Edward Peck is taking up his role of chair of the regulator for England’s higher education sector at a time when the Office for Students’s role continues to evolve. Tasked with managing the sector’s financial sustainability, developing a new approach to quality, and building trust with providers while being prepared to crack down where necessary to sustain public confidence in the sector, the regulator must face in multiple directions at once, all while regulating under a market-based framework that may not support the objectives of the current government in every respect. We’ll be discussing the regulator’s key priorities and strategy, and how to find the tricky balance between support and challenge.

Will we see a consolidation of higher education provision in the UK in the decades ahead, with a trend towards mega-institutions offering the full gamut of options? or will we see increasing specialisation and coordination, as institution seek to play to their strengths? Will the sector be entirely cloud-based? Will we have robot academics? Nobody knows for sure, but for the final session of the Festival of Higher Education we’ll be indulging in some speculative fun with a serious intent – because to a not-insignificant degree, the future of higher education will be determined by the leaders and decision-makers of today.

At last year’s Festival of Higher Education OfS director of regulation Philippa Pickford said she wanted to “start a conversation” about higher education governance, prompted by the regulator’s initial work into institutional financial sustainability which found a degree of reluctance in some quarters to fully grasp the nettle of the financial challenge facing institutions.

A year on, she’s back, in conversation with newly appointed chief executive of Advance HE, Alistair Jarvis, arguably one of the people in the sector with the greatest scope to shift the dial on the effectiveness of HE governance across the whole system. Philippa and Alistair will discuss their diagnosis of the nature and extent of the issues, what the regulator might reasonably expect of higher education governance, and what the sector’s development agency can do to improve it.

Higher education can in lots of ways be a fantastic environment in which to work, but there’s no denying that staff across the sector are having a tough time, with many coping with major institutional restructure and redundancies. Drawing on the evidence base for staff experience in higher education, we’ll draw out actionable insight for leaders and future leaders on what could make the difference in supporting staff and helping teams to support each other.

Announcing your values are liberal these days immediate puts you at a disadvantage in public debate. Yet higher education is, in principle, grounded in the pursuit of truth, rational debate, free speech, and tolerance. On the other hand, higher education institutions have often found themselves struggling to defend their choices when they seek to express a values-based position on contemporary cultural or global issues, accused of creating a chilling effect on debate on the one hand and tolerating a culture of silence in the face of atrocities on the other.

As an interlocutor on public policy and ideas through his newspaper column, his Striking 13 Substack, his books on political thinking and practice, and the brilliant Origin Story podcast which he co-hosts with Dorian Lynskey, Ian Dunt is the perfect person to help us find novel perspectives and ways of thinking about this perennial moral challenge for the higher education sector.

Universities drive economic growth through graduate skills, research and innovation, and commercialisation and knowledge exchange. Some are getting creative in deploying their assets, whether tangible or intangible, for wider benefit. But generally speaking higher education is incentivised to produce high quality knowledge outputs, not drive growth. Certainly it is often difficult for higher education to share in the proceeds of growth. Our panel will discuss whether higher education institutions could go further and faster in contributing to growth and what interventions would be needed to make that happen.

Wonkhe associate editor for research and innovation James Coe sits down with outgoing principal of the University of Glasgow Anton Muscatelli for a deep dive on the UK research landscape and how research funding changes are likely to reconfigure the shape of the sector in the years ahead.

Higher education offers the chance to gain powerful knowledge and…in principle, to an extent, in some cases…the knowhow to apply that knowledge in industry, the professions and graduate employment generally. “Skills” has become a universal term to capture a sense of the value gained from education, but it can mean anything from specific technical competences to generic capabilities. The gauntlet has been thrown down to higher education providers to ensure their graduates have the skills their region needs and to coordinate with other education providers in their areas to deliver on regional skills agendas – without much indication of how that might happen. But while half the country doesn’t benefit from higher education, adult education provision has been hollowed out over the last two decades, and there are nearly a million young people not in education, employment or training, should HE even be trying to articulate a role for itself in “skills”? Our panel will try to cut through the noise to define what the role of HE is or could be in ensuring the right mix of skills for the nation.

The stats are in, and its now clearer than ever that international universities bring major economic benefits to their regions. But is anyone listening? With Reform on the rise, the government believes that “fixing” immigration is the key to a second term, despite the known positives of international recruitment. As the immigration white paper translates into legislation and higher education institutions will be expected to demonstrate they have considered the impact of international recruitment on local areas, how can the sector make the arguments to the right people in the right places?

A shrinking unit of resource for undergraduate teaching, and the erosion of cross-subsidy must inevitably mean students are having a worse quality experience. Or does it? As once again the question is put about how to define and assess quality in higher education, is there an alternative to a thinned-out, pared back version of a traditional learning experience? Students are changing; they have more complicated and diverse needs and different expectations – there’s no reason to believe that a classic experience is what is most desirable. But what are the alternatives – and can the sector afford them? Our panel will rise to the task of working it out.