Report 00/30

Restructuring and Collaboration Fund

Progress report on approved projects in 1999

This version of the report contains the Executive Summary, Summary of approved projects and Overview of progress only. It is also available in Word as follows:

• Full report (484Kb)
• Executive summary plus Section 1 Summary of approved projects (200Kb)
• Section 2 Overview of progress (88Kb)
• Section 3 Individual project summaries (395Kb)
• Section 4 Criteria, approval procedures, terms and conditions, and monitoring (99Kb)

Executive summary

Purpose

1. This is our second annual report on the Restructuring and Collaboration Fund (R&CF). It summarises the progress of projects being funded through the R&CF which had been approved before the end of December 1999. It includes contact details to obtain further information on individual projects.

   Key points

2. A total of 50 projects had been approved for R&CF funding by the end of 1999, attracting total HEFCE grant of some £34 million.
3. Section 1 of this report is a summary table listing all approved projects and grant allocations.
4. Section 2 gives an overview of the main types of project which institutions have put forward for support.
5. Section 3 contains progress reports on continuing projects, with contact details for further information. The final page of that section lists those projects which were completed before January 1999, and denotes which progress reports were included in our previous R&CF report, HEFCE 99/34. They are not described further in this report.
6. Section 4 sets out the criteria against which we assess applications, and the standard terms and conditions that we apply to all approved projects.

   Action required

7. None: this report is for information. Any institution wishing to put forward an application for funding, or seeking further information, should contact its HEFCE Regional Consultant or Higher Education Adviser.

Section 1: Summary of approved projects

Approved projects

Completed projects

Section 2: Overview of progress

8. The HEFCE Restructuring and Collaboration Fund was introduced in 1997-98. It is used as a discretionary fund to support projects that meet one or more of the following criteria:
   1. Major changes to the academic portfolio.
   2. Major constitutional change, particularly merger.
   3. Institutional restructuring with sufficiently innovative aspects to be of general benefit to the sector.
   4. Structural realignments within institutions.
   5. Collaborative arrangements between higher education institutions.
9. There is no annual deadline for the submission of proposals, and projects have not so far been judged competitively. Rather, they are considered case by case, so that the timing suits institutional needs. This approach is designed to retain maximum flexibility in responding to proposals from institutions, but it has meant that awareness of the fund, and the types of project which it can be used to support, has grown over time.
10. In May 1999 we published a first progress report on projects being supported by the fund (HEFCE 99/34). We intend to publish such reports annually. This current report shows projects approved up to the end of December 1999.
11. The main areas of activity we are now supporting through the R&CF are as follows.

    Mergers

12. Merger projects include both those between two HE institutions and those between one HEI and an institution from outside the sector. The forms of expenditure supported can cover staff restructuring, preparation of business plans, buildings refurbishment, rationalising support services, and communications technology to link sites. Those approved to date for R&CF support include:
    • Hull University and North Riding College
    • Leeds Metropolitan University and Harrogate College
    • Loughborough University and Loughborough College of Art and Design
    • Southampton University and La Sainte Union College.
13. A number of further merger proposals are in the pipeline. These are among the largest projects supported by the fund.

    Restructuring of subject departments or programmes

14. Several projects are helping institutions to restructure departments, often involving staff restructuring and refurbishment and re-equipping of premises, or the development of new programmes and pedagogic approaches. This can be within a single institution, for example the restructurings of:
    • medicine at Manchester University
    • physics, materials science and sports science programmes at Coventry University
    • science at Lancaster University
    • science and engineering at Salford University
    • the Institute of Bioscience and Technology and agricultural programmes at Cranfield University.
15. Other projects in this category are collaborative, with a transfer of provision from one institution to another so that the resulting merged department is stronger, for example:
    • transfer of physics from Birkbeck College to University College London
    • transfer of physics from University of East Anglia to University of Bath
    • transfer of physics from Essex University to York University.

    Major development of academic provision

16. Some projects support restructuring by helping institutions achieve a step-change development in their academic provision or infrastructure. This may be through major capital projects to develop their estate, or through revenue projects, for example:
    • Goldsmiths College estate development
    • Thames Valley University learning resource centre
    • equipping the University of East London Docklands campus with multi-media facilities
    • University of North London estate development
    • Chester College of Higher Education development of new academic programmes in business and management
    • Royal Academy of Music "York Gate" project to build new accommodation for teaching and to house a specialist instrument collection.

    Regional development of HE

17. The fund is used to support the development of higher education programmes in under-provided localities. Support can come at two stages:
    1. Helping to finance consultancy studies of current and future demand for higher education in a defined area, as a basis for assessing the appropriate scale and rate of growth - for example, in Cornwall, Cumbria, Thanet and Southend.
    2. Helping institutions then implement growth projects in the light of the demand studies.
18. In the light of demand study projects undertaken so far, we commissioned KPMG consultants to prepare generic guidance on the conduct of demand studies. That publication, HEFCE 99/64, is available on our web-site at http://www.hefce.ac.uk/ under ‘Publications’. This guidance is an example of an activity where we use R&CF funding to support one or more pilot projects, to establish how a task is best undertaken and then produce a report from which the rest of sector can benefit.
19. The demand study projects also illustrate the use of R&CF funding in parallel with other HEFCE funding programmes. Where the need for growth is shown, the R&CF may be used in association with revenue funding allocated through the annual additional student numbers (ASNs) exercise, and/or capital projects to develop the necessary premises through the Poor Estates scheme. There is, however, no commitment that a project approved for R&CF funding will be successful in either the ASN or poor estates programmes, given that both are subject to a competitive bidding process.

    Expansion of medical intakes

20. Several projects approved in 1999 have supported the expansion of student intakes to medical courses in line with the Government’s objective of increasing the supply of doctors for the NHS. The primary funding routes for the expansion are ASNs and capital allocations. But the R&CF has been used to support:
    1. Preparation of business plans where the project was on such a scale or so innovative that it needed particularly intensive planning - notably, the proposals for new medical schools from the Universities of Exeter and Plymouth for the South West and from the University of East Anglia; and proposals from the Open University to develop a distance learning programme for the pre-clinical stages of medical training.
    2. Start-up costs where a university is introducing medical education for the first time, as in the collaborative project between Warwick and Leicester Universities.

    Regional HE consortia

21. The fund is being used to support the establishment and development of regional consortia of HE institutions. Every region now has such a consortium, as a mechanism both for the HEIs to share information and collaborate between themselves, and to facilitate collaboration with other regional partners such as Regional Development Agencies. Some of these associations are well established (such as the Yorkshire and the Humber Universities Association and Universities for the North East), while others are newly formed. We are generally providing support for the salary costs of an executive officer for the consortium.

    Other institutional collaborations

22. These include:
    • the Consortium of Art and Design Institutes in the South East
    • collaboration between the University of Bradford and Bradford College, to review the scope for joint provision of both academic programmes and support services
    • the consortium of Church and Associated Colleges.

    Sector-wide collaborative projects

23. The fund is used to support a number of sector-wide collaborative projects, notably:
    • the setting up of the Institute for Learning and Teaching
    • the setting up of the new web portal "Higher Education and Research Opportunities" (previously known as the UK HE Mall)
    • the joint HEFCE/CVCP project to map the contribution of HE institutions to their regions being undertaken by the Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies at the University of Newcastle.

    Future projects

24. The pressures for change in higher education are many and increasing. In particular, demand from students and employers is constantly evolving, in terms of both the relative popularity of different subjects and in expectations about the way programmes are delivered. We believe that every HE institution should be keeping under review both its own structure and the scope for collaboration with other universities and colleges.
25. We introduced the Restructuring and Collaboration Fund in order that we could help institutions that had identified a need for substantial change but lacked the resources necessary to secure it. We are currently allocating some £20 million a year for the fund. We will keep under review the funds which we can make available for this purpose within each year’s grant. We do not guarantee that we will be able to support all the worthwhile proposals that are put to us. Nor do we want to create a presumption that change should happen only if the HEFCE allocates supplementary funding to support it. But we do encourage institutions to consider whether there are restructuring or collaborative projects that would make a significant difference to their strategic development; and we stand ready to discuss any proposals.