Business schools are set to be at the forefront of efforts to “diversify” UK higher education in the years ahead, according to sector leaders, who predicted that much of the innovation around shorter courses, online learning and transnational education will be channelled through their programmes.

With institutions still under pressure to expand despite constrained finances, the Chartered Association of Business Schools Annual Conference on 10 November heard how “purposeful growth” was now the target for many deans. 

Opening the event, Stewart Robinson, dean of Newcastle University Business School and chair of CABS, said many institutions were “half anticipating further decline” despite recent policy announcements.

Although the government’s Post-16 Education and Skills White Paper confirmed that tuition fee caps will rise with inflation, 40 per cent of schools said this would have “little or no impact” on their stability – “unsurprisingly,” he added, “given that this is just rising with inflation”.

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But financial performance, he warned, had now become the top priority for most schools, overtaking all other measures.

“This is where the government really does need to step in and signal support for the sector,” he said, cautioning that any benefit from the tuition fee uplift could be offset by a proposed international student levy.

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Katie Normington, vice-chancellor of De Montfort University, told delegates that her university’s business school, now 50 years old, reflected the pressures facing post-92 institutions.

Undergraduate applications had “shrunk nationally”, she said, although international enrolments had offered “a bounty” last September.

Normington said international expansion remained central to De Montfort’s model of “purposeful growth”, citing a new wholly owned campus in Dubai and partnerships in Kazakhstan, Cambodia and Malaysia. Such ventures, she said, take education “to where the demand is”, particularly in countries with large youth populations and skills shortages.

Speaking to ̽����Ƶ at the event, Mohammad Ali, pro vice-chancellor and dean of business and law at Anglia Ruskin University, said the conversation underlined a shift in how vice-chancellors view their business schools.

“Until two years back it was about bringing more international students. Now the ask is changing – it’s about diversification.”

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He pointed to the Lifelong Learning Entitlement and block teaching as areas where business schools could lead innovation.

Ali agreed with Normington that “diversification is what will bring things in”, adding that Anglia Ruskin was focusing its efforts on transnational education and online learning.

“By around 2028, globally, the number of online learners will surpass the number of people going to a university,” he said. “That means huge growth in online education.”

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He warned that demographic and policy changes would intensify financial pressure across the sector.

“The levy that government is going to introduce will have a huge impact,” he said, adding that the number of 17- to 18-year-olds in the UK is expected to peak in 2031 before declining.

“We have four or five years to build new models of lifelong learning before that trend hits.”

Ali warned that the coming decade would bring what he called “painful growth”.

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“We’ll have to lose staff. It will be painful because we’ll have to cut down on research unless you’ve got external funding,” he said. “Financially it will be painful; strategically, restructuring will be painful.”

tash.mosheim@timeshighereducation.com