How Tertiary Education Commission could reshape Australian sector

The possible establishment of an Australian reform driver without a funded reform agenda has raised questions about how it might spend its time.

Observers expect the May budget to include funding for an advisory committee to guide implementation of the recommendations from the Australian Universities Accord. Top of its list will be an Australian Tertiary Education Commission (Atec) to spearhead the 46 other recommendations from the accord’s 408-page report.

But many of these proposals – a 109 per cent boost to government-funded enrolments, needs-based funding for disadvantaged students, improved living allowances, payments for practicums and increased funding for research overheads, among others – would be inordinately more expensive than the commission itself.

In an austere fiscal environment, Australian higher education could inherit a reform steward lacking expensive reforms to steward, and looking for other ways to make a mark.

“One of the questions for the sector is what the regulatory philosophy will be,” said Ant Bagshaw, senior adviser with LEK Consulting’s education practice. “Is it going to be, ‘We’re going to tell you what to do?’ Or is it, ‘We’re going to hold you to account?’

“In other words, how will it balance regulating by inputs or outcomes?”

He said proposals in the report offered a taste of the “interventionist approaches” that a commission might adopt. For example, the panel recommended the development of an Australian Higher Education Teaching Quality Framework – modelled on the UK’s much-criticised Teaching Excellence Framework – to capture learning and teaching metrics. They would include the number of staff who had undertaken “accredited training” in teaching. “It should become the norm that higher education teaching staff hold teaching qualifications,” the report notes.

Dr Bagshaw said it would be “comparatively easy, in regulatory terms” for a commission to move one step further and require every tutor, lecturer and professor to be a qualified teacher. But that would not necessarily be the most effective approach. “My view is that if you challenge institutions to deliver good outcomes, they will find a way to do it.”

He also highlighted an accord recommendation to micromanage the cost of course delivery in universities. “At the moment, universities can afford low enrolments in one programme because they have high enrolments in others. It doesn’t matter what each course costs to run, so long as the overall operation is sustainable,” he said.

“Under what has been proposed, universities would essentially be expected to finance their operations on a programme-by-programme basis. These proposals seem to be intrusions into two really core areas of university competence – how they teach and how they manage costs.”

Higher education financing expert Matt Brett said he supported the idea of a commission, but was unsure whether it would adopt a “principle-driven frameworks direction” as opposed to “technical micromanagement” of the sector.

Much will depend on the body’s terms of reference and underpinning legislation, he said. “I’m optimistic [about] what the sector might look like if it had a buffer body operating under a principle-based approach.”

Dr Brett, director of academic governance and standards at Deakin University, said the “stable policy framework” promised by a more hands-off commission would allow resources to be devoted to the core business of teaching, learning and research rather than policy-related activities.

He said the commission’s approach should be modelled on the Higher Education Standards Framework – broad operating rules for registered institutions, which have changed only twice since their 2011 inception – rather than the Higher Education Support Act, the sector’s main piece of legislation, which has been amended more than 80 times.

Presenters to a University of Technology Sydney webinar on 13 March considered Atec’s establishment a near certainty. “I think it’s absolutely going to happen,” said Shamit Saggar, executive director of the Australian Centre for Student Equity and Success. “No Atec, no accord – it’s as simple as that.”

Western Sydney University vice-chancellor and accord panellist Barney Glover said that without an accord, there was little point in Atec. “The stewardship of the accord [recommendations] is a hell of a lot more important than just the implementation of a tertiary education commission,” he told the webinar.

Consultant and former regulator Claire Field said Atec “probably isn’t worth setting up” without the funding allocation role envisaged by the accord’s panel. “In public policy, it’s who controls the funding and where…they allocate it that really influences the shape of a sector,” she told Times Higher Education.

“Without those funding responsibilities…there is a significant risk that it inadvertently creates additional layers of bureaucracy and has an overly developed regulatory focus.”

Ms Field said that apart from funding, the commission’s primary functions could broadly be categorised as data analysis, performance monitoring and engagement. Without the “funding heft”, Atec would be no better placed to undertake data analysis or engagement than the Department of Education with modest extra resourcing.

“The role in allocating funding is a really critical part of the Atec, and without that, it seems an unnecessary additional body.”

But Gwilym Croucher, deputy director of the University of Melbourne’s Centre for the Study of Higher Education, said a commission could have a “useful advisory role” in funding without controlling the purse strings. “If the commission is going to be able to effect change…it clearly needs the capacity to make recommendations on funding, [but] it doesn’t have to have complete control in doling out the money.”

Dr Croucher said Atec could emulate the Commonwealth Tertiary Education Commission of the 1970s and 1980s, and its antecedent the Australian Universities Commission, in generating “a more consistent, transparent evidence base” for ministerial funding decisions. These bodies’ “detailed” reports and triennial recommendations had provided “coherence” that could be applied to contemporary challenges such as how to adequately fund regional higher education delivery.

“You’d hope the commission was able to [offer] sensible recommendations that are sensitive to the constraints which universities are under, but also think about what’s in the national interest,” he said. “And it viewed higher education policy as a marathon rather than a sprint, in trying to bring some consistency over decades rather than…three-year election cycles.

“If you look around the world at the successful systems, whether they call them commissions or…something else, they tend to have this transparent advisory function as a key element in system governance and planning.”

Dr Bagshaw said a commission could potentially benefit the sector greatly in negotiations with key government agencies such as the Department of Home Affairs, the Australian Taxation Office and the Department of Social Services. “It can engage in a way that a peak group can’t,” he said. “When Universities Australia goes into bat, it’s doing so with the baggage of a lobby group – not an agency charged with the health of the sector.”

Atec could help drive the establishment of new public universities in emerging population centres – something that has not happened in the past three decades. Dr Bagshaw said there was no material incentive for universities to “spin out” their campuses into stand-alone institutions, in the way that the University of New South Wales colleges had evolved into the universities of Newcastle and Wollongong, and state governments lacked the higher education expertise to plan new institutions.

“A commission could work with the states, planning out future provision,” he said. “I think it’s genuinely exciting and important.”

Other tasks for the commission could include devising a new research assessment mechanism and battling visa processing problems, loan repayment glitches and income support anomalies.

Dr Croucher said the autonomy bestowed on Australian universities had underpinned their “entrepreneurial” flair, particularly in international education. But this had left the sector struggling in areas that were “not well addressed by quasi-market mechanisms” – regional delivery, for example.

“If the commission undermines the autonomy that universities have had, that’s going to come at great cost,” he said. “The challenge is how you have a commission that can help where there are clearly areas where we need better coordination, without impinging upon that autonomy.”

Dr Croucher said Atec’s leadership, governance and riding instructions would be vital in preventing “some of the worst fears” from being realised. “Having clear legislation [and] defined boundaries are probably the things that are most critical to its success,” he said.

Ms Field said she had drawn similar conclusions from her early career experience at the Australian National Training Authority (Anta), which planned and funded vocational education between 1992 and 2005. “[One of the] lessons from Anta is that senior personnel are crucial,” she said.

But Atec’s leaders would inevitably move on, as would the politicians they advised. “With changes of government, changes of personnel or changes of minister, decision-makers’ appetite for…advice and action by an independent statutory body wanes with time,” she observed.

“Government departments can find it challenging to have two sources of advice to ministers on particular issues. And if something goes wrong [under] an independent party rather than a department, that can be more challenging for ministers.”

Ms Field said the commission’s relationship with government was arguably more important than its relationship with the sector. “If [support] is not bipartisan, I can’t see it having a long life.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com