In July a report by KPMG and Mills and Reeve (Radical Collaboration: A Playbook | KPMG UK) was released about possible mergers and innovations in the future of Higher Education. It's good to have some blue-sky thinking - particularly at a time when universities are under such pressure. But looking through the ideas I was left wondering where our strategic thinking is going wrong. The KPMG ideas include "Multi-University Trusts" in the same mould as "multi-academy trusts" in schools - an innovation which replaced local authority control of schools with corporations and CEOs on big salaries.
This is well intentioned stuff - at best I think the authors believe that these structural changes will improve education and the experience of students. But what's noticeable is that there is rather little the report says about the experience of learning itself. Indeed, it's fascinating how little we talk about the experience of learning at all. We have professionalised the administration of the organisation of a particular kind of "education system" (with all its jargon which frankly I cannot keep up with), but we remain amateurs in our understanding of what it is to learn and to think. We tried to bureaucratise learning with ideas like "learning outcomes", but as Ron Barnett rightly points out, this was merely a kind of neoliberal conceit. In many ways, AI is highlighting this deficiency in actually dealing with the deficiency of thinking about thinking and learning.
There is a deep asymmetry and disconnection between the design of the structural conditions of education from the consideration of learning and intellectual development. Almost all policy work focuses on the structural conditions, and assumes that the learning will happen if the structural conditions are right. The problem is that system design and learning experience are mutually constitutive.
The deeper problem is that we have no methodological tools for making the connection between population-level study and individual experience. Yet every individual in education - learner and teacher - exists within a set of constraints through which each of us navigates in a step by step way: do a bit more of x, a bit less of y, and things move forwards. What Deming thought was that all organisations should work as organisms in a way where every unit (person) acts in concert with the whole. One way to conceive of that is to think that the constraints bearing on the whole translate to the constraints bearing on the individual, and that the interrelationships between these constraints can be made apparent.
I was in a meeting the other day where high-handed decisions from the top were being enforced without any consideration for the constraints that those subject to them were dealing with. If this happens we get alienation and disintegration and, ironically, more top-down decisions as management seeks to reinforce control on a situation which resists control.
But if we could see where we were, and where the high-level constraints were as a piece, I think this could be avoided. Deming's mantra was to study the whole system, rather than manage specific outputs or targets, under the broad heading of his "System of profound knowledge". His argument was fundamentally cybernetic - unmanaged variety was the problem, and variety needed structures and processes to manage it. Only by doing this could the whole system become more reliable and predictable.
Universities are interesting with regard to variety. They are very high variety institutions, but consequently management attenuates the variety with bureaucracy which becomes stifling. Management does not consider the constraints that each person - learner, teacher - works within, but imposes more constraints from above. This is partly because whatever chaos unfolds internally, the institution must present a predictable interface to society.
Effectively what society sees is a top level aggregation of multiple constraints - an HE system which grants degrees and charges fees. It is subject to political forces. Management sees its duty to safeguard the interface to society - so its focus is on targets and external measures and not on internal organisational flow. I think this is why "heads of education" in universities are rarely experts in education. Perhaps if they were, things would be better, but the job as it exists is to manage targets which are externally inspected.
The best of them understand that the targets can only be met if the internal flows work. It has to come down to listening to teachers and learners to work out where their constraints really are, and making local interventions to try to shift those constraints to make things work better. I think this is what Deming would do. I don't think he would impose blanket standardisation to force predictability on the system. That would merely mask it's pathology. Such a mask might temporarily be in the short-term interests of managers (who can claim their targets met), but ultimately it tips the institution in the direction of increased chaos.
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