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.