higher education and the politics of consensus
Three elections held on the same day last week returned three governments unable to act alone. In Wales, Plaid Cymru emerged as the largest party in the Senedd but fell short of the threshold for an overall majority, ending a long period of Labour dominance. In Scotland, the SNP will continue in office as a minority administration. In England, the local elections produced no overall control in more than fifty councils, a numerical pattern which, taken in aggregate, would describe a country without a clear governing party of its own. The State Opening of Parliament arrives against this backdrop, and with it the customary signal of legislative intent for the session ahead.
For higher education, the immediate question is what this kind of political condition does to the policy environment that the sector has been planning against. A Skills Bill is widely expected to be included in the legislative programme and is anticipated to be the vehicle for measures, including strengthened enforcement powers for the Office for Students and the regulatory and funding framework needed to implement the Lifelong Learning Entitlement. None of this is yet confirmed, but the direction of travel has been visible for some time. The LLE itself has already absorbed multiple delays, with applications now scheduled to open in September 2026 and study to begin from January 2027. The Office for Students has been preparing its regulatory approach to modular provision on this timetable, working through how a system originally designed around full courses can accommodate a more granular model.
What is harder to predict, and may matter more, is the political arithmetic through which any of this now passes. Where consensus is the price of progress, the things that get attempted tend to be those that can be assembled across competing constituencies. Radical or divisive intervention becomes harder to engineer. Doing less can begin to look like the lower-risk option even where inaction itself carries serious costs. There has also been talk of a Cabinet reshuffle affecting the education and science departments, although reshuffles, however significant, do not in themselves alter the underlying parliamentary mathematics or the shape of the wider political moment. What is more consequential for the sector is whether the broader appetite for substantive reform survives a session in which much of the parliamentary energy may be absorbed by negotiation rather than initiative.
It is worth holding the longer view alongside the immediate one. For much of the past six decades, higher education in the UK, and latterly in England in particular, has been shaped by a small number of milestone reports: Robbins in 1963, Dearing in 1997, Browne in 2010, and Augar in 2019. Each was possible because governments could act decisively, with the time, the parliamentary majorities, and the political authority required to commission, receive, and respond to large-scale reviews. The sector developed, through these cycles, something of an instinct to organise itself in relation to such moments: to anticipate them, to position itself within them and afterwards to absorb their consequences. The rhythm became almost familiar. Whether the same pattern of policymaking is now becoming harder to sustain is a question worth taking seriously, not because of any single party or government, but because the underlying political conditions appear to favour caution and compromise over the kind of decisive intervention those reports represented.
This is not a moral observation about whether decisive policy is to be welcomed or regretted. It is an empirical question about what kind of policy environment the sector should now plan for, and over what time horizon. If the next defining moment is longer in coming than expected, and if much of what does arrive turns out to be the product of negotiation rather than the expression of a coherent governmental vision, then the assumptions embedded in many institutional plans warrant revisiting. The gap between the scale of challenges facing the sector and the apparent capacity of the political system to address them decisively may itself be the most important variable to plan around.
The argument here is not for disengagement from policy. The opposite, perhaps. But it may be that governing under conditions of sustained indeterminacy is a meaningfully different exercise from positioning ahead of the next big review. It places more weight on the quality of internal strategic judgement, the depth of institutional self-understanding, and the capacity of governing bodies to make consequential decisions without the comfort of a settled policy backdrop against which to test them. It asks senior teams to articulate, in their own terms, what their institution is for, what it can sustain and what it can no longer afford to do, rather than waiting for external clarity to organise these questions for them. The discipline involved is not new, but it may need to be exercised more deliberately, and across a wider span of decisions, than has recently been the case.
There is also a temptation, in moments such as this one, to read fragmentation as instability and instability as something which will soon resolve. That may prove correct. But it may also prove that the present condition is less an interlude than a setting, and that the sector’s planning horizon needs to accommodate the possibility of policy ambiguity as an ongoing feature rather than a passing weather pattern. Several of the most consequential institutional decisions of the coming years, on portfolio shape, on cost base, on partnerships, on the response to the LLE, will likely need to be taken whilst the wider settlement remains unresolved. Reading the moment correctly may itself become part of the work of governing well.
What does it mean, in practice, for boards and senior teams to plan against a settlement that may not arrive in the form, or on the timescale, that previous cycles would have suggested? Where in current institutional decision-making is the assumption of imminent clarity still embedded, and what would change if that assumption were relaxed? And what kind of strategic self-reliance does this moment ask of the sector, not as rhetoric, but as a quieter discipline of governing well in the absence of resolution?