How to make friends and influence public policy

The higher education sector’s record on significantly influencing public policy has been patchy at best in recent years

Melbourne-based management consultant Ant Bagshaw says there is good evidence of institutional influence on policy agendas in Australia. Picture: David Geraghty

“Public policy is a study in imperfection. It involves imperfect people, with imperfect information, making deeply imperfect choices.”

It’s a line attributed to Jake Sullivan, a former adviser to Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and it neatly encapsulates the difficulties in formulating, influencing and implementing public policy across the spectrum.

Indeed, the higher education sector’s record on significantly influencing public policy has been patchy at best in recent years. There have been wins, but also high-profile losses over issues such as the deregulation of tuition fees and the failure to stave off funding cuts and reinstate a demand-driven system.

Now a new book examines how public policy in the higher education sector can be influenced for long-term impact.

It is edited by Melbourne-based management consultant Ant Bagshaw and his former colleague from Britain’s National Union of Students, Debbie McVitty, who later became chief of staff at peak group Universities UK. Both went on to work for British higher education online media outlet Wonkhe, whose founder Mark Leach also had worked with them at the NUS.

“In the UK I’d met a whole host of people who were working in universities and in peak bodies whose role, at least in part, was designing and implementing policy,” says Bagshaw, who is a director of management consultant the Nous Group.

“Often, they were very isolated, particularly in individual institutions where it can be a single person’s role. Although there is a developed literature about public affairs more generally, very little has been written specifically for higher education.

“I saw the book as an opportunity to step back and provide something more curated, longer form, and providing a different resource for people working in higher education to think about policy literature.”

Although Influencing Higher Education Policy: A Professional Guide to Making an Impact, published by Routledge, has a British focus, Bagshaw says many of the ideas, practices and case studies are relevant to Australia.

However, he notes there are some marked differences.

“Peak groups in Australia appear to have more of a lobbying focus than one on policy generation,” Bagshaw says.

“My impression is that they do more work behind the scenes, so it’s harder to pinpoint the influence of these groups.

“In the UK there is a huge amount of published output, so you get a clearer sense of their agendas. Here there’s an iceberg effect.”

Bagshaw says this may not necessarily be to the Australian sector’s advantage.

“The UK benefits from a richness of public debate, which includes a plurality of voices,” he says. “My impression is that policy influence here is limited to a much smaller number of actors, a smaller number of vice-chancellors and a smaller number of people within peak bodies and elsewhere.”

He says that, unlike Britain and the US, think tanks are not players in policy in Australia, particularly since the Grattan Institute disbanded its higher education division last year.

There is also limited and ad hoc academic research activity.

Bagshaw insists he is not making a judgment, merely an observation.

“But it does mean that universities should adapt their strategies accordingly, which means developing key relationships and building authenticity into communica­tions with those key people such that you build a reputation for trust,” he says.

Asked whether the higher education sector in Australia is effective in influencing policy, Bagshaw says there is good evidence of institutional influence on policy agendas, naming the recent performance-based funding report and recommendations as an example.

“To even be in a situation where a group of vice-chancellors would be asked to conduct a review is a demonstration that there is a key institutional role in policy development,” he says, noting that in Britain an extra level of regulation, via the Office for Students, removes much of the direct access of vice-chancellors to the ­bureaucracy and politicians that occurs in Australia.

“But that raises the question — and one I would be interested in the sector’s response to — (of) whether that impacts their ability to influence the long-term agenda, be that research funding or visa settings and so on.

“Clearly, if you think about some of the really important things for the sector like the re-capping of undergraduate places, the argument about the importance of the demand-driven system to the broader economy has not been won.”

The relatively small size of the sector in Australia is both an advantage and disadvantage, he says. While on one hand vice-chancellors and their proxies can have direct access to ministers and departmental staff, this in turn may mean universities are less strategic in their approach and more reliant on personal relationships, which change as governments come and go.

“If you think about the architecture of policy influence, there are mediating institutions such as think tanks and the media. In order to influence the minister of education, you might do that via a number of routes. But in Australia the political distance is shorter.

“I’d say that universities here have not thought in a systematic way about how they can and should influence the agendas they are subject to.

“They should all do some institutional reflection — what do they want, why do they want it, how does changing those conditions fit within their strategy and aspirations and, once that has been worked out, what do they do about it? In my experience, both here and in the UK, that has not been a topic of conversation around senior management tables.”

Ultimately, Bagshaw says three core principles underpin the book: “Humility; thinking about what the audience wants and needs; and having a short accessible message.”

As with Sullivan, Bagshaw notes that the messy and compromised nature of public policy creation can be anathema to many people who work in higher education. “There’s a selection bias among people who work in universities; they often do so as a public good,” Bagshaw says.

“They see universities as institutions of value. But it can be a hard task reconciling that ambition — which is really attractive and laudable — with the cold-hearted reality that there are other public services competing for a slice of the pie.

“For many people, there is a desire for politics to be cleaner, nobler and more evidence-led. But evidence isn’t always what matters in politics. Policy is often about reconciling principles with pragmatism.”

However, he notes, universities have a unique advantage.

“One of my favourite phrases is that universities are unusual in that they are designed to live into perpetuity,” he says. “It’s not about the quarterly return or the shareholder report — they can afford to take long-term strategic decisions, and they should. Higher education has the evidence, the public goodwill, a highly desirable product and enough autonomy to think in the long term.”