In this Times Higher Education article, GuildHE CEO Dr Brooke Storer-Church shares her thoughts on non-traditional providers' experience of the sector's recent boom and bust.
She describes it as a "silver lining" of a system designed around large-scale, multi-faculty universities.
Our members’ experiences of the sector are marked by high levels of inflexible regulation, low levels of funding, and constraints on expanding or developing new income streams due to their size or specialisation.
Because they haven’t been able to avail themselves of those more recent market-driven manoeuvres, they have not been as impacted by changes in immigration policy or other policy changes that result in immediate destabilisation of their finances.
There needs to be wholesale funding and regulatory reform to ensure the survival and sustainability of our world-leading specialist institutions and those smaller-scale institutions.
Dr Brooke Storer-Church, CEO, GuildHE