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.