Vivienne Stern MBE, Chief Executive, Universities UK

I did. I didn't have to go very far to bring this because this is a picture that hangs next to my desk. And you probably can't see it very well, but it's a print of an engraving by William Blake. It's a very small print. The original engraving is very small and it has a tiny, very simple figure standing at the bottom of a ladder, and the ladder, which is long and thin, reaches up and rests on a little crescent moon. And the picture is called 'I Want, I Want.' And I've had this picture in various forms, a print of this engraving, hanging over every desk I have worked at since I was at university. And there are two reasons I sort of wanted to bring it for this purpose. The first is because it reminds me about the incredible importance of purpose. Clear purpose. Having a really, really clear sense of what you're trying to do here. It's so easy to lose it. It's so easy to lose it when you're writing an essay, which is why I had it at university. It's so easy to lose it in your work life. And for me, that sense of trying to be really super clear: what are we trying to achieve here? What do we want to change? What is it that we want to be different because we turned up at work and did a bunch of stuff? And I think it applies to your personal life sometimes, too. The other reason is that I bought that postcard. And I bought two at the time. There was another little Blake engraving with a drowning man with his hands sort of just poking up above the waves, and the title of that little engraving is 'Help.' And I bought them because I was trying to persuade an extremely illustrious professor of English literature to supervise me in my final year. Her name was Anne Barton. She is a professor of English literature and she specializes in the study of Shakespeare, and she happens to be married to John Barton who is an extremely revered director. And I did a paper in my third year at Cambridge on Shakespeare and performance, and she was the person I wanted as a supervisor, but she doesn't supervise undergraduates because, like many people who are illustrious academics, they don't need to, frankly. They've got better things to do with their time. So I thought really hard: how do I get Anne Barton to think I'd like to meet this person and have a conversation about whether they might supervise me? And I thought, try and get her interested by giving her something which sort of boils down to: you're going to want to meet this person because this person wants you and they want your help, and that might be interesting. And it worked. It really worked.

Yeah. And not giving up is an extremely important part of it. But mostly it's about just knowing what you're trying to achieve. Just being really clear and trying to make yourself come back to that again and again and again.

Do you know, a very funny thing happened yesterday. I was speaking at a conference and at the end of it somebody came up to me and said, 'Did you go to St. John's Primary School in Leicester?' And it was somebody who I'd been at primary school with who I hadn't seen since I was nine. So that was really kind of funny. I think I was very happy at school. I think I'm a curious creature in the sense I've always been reasonably happy in institutions. I should say that my first primary school, I was probably deeply unpopular and a bit bullied. So I moved to primary schools when I was about seven and I was still a bit picked on at primary school. Partly because I've always been a sort of slightly wonkish, you know, even at the age of eight or nine, I was probably kind of pretentious and used a lot of polysyllables. And I think I probably didn't really fit in very comfortably at primary school. But then at secondary school, I sort of found my place and I was just very happy. And I went back to my secondary school recently to give a prize-giving talk which was just such a joy. And one of my teachers was in fact retiring that year. And I think I was just very, very lucky. I was surrounded by people where being interested and wanting to work hard and wanting to do well and being interested in ideas and being academically ambitious wasn't a bad thing. I think there were probably lots of schools and it probably was a little bit the case in my primary school where it makes you super unpopular. It's just not cool. And so to be in a school where I didn't feel that, I think I was very lucky.

So I went to what was at that stage a grant-maintained grammar school for my secondary school. So yes, it was a fee-paying school, but at that stage subsidized by the government.

Yes, absolutely. I think probably like a lot of people, there are a couple of teachers who I think had a massively formative influence on me. Again, I got a note a few weeks ago from a guy called Steven Pollard who was my English teacher at secondary school and was one of two English teachers I had for A-level. And there's absolutely no doubt I did English literature at university because I just loved studying in his classes. Him and there was another guy called Robert Kidd, and together they brought different things to the subject but it was just so interesting and so rewarding. For me it was a bit of a toss-up between that and studying history because I also had a great history teacher. But I was really lucky with some of my teachers. There were the odd person who I feel very guilty now I probably didn't appreciate at the time. There's one teacher in particular who tried to teach me geography and I wasn't very good at drawing maps, which at the age of around eleven, he sort of made a comment in a parents' evening about thinking that I had a mental block when it came to drawing maps. And I just took this as the most colossal insult and immediately gave up geography for GCSE, which I think was probably a mistake. But you know, there's the odd thing where a teacher says something to you and it really sticks. It really does.

Yeah, it's a funny thing as well. It kind of reminds you how people in positions of some authority over you, as teachers are with pupils at school, you can say something which you think is either kind of borderline quite funny or is not intended in any way as a major criticism, but it sticks and it hurts. And I think probably there have been occasions in my career where I've made an off-hand comment to somebody which they have taken really as an insult. And I think I probably have to be quite careful of that.

Well, I mean, like I say, Steven Pollard, my English teacher, I'd lost contact with for 20 years. I mean, the last time I saw him, I was at university and he sort of popped a note in my pigeonhole and I sort of met him for a coffee. But yeah, I hope I'll be able to see him again. He was a wonderful teacher.

Yes. I mean, no question about it. I wasn't necessarily, I don't think anybody thought I was a slam dunk that I would get necessarily a place at Cambridge, but I certainly was encouraged and supported and I think that made a big difference.

I still feel that it was just an incredible privilege to be part of a community like that. And I still get a little bit of a thrill from visiting the university and thinking about what's going on in all of those buildings. I think it's quite an extraordinary place to be able to spend a bit of time even as an undergraduate. And I think it's quite important to make clear: I did a bachelor's degree. I have not yet done a master's. I think in this field a lot of people sort of assume I've got at the very least a master's but probably a PhD, and I don't. And so I don't want to overclaim for my academic credentials. I could have, you know, Cambridge automatically converts bachelor's degrees into master's degrees if you stay out of prison and give some cash. I may have got that wrong, they may have changed the rules, but anyway, I didn't convert it because I thought that was borderline unethical. I might try and do a master's. I'm right across the road from Birkbeck and Birkbeck's got some fantastic master's programs that I would love to be able to do, but I just don't think I've got the bandwidth right now. But eventually I'll do a master's. As an undergraduate student, I spent a lot of my time doing plays, basically. I did a lot of directing, a lot of acting, a lot of producing plays. I thought at the time I was sort of getting away with it and combining my degree with doing that. Now I think that a huge amount of that experience has been quite valuable to me. Things like working in teams, managing budgets, managing a big project, even things that are quite logistical. One of the most challenging things I did in the whole three years I was at university was cater for a group of 24 students taking a production of Hamlet around Europe. And I had to feed them three meals a day for about 20 days on the road with a Baby Belling and a budget of something like a couple of hundred pounds. And I don't think there's anything I've ever done that has been quite as stressful as that. But the degree, I had such freedom. I chose to study in a college which was very small because I thought that would allow me to choose supervisors from different colleges. Because if you're taught in a college which has a big English department then you're going to be taught in college, and I kind of knew that there would be people all over the university who had interesting things going on. So I really did get to select supervisors and ask them if they would supervise me. I think that's an enormous privilege. But there are lots of things about that degree which with hindsight I think are not so great. When I go around universities now I think about how limited it was in terms of its breadth. It was kind of English literature 1300 to the present day, and that meant 1950, because if you're not good and dead then how can you possibly know whether it's literature?

Oh goodness, I don't know how to answer that. I think that everybody has a mixture of things about which you're super confident and things about which you have no confidence at all. I'm sure that's true of me too. But when I look back on it I think it's quite surprising that I went in with this mindset that I could probably approach somebody who was an illustrious academic and ask them to supervise me. I don't know where that came from. Actually one of the good things about what happened to me was that because I was doing lots of drama, I was with people who were third years in my first year. And actually most of my friends, my really good friends even to this day, were a year above me, so they'd sort of worked out how the system works. And whilst as I say I think there were some limitations to the way the English degree is taught in Cambridge or was at that time, for me working in teams with people who were more experienced, including actually master's students and PhD students, that probably gave me this kind of 'oh, you can do that' feeling. And it meant that the person I asked to supervise me for a paper from the Italian tripos, actually I think I was probably a bit arrogant with hindsight, I did a paper studying Dante, and I did that because somebody two years above me just thought that this guy Robin Kirkpatrick was the most amazing person he'd ever met. So it was that sort of knowledge transfer, I suppose.

I had a fantastic time. But it's a sink-or-swim environment. And I don't think there are many universities that provide much more individualized support to students and for whom there is a kind of obvious stake in student success, which I don't think was at all my experience. It was like: you're lucky to be here, here is the world at your feet, you make what you can of it, and if you decide you don't care and you dial it in, that is your choice, you go right ahead. When I think about how hard many other universities work to take students who've got much less well-supported educational backgrounds, who need much more side-by-side and dedicated and personalized support to make sure that they can take advantage of that opportunity, I think there's no question that makes a better university. I was lucky to be in an academic community from which I managed to really profit, but did Cambridge make much of an effort to form me? Not really. The sort of care you will have taken over your students would dwarf anything that Cambridge, now, that was, I'm now old enough that I can say that was last century, and I'm sure things have changed even at Cambridge, and it's probably different in other degrees. That's why I get really irritated by people talking about good universities and bad universities. Cambridge would be an utter disaster for probably the majority of students, for whom you would just be a bit lost. You need something that will help work with you. I just think it's the right environment for a very small number of students. I was at Leeds Trinity recently and I was taken around by a student who was neurodiverse, who had been estranged from her parents, and for whom being in a community where people know your name, where you have a degree of personal relationship with the well-being staff, that's the right university for somebody like that. That student was effusive about the support they got. And there's no such thing, therefore, in my view, as a good university. There's the right kind of university for the right student, if you see what I mean.

Yeah, we hear that a lot. And it's based on a huge amount of prejudice and ignorance. And I do think it's really an important part of my job to try and explain to people, and I'm sure we don't do it well enough, that the rankings are based on a set of metrics which you can compare internationally, and that means they're predominantly based on research. We do not have an internationally comparable data set on teaching. It just doesn't exist. And therefore you can't compare the quality of teaching in the same way. Then there are proxy measures for the quality of teaching which include things like staff-student ratios or the proportion of international students compared to domestic students, or international faculty. If you're a research-intensive, highly-ranked university, those proxy measures for teaching will almost inevitably be better because you've got more resources, lower staff-student ratio, you've got the ability to attract international staff and students. These things are mutually reinforcing. They don't actually tell you whether a university is good. One of the things that I like about the UK, although all rankings are in a sense equally problematic, is we've got lots and lots of different ways of looking at objective information about quality of universities. So I can't remember who won the WhatUni Student Choice Awards this year, but my guess is it would be one of the very small community-based institutions that just whacks it out of the park when it comes to student experience. I was talking to the vice chancellor of Birmingham Newman University and they typically do very, very well. In fact, they may have won again this year. So these other domestic league tables which have more data to draw on from a teaching point of view can give you a different sense. But then as an applicant you have to decide what's important to you, and which comes back to who are you and what do you want to get out of being at university.

And I think there is a, I don't want to be disparaging about any institution in our membership, but when I visit, I obviously visit universities of all types. And there are universities where the vice chancellor is thinking constantly about the student experience. They're thinking about where is it not as it should be and how can I make it better. And then there are universities where I just don't think that's so much a top-of-mind issue. There's a bit more kind of complacency over the role that the university plays. And I'm not going to name names, but every now and again you'll hear from somebody whose offspring has gone to university and they find it disappointing that they're getting very little personalized support. And you kind of think, well, would you have considered applying to one of the big post-92 institutions that really will think about who you are and what you need to succeed? You wouldn't, because you're too snobbish. But if that was what was important to you, then you should have been thinking about that when you applied. But anyway, I try not to rant.

Well, it was all a terrible mistake. So first of all, when I was just coming towards the end of my degree, it started occurring to me that at some point I was going to have to earn a living. And it turned out I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do. I'd never set foot in the career service. When I did, they thought I should probably be a police officer, which I thought was unlikely given that I'm five foot one and a half and extremely short-sighted. So I went to Italy because I thought I might as well be learning a second language whilst not knowing what to do. And so I studied Italian for three months in Bologna. And I taught English. Turns out teaching is not my metier, and also that I don't understand the English language despite having studied English literature. What is a phrasal verb? Never heard of this thing. Turns out English is kind of interesting. And then I think the school I was working for realized that what I'd be really useful for in Bologna, a big university city, is helping professors polish up their material for publication. So I did a little bit of that and then I went to work in San Remo, which is this town on the Ligurian coast that's really famous for a kind of massively tacky music festival every year, but it's quite beautiful. Well, it's not tacky at all. I follow it every night. So that was a lovely place and I lived there for three or four months working for a company that ran summer schools. And then I came back to the UK and I moved in with a couple of friends and I'd spent all my money on the deposit for the flat. So I just had to get a job, I literally had to get a job that week. And so I went into temp agencies around Victoria, Whitehall, because I sort of thought all these government departments and things must be hiring from somewhere. So I temped for a bit. I did a stint at the Royal Geological Society and at the Medicine Control Agency as a kind of receptionist. And I wasn't perhaps very good at it, but I quite enjoyed all of that. I've enjoyed every job I've ever had. And then I got a job working for an MP, which I did for about 18 months, a guy called Barry Sheerman, who was the chair of the Education and Skills Committee. Which was a great experience, I learned a lot. I didn't enjoy it a huge amount. And I got to the point where I just needed to get out after about 18 months. And I applied for about 50 jobs and, like many recent graduates, a lot of them I didn't get even a reply let alone interviewed. And then after about two months I got two interviews on the same day: one working as an administrator in an advertising body and the other working as a parliamentary officer in Universities UK. And I got offered both jobs and I took a weekend to think about it. The then director of communications, who's still a good friend of mine, from Universities UK called me up and tried to persuade me that I didn't want a career in advertising, which with hindsight is correct. So that's it. And then I started at Universities UK. I walked in and I thought I'll do six months. You know, it looks really boring. But I've just fallen in love with the place. I think I'm so lucky. It's been a huge privilege. I've done I think eight or nine jobs. So I started in one of the kind of entry-level roles and I've wiggled my way through the organization. I came within two days of a contract ending because I'd skipped from a permanent to a temporary contract to move into policy. And then I sort of came back into the lobbying sphere as head of political affairs, and then led the international function for a few years, and then I've been chief executive for coming up for three years. So it's a very unusual career. I've got a very short biography. Started at Universities UK as a small child.

Yeah. Yeah. So I mean it was a bit of a mixture of both. And at that stage we had, I mean the jobs changed a lot. Jamie Arrowsmith, who now runs the international unit, it's ninety percent, there's a huge amount of domestic policy now in that role. But at the time we were kind of trying to see whether through working as a team with embassies and the British Council and what was then the Science and Innovation Network overseas, we could make the kind of environment more favorable for UK universities to operate. And so we developed quite close relationships with ministries and officials in a set of significant countries. And that meant we did travel a lot.

We did develop relationships and try to curate them, and that's still happening. DBT is now doing much more active work — it's taken on a lot of the work that we started doing. I think we showed what could be done if you engage, if you really deeply listen. We're also at that stage — when I started, David Willetts was the universities minister, and he was absolutely brilliant at international engagement. Really good at saying, look, here's what we could both get out of doing more together. So it was a great time and a really kind of golden age of international collaboration in some ways.

When I started in that job in 2014, I think when David Willetts was there, lots of things were happening, weren't there? Not only in the international arena — he was so engaged with the university sector.

He was a fantastic minister. And we've had a few ministers who really use their role — because ministers have got the opportunity to develop relationships with their peers — and there are some university ministers who've really done that very well. It's difficult when you've got a government that is under pressure because it doesn't have a large majority. So the back end of the Conservative government was a bit like that. Ministers couldn't travel. But we did some good things working with governments to enable them to develop environments where, for example, transnational education could flourish. And we did a huge amount on international research collaboration, which I really enjoyed.

I think it does. I mean, presidents bring their own approach. And I can think of times when the approach of the president has been really very important in the way that Universities UK is perceived by its own members. I mean, both for good and bad, right? I think Sally Mapstone is an absolutely exemplary president. I think she's been fantastic. And I've seen her behind the scenes as well as in public. She deeply believes in the diversity of the university sector, and that is a strength. I think it's extremely important for a membership body that has such a wide membership that you can advocate genuinely and passionately for universities of different types.

I will lie down in front of the tanks for UUK's position in global research terms and the preservation of our reputation for excellence. But I will not do that at the expense of institutions that serve an extremely important mission in different ways. And that includes our specialist institutions, our postgraduate-only institutions, institutions that have their roots in faith communities — the Catholic and Anglican communities which have produced a special group of institutions — the big civics, places like Edge Hill where, frankly, these things are distinctive and they fill a particular need, and we should be able to passionately advocate for them too.

I think Sally really believes it and she demonstrates it when she talks. I think there have been occasions when it's not that hard for a perception to build up that UUK cares more about one group of universities than another, and the approach of the president is quite important in that. There have been occasions I can think of where that's been the case, but we've had some fantastic presidents. I mean, Alistair Jarvis — I loved working with Alistair Jarvis, particularly on the political engagement. He was just very, very funny to watch, and I learned a lot from watching him.

Yes. No, she's — oh, listen to that one. Yes. No, you do. Yeah.

I think it's difficult. In a way, I try to avoid using the word crisis because I think there is a fundamental structural problem in the funding of teaching and research. There's no question. I think that affects all universities. It affects every part of the system for different reasons. All four nations of the UK — there is a structural problem with the funding of teaching and research, and we have to find a way to address that because the consequences of not addressing it will be that we erode this extremely important national capability.

That probably feels like a crisis in some institutions. And again, I'm not going to name names, but there are certainly institutions where I think it's not impossible that a point will be crossed — a moment will come when it's difficult to see how that institution continues in the way that it has. And there are other institutions where there genuinely isn't a problem — for one reason or another, the institution has managed to adapt its cost base in a way that means they've got healthy reserves. They are not in deficit. They're able to invest and grow. And that's not all because of competitive position. I've seen institutions that are in good health in all parts of the sector, but they are in a minority.

The majority of institutions are somewhere between those poles. So finding the almost continuous deterioration in operating conditions and extraordinary strain — doing what needs to be done to balance budgets, often at the expense of things that under other circumstances you would want to preserve. A huge number of job losses in the sector. Courses being closed. People scaling back on the research that they do. And within that, there's probably a spectrum of institutions who have managed to do that in a way that feels strategic and likely to leave them in a stronger position, and institutions where it's just tactical — we've got to balance the book, so we're just going to do it fast, and then there'll be other problems that arise from that. So I think it's a system-wide problem. I think it is a crisis in a small number of institutions.

It's really mixed. It's really mixed because it's gravity — you get universities of all types that are responding to the same fundamental conditions. The only thing I would say is that the loss on research activity — the volume of that is about six billion, compared to the loss on the teaching side, which I think the last time we looked at it was about one and a half billion. So if you're losing money on both, then you're going to have big trouble.

I think the other thing is international students and the patterns. People have different dependencies on parts of the world that are differentially affected by visa policy. So if you have robust recruitment from parts of the world where changes to dependent rules or post-study work rules don't really impact demand, then you're going to be in a slightly more robust position. And of course there's been some really hyper-competitive behavior on domestic admissions, which I think has weakened universities that are absolutely outstanding — they're just in a sense being weakened by the behavior of competitor institutions, and I know that's a source of extraordinary concern in some parts of the sector.

I think you can see that. We just recently did a survey which asked institutions to tell us what changes they were making or planning to make, and about 20% of the institutions which responded to that survey said they were reducing research activity. And we can certainly see lots of examples of people trying to focus on strengths. So it may be that even in an institution that isn't broadly research-intensive, there are one or two areas that are very important — they might be very well aligned to a particular industrial cluster in a particular place and you want to preserve it and be able to continue to be strong in a small number of areas. But trying to spread your resources a little bit less thinly, trying to manage the amount of time that's allocated to research, make sure that that's mindfully done — I think that is what's happening.

And maybe there will be whole universities that say, you know what, our mission is teaching and we're not going to try to sustain — I mean, the issue is that most people in this sector believe that there is a very, very strong connection between not only being abreast of developments in research but being actively engaged in research, because it is an environment in which you're training people who need to themselves develop research skills. And I think therefore it would be a mistake to let ourselves get into a situation where there are universities that simply have no research activity, that have no research culture.

Yeah, I know we have. I know that the graduate route was introduced because we pushed for it. And it was protected on three, four occasions because we lobbied like hell to keep it. I know that it doesn't feel like this to many institutions, but we've got a government that actually does recognise a financial sustainability challenge in the sector. And I believe we're going to see a little bit of action. I don't think it'll necessarily come today with the spending review. But I think there will be different points in the four nations of the UK. But I think in the Westminster government there will be action to demonstrate that they understand that the government too has to support the financial sustainability of the sector.

And I think the relationship with government is broadly speaking quite a good one. It's different in different parts, and both Scotland and Wales have got elections coming up next year, and the dynamics are kind of difficult — in Scotland I think in particular. But yeah, I think UUK is having influence at the headline level and on the small stuff.

So I think there are swings and roundabouts. First of all, to your point about Scottish, Welsh, and perhaps most particularly Northern Irish universities feeling sometimes a little bit left out of the UK conversation — this really bothers me. When I started in this job, I stuck a little post-it note on the cupboard in front of my desk which just said 'UK', because it's so easy for us to forget when you're dealing with a sector where the numbers just lead you to spend a lot of time thinking about England, because it's such a very, very large proportion of the total membership.

One of the things I've really tried to do is make sure I work really closely with the Universities Scotland team and the Universities Wales team, that I'm in Scotland and Wales frequently, and that we try to make sure that everything we do or say — we just acknowledge when we're talking about a UK-wide issue or a kind of England-only issue. And that in a sense should try to keep us a bit more honest about where we're putting our time.

On the policy landscape, it swings and roundabouts. So you mentioned some of the frustrations in the English sector with the OfS. There are some absolutely clear benefits of the different relationship in Scotland and the SFC. I think it's much more like a partner with the sector in many ways. But at the same time you've got a system which has constraints that come with that different relationship and the political context, which has left Scottish universities in a broadly speaking worse position than English institutions — for all the kind of annoyance of dealing with the accountability. And Wales is maybe somewhere in the middle. We've got an interesting development with the creation of Medr. Medr has, under Simon Pirotte's leadership, been broadly speaking a very good partner with the Welsh sector. It's just acquired a new chief executive. I have not yet met him, but I think it's a very important appointment. And as I say, the 2026 elections for both Scotland and Wales are going to be very important in determining what the relationship between the government and the sector and the regulator and the sector is.

It's sort of — you will probably recall that every now and again you'll have conversations in UUK where all the English members decide they'd like to move to Scotland or vice versa. We've all got our own unique troubles, and some of the features are things you'd want and you don't have.

Yes, I feel entirely optimistic about the university sector. I think we're going through a bad patch. I really do. And I mean, I feel a bit annoyed that I think the period that I'm chief executive might coincide with a period in which the policy landscape feels pretty difficult and the funding landscape is pretty constrained. But I absolutely feel optimistic. I mean, I think this is a sector which has gone from strength to strength, and our job is to make sure that it does that in this next era. And I think it will change for sure.

One of the sort of challenges that I think we've got to deal with — and one of the great difficulties of a job like this, you must recognise this from roles where you are just constantly battling with today's problem — is being able to think about the medium to longer term. But I think in the last two decades this sector has gone through the process of massification, and it's been positive. That has been a good thing. It means that there are lots of people who go to university now who wouldn't have done it in the past. And the university system has become much more flexible and responsive to serve students of different needs. That's a good thing, and it's probably not quite finished yet because you're still twice as likely to go to university if you're from the most affluent groups in society compared to the least affluent. So we're probably not done with massification.

But we are still evolving the mechanisms to cope with what is a fundamentally different system. And I think if you take the long-term view of it — actually we're still at the beginning of a new era of mass higher education participation, which I think is going to be a permanent feature of our landscape. But for sure the system's going to have to evolve. So it's not trying to deliver higher education in the same way that it did in the previous century.

Yeah. And for me, I'll tell you what is at the top of that ladder. It's two things: financial sustainability across all four nations, and it's the reputation of the sector. And I figure maybe I'll do this job for — I've been doing it for three years. Maybe it would be healthy for me to do it for another five or so, and then probably at some point somebody will want to boot me out of UUK. But I'd like to be able to say at the end of that period, I did achieve something on the financial sustainability of the university sector in all four nations of the UK, and we have done something to begin to address — it probably won't be a completed task — but to begin to address the reputation of the sector. That's what I kind of keep in mind every single day.

I think this is going to sound like a slightly banal answer to the question, but I think the most important and shocking lesson I keep learning is how important your decisions about how to use time are. I'm hopeless at it. I'm hopeless at it. And it stops me doing the job I want to do. And I can't tell you I know what the solution is, but I spend so much of my time committed that it stops me from doing things I think are my responsibility to do. So that's a really important lesson I keep learning.

I feel hugely privileged in the sense that I'm learning every single day about the sector. I get to visit institutions — every week I'll be in a university, and I get to see things, often things I've never seen before. And I am constantly learning about — I regard myself fundamentally as a lobbyist. I mean, I think fundamentally that's what I am. And I'm still learning about how to influence political decisions. It's so hard sometimes, but I find that endlessly fascinating.

Well, there's a very obvious thing in the English context around maintenance support, where maintenance support has been eroded for such a long period that I think it's quite hard to see how many students are really being given a fair opportunity to succeed in their studies without having to do so much part-time work that they're just held back from doing the kind of things we talked about — to do things which give you all sorts of opportunities to develop skills at that point in your career. If I had had to keep down two jobs working in a café or a bar or in a shop, I wouldn't have got to write and direct and act in plays or tour Europe. I mean, what a huge difference in the experience that would have been. And I think maintenance is a real issue.

Having said that, the most generous maintenance regime in the UK is in Wales, and participation is falling. And that takes me to the second thing. I think this sector's got a great story to tell on adapting the way it delivers higher education to meet the needs of different sorts of students and to address the differences in educational outcomes from students from different backgrounds. But we have certainly got work to do to make university more accessible to people at different stages of their lives, to work out how to fix those cold spots where you get very low participation in higher education. You know, why is it 13% of 18-year-olds in Barrow-in-Furness go to university and 70% in Kensington and Chelsea? Yes, it will be about maintenance, but it's more than that.

And I think that's part of it. Then there's a kind of more difficult set of issues about what is the right level of support for a university to provide a student, including both academic and pastoral support, within the limits of affordability. And I think that is in a sense a debate the sector is going to have to have with itself.

I don't know. I mean, this is a bigger question than university policy. This is about the kind of societal appetite for high tax, high benefit. I think the worrying thing is that we're moving into an era in which you'll get higher taxes, but you won't have the kind of — oh well, it's worth it — because the amount of money is being swallowed up by a combination of the healthcare system and the welfare system. I think we're going to find that the burden of taxation is increasing and yet you're not in a position where — and I don't know — when I started my career, university was almost entirely paid for by public grant. The cost of teaching was almost entirely paid for by the block grant, and there was this constant argument between higher education, schools, hospitals — today it would be defense.

The reason I think UUK at the time supported a shift to the graduate contribution is because it would give you a stability that you will not get if you're up against those extremely hungry public services. And so, whilst I think I quite often, whenever I visit — I think Denmark's a wonderful country, and there are parts of northern Europe and the Baltic states where you think there's something here, it's a different way of living — but I don't think the UK is like that. It's a societal — there's a huge societal difference. So I don't think it would be easy to wish it away.

I do though think the balance between the public contribution and the private contribution to higher education is wrong. It's wrong in Scotland — it's too far towards the public contribution — and it's wrong in England — it's too far towards the private contribution. There must be somewhere in the middle.

Yeah, I mean, first of all, I've never had any career plan. And I didn't when I wandered into UUK — I thought it was just a desperate move to get out of a job I didn't like. And I still don't have a career plan. And I think there's part of me that would want to say that actually following your nose isn't the worst thing. You learn what you enjoy doing and then you can see where that might take you. And that kind of iterative career development approach — how would you know when you were 18 what you want to do when you're 50? It would be absurd, you know, unless you really have a vocation. I think it would be absurd anyway for somebody from my kind of background to have a clear sense of where things went.

But I do think the one piece of advice that I do give to people is: look at people you admire and try and work out what it is about them that you admire. For me, having a sense of purpose is important. And that's not about — for me it's not about money or position. It's about: do I think this job is worth spending a huge chunk of my time on? And would it — does it make a contribution to, I'm going to say, public good. I don't want to sound too arm-wavy about it, but you're going to spend a huge amount of your time doing whatever it is you do to earn a living. Make it count. Life is very, very short.

And I would like to be able to look back at the end of my career and think: yes, it was rewarding and satisfying, and I worked with great people, but I also did something I'm proud of. So that's sort of I think the best advice I could give. Find people you admire, work out why you admire them, and do something that matters to you.

Well, likewise. Thank you. And it's nice to see you again.