCE itself, but more especially from Universities UK - but with individual vice-chancellors and the spokesmen for different sectional interests buying into the big general message as well. Otherwise 'divide and rule' could be the fate of UK higher education..