Nick Clegg has joined David Cameron in writing to public sector workers asking for ideas on how to cut public spending. This is at least a long-overdue recognition of the fact that it is the people now fashionably known as ‘frontline workers’ who are most likely to know where the excesses are to be found. It is, however, hard to be optimistic about the results, for one very simple reason. All the signs are that the responsibility for implementing any changes is going to be given to the same people that have allowed waste to flourish.
The public sector includes the UK’s universities, run at an annual direct cost of about six and a half billion pounds and now expected to take their share of the cuts. Much of the recent argument has centred on whether teaching should be cut to protect research, or research should be diminished to support teaching. However, in May last year, John Denham, the then Secretary for Innovation, Universities and Skills, called for savings of £180 million to be made in university administrations, rather than in the core university businesses of teaching and research, pointing out that administration in some institutions costs a staggering £16,000 per student. This is, it must be hoped, an extreme example, and it is not easy to establish how much money individual universities actually spend on administration, as opposed to teaching, research and direct student support, but since most now demand administration overheads of around 100% on research grants from commercial companies, it seems unlikely that the figure is less than a third of their total budgets. Seen in this light, a £180 million saving seems relatively modest. Few people with direct experience of university administrations would doubt that a figure of 10% saving on administration costs, or about a quarter of a billion pounds per annum, is easily achievable,.
At this point, cynicism sets in. Saving money by reducing administration has been a mantra in government circles for as long as there have been governments with budgets, and the failure to do so has been documented just as often. Failure has been almost inevitable, because the job of finding the cuts has been given either to the existing administrators (who usually decide that expansion rather than contraction is necessary) or expensive outside consultants are brought in to provide advice. Experience suggests that any savings achieved by consultants are less than the fees that they charge.
And yet, dramatic savings have been achieved over the past few decades in the university sector. Not, of course,in administration, but in swingeing cuts imposed on academic budgets by the administrators. This suggests a very simple mechanism for making savings in administration. Give this responsibility to the teaching and technical staffs. After all, universities exist solely to allow these people to do their jobs, and they know the systems from the inside.
How would such a system work? Inevitably, it would have to be implemented, within each institution individually, by a committee drawn from the front line. It would have to be entirely separate from the administration in any shape or form, and could therefore not include heads of departments or their deputies, since these are already effectively part of the administration. Independence could be assured by making membership elective, and time limited. The electorate would consist of the academic and technical staffs, the period of office would be of the order of three years, and the total membership would be small (certainly no more than twelve, ideally perhaps as low as six). Elections could be held every year, with a third of the places filled each year.
What would the committee do? It would act as a counterweight to the existing system, under which no academic expenditure can be undertaken without administration approval. This would continue to be the case but, equally, no administrative expenditure would be possible without academic approval. No vacant positions could be filled, or new positions created. No offices could be expensively refurbished, computer equipment be replaced, courses be attended, consultants be employed, advertising campaigns initiated, without such approval. Telephone and photocopying costs would be subject to the sorts of restraint that now only apply to academics.
This would be the standard and long-term modus operandi. In the short term, the committee members would have an additional task. In the first three years of the committee’s existence, they would also be required to find savings, which would become permanent, of at least 10% in the adminstration budgets of their own institutions. I am sure that they would not only find this possible. They would find it enjoyable.
References
Report in the Daily Telegraph, 24 June 2010 and Report in the Guardian, 7 May 2010
Related posts:
We could reduce the number of Teacher Training Colleges in Wales, bring it down to three and not the five or so we’ve got at the moment?
In line with the report commissioned by Wag:
Review of Initial Teacher Training Provision in Wales.
John Furlong, Hazel Hagger, and Cerys Butcher
University of Oxford Department of Educational Studies
in association with
John Howson
Education Data Surveys Ltd
January 2006
This is part of the continuing drive to reduce the costs of administration in universities which includes the shared services agenda and is aligned to public sector transformation initiatives that have been going on for some time. Many universities have already made signficant efforts to realise efficiency savings, and administration is always going to be a key part of the structure to enable delivery of institutional strategies. This includes the inter-relationship with academic activities as the two are not wholly separable. Whilst departmental reorganisation and administrative cuts are a useful tool to enable savings, John rightly points out that administration is often perceived as a ‘necessary evil’ and so the easy target. Administrative restructuring or savings can lead to decisions that detrimentally impact on academic provision, or in academic staff absorbing the administrative activities in some way. The fact is that somebody has to do it unless you can find a way to do it differently or not at all, and academic staff are not necessarily the best suited or willing to take on the required administrative activities. So we have a problem, and as budgets continue to be cut, this risks the ability to maintain the quality of the student experience/research activity, or the ability to find new sources of revenue given the opportunity costs. Some have advocated costly university mergers, but it is clear in my mind that shared infrastructure and enabling administrative activity through greater collaboration would be far better in terms of realising the benefits in the short term, providing the existing resources that are freed up can be redeployed effectively to create new opportunities. In England there is the situation where very many students will be turned away from institutions this year because of lack of places, and this cannot be good for the economy and in addressing higher order skills deficits post-recession. Surely there is a need to do something about this given unused capacity across the UK? In parallel I suggest that there is already a serious need for retraining/skills development in academic administration and management, and there will inevitably be much more collaborative working and outsourcing of administrative functions where this actually adds value to meet the needs of the budgetary cuts.