The sector’s governance expectations have shifted their centre of gravity. Where an earlier generation of codes concerned itself chiefly with the machinery of oversight, its committee structures, registers of interest and assurance trails, the revised expectations issued for comment this spring place the culture of a governing body close to the centre of what makes governance work at all. A board is now asked to attend to the openness of its own conversations and the behaviours a chair sets and tolerates, and to consider whether disagreement can be voiced without cost to the person raising it. This is a modest change in wording and a larger one in emphasis. It suggests that honesty within an institution is coming to be understood less as a document to be produced on request and more as a practice to be sustained.
Alongside this, a wider idea has begun to circulate, that universities might owe their students and their staff a duty of candour. The word carries a particular inheritance. In the health and care sector it describes the obligation to acknowledge when something has gone wrong, to apologise, to share what is known and to demonstrate that something has been learned from it. It was placed on a statutory footing there only after the public examination of institutional failure, when it became clear that the instinct to protect a reputation could outlast the duty to tell the truth. Whether higher education should carry a comparable obligation is now a live question, and one that rests partly with legislators rather than with institutions themselves. That legislative question, though, is not the most interesting part of the matter. The more searching one is what candour asks of those who lead, in the ordinary conduct of institutional life, long before any formal duty might be engaged. It is one thing for a professional to be candid with the student in front of them, and another for an institution to be candid about itself, since the second kind of honesty has no single author and no shortage of reasons to defer.
The pull toward reassurance
Candour does not sit easily with much of what an institution is under pressure to do. A university is asked, more or less continuously, to project confidence. It reassures applicants who are choosing where to spend more or less three formative years, steadies staff who read difficulty as a threat to their security and satisfies those who watch its finances for signs of strain, all within a competitive market in which the appearance of trouble can help to bring the reality about. These pressures are legitimate, and a leader who broadcasts every private uncertainty would serve no one well. Their cumulative effect, though, is to make managed optimism the habitual register of institutional communication, the tone in which a difficulty is conceded only once it has grown too large to conceal, and seldom before. Candour, understood as a disposition rather than a single act of disclosure, runs against that current, and it does so most sharply at exactly the moments when the stakes are highest.
This is why writing openness into a code, welcome as it is, may prove insufficient on its own. A published account of the behaviours a board expects of itself, a route for raising concern that does not run through the very people a concern might implicate, a senior figure whose role is partly to test the chair rather than defer to them, an insistence that dissent is a contribution and not an inconvenience: these things matter, and their appearance in the sector’s governance expectations is a real advance. Yet a culture is not brought into being by being described. Candour is practised, or it is not, in the texture of a meeting, in whether an uncomfortable paper is tabled or gently deferred to a later date that never quite arrives, in what a leadership team is willing to say to itself about a problem before circumstances force the conversation into the open. The distance between openness written down and openness lived is where the difficult work sits, and it is not obvious that a code, however well drafted, can close it. What a code can do is make the absence of candour harder to defend, which is not the same as making its presence habitual.
What honesty costs
It is worth holding in mind where the candour conversation has come from. It has been carried, in large part, by families who found institutions defensive at the very moments they most needed them to be open, and by a wider recognition of how much is at stake. Independent national figures record more than eleven hundred student deaths by suicide in England and Wales across the years between 2016 and 2023, an average close to a hundred and sixty each year. Behind an argument about board culture and codes of conduct there are people to whom candour was owed and, too often, not extended. A history of that kind does not ask institutions to adopt a permanent posture of contrition, which would help no one and would ring false soon enough. What it asks is more demanding and less performative, that candour be treated as more than a communications style, and that the habit of honesty be recognised as something tested precisely when honesty is most costly to the institution obliged to practise it.
None of this resolves into a tidy prescription, and it would be a poor sort of candour that pretended otherwise. The harder questions are the ones that resist a governance solution. How would a leadership team know that its culture had become genuinely candid, rather than merely compliant with an expectation to appear so? What does candour cost an institution in the near term, in confidence surrendered or difficulty admitted before it is forced, and over what horizon, if any, does that cost return as the more durable asset of trust? And can candour be governed into being at all, through codes and duties and published plans, or can it finally only be modelled, imperfectly and at some personal risk, by those willing to say the uncomfortable thing first and to keep saying it? These are not questions a code can answer on a leader’s behalf, yet they may well be among the questions that most repay a leader’s attention.