The decentralisation of the governance of UK higher education: the effects of devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and on England

ABSTRACT

This article explores the impact of devolution from a centralised UK governance model on universities in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and England, and shows how a unified system of higher education has been transformed into four systems with contrasting aims and objectives. The structure that has been arrived at makes the UK Government directly responsible for English higher education, the largest of the four systems, but the devolved nations often find themselves making policies which are reactive to or opposed to those adopted by the English system. It argues that devolution may not have been good for the English system where the freedom to adopt a fully marketised policy with its consequential reinforcement of differentiation between institutions and its encouragement of the establishment of a ‘business model’ of institutional governance would have been resisted by political representation from Scotland and Wales, both unsympathetic to the approach adopted in England. It concludes that the creation of devolved systems in Scotland and Wales has been successful in that it has increased the diversity of UK higher education and moved universities closer to their regions. However, devolution has not served Northern Ireland well because of the stalemate in the political life there.

KEYWORDS:

• Governance
• decentralisation
• devolution
• diversity

Acknowledgements

The authors express their gratitude to the institutions visited and to the individuals who gave of their time to be interviewed. The authors also extend thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful and constructive comments and suggestions. An early draft of this paper was presented to the EAIR Forum in Leiden in 2019. The authors greatly appreciate and thank the Forum organizers for making our participation possible and to the participants attending the presentation for their insightful questions and the discussions that followed.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This study is supported by the Economic and Social Research Council, the Office for Students and Research England (grant reference ES/M010082/2), and the Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE), University of Oxford, Oxford.