Twenty years inside UK higher education. Notes on the work I take on outside HE Perform, and the six simulations that started as a side project and now sit beside the rest of the practice. If you came for the simulations, they are §2.
I have spent twenty years inside UK higher education. Most of that was in business schools, latterly at the University of Salford. After Salford I moved to Advance HE, where I ran director-level work on assessment and digital. I am now a director at HE Perform, where I build a financial modelling tool that several English universities use to work out what their next five years actually cost.
This page exists because people ask, often enough that an answer in writing saves time, what I do that is not HE Perform. Some of that work I take on. The notes below describe what kind of thing, what kinds of institutions, and how I tend to work when I do.
I have tried to write this without the consultant register. If a sentence sounds like it could be on twenty other websites with the names changed, I have cut it.
The simulations on this site are a side project that grew. Each one is a six-turn scenario built around a specific role: vice-chancellor, principal, PVC, union branch chair. The decisions come from things I have seen happen, and the financial structure of each scenario draws on the HE Perform model and other sector sources. Names and identifying detail are fictional; the underlying numbers are not. A single-player run is ten to twenty minutes.
I run longer versions in person, for executive teams and governing bodies, designed around the institution paying for them. That is a different thing: multi-strand, facilitated, two to twelve hours of room time, with a debrief and a written playbook at the end.
The public scenarios are below. New ones get added when something in the sector demands it.
If you would like a version designed around your institution, read the longer note on executive simulations.
Four kinds of thing, in rough order of how much of my year they take. None of it is generic. If something here does not describe what you need, the work is probably not a good fit and a conversation will save us both some time.
The bulk of the work outside HE Perform. A university (Russell Group, post-92, sometimes a college) wants to decide which subjects to grow, which to hold, which to shrink, and which to close. I run the numbers, sit in the room with the deans and the PVCs, and write the paper that goes to the executive. The work takes between six weeks and four months, depending on how much disagreement the institution wants to surface up front.
Schools and departments where something has stopped working. The work usually involves redesigning the assessment regime, rewriting the workload model, and saying things in meetings that the substantive head cannot say without resigning. I do not take this work on lightly and I do not take it on often.
Learning analytics, AI in assessment, EdTech procurement. I am tired of vendors, and I think most institutions are paying for software they do not use. There are two or three pieces of EdTech that are doing genuine work right now and I am happy to tell you which.
TNE strategy, branch-campus design, and occasional advisory work for governments and ministries in MENA, APAC and Central Asia. The advice is usually about what not to do. The hardest part of TNE is not the strategy; it is whether the home institution has the management capacity to run anything at distance.
A typical engagement is a fixed-scope piece with a written deliverable (usually a paper to the executive or governing body) and a meeting in which I present it. I do not run retainers. I do not charge by the hour. I do not produce decks unless an institution genuinely needs one, and most do not. The price is agreed up front and includes everything.
If you want a longer relationship, what works best is a sequence of fixed-scope pieces over a year or two.
The deliverable is the bit people remember, but the meeting is the bit that matters. The point of the writing is to make the meeting possible. I would rather write twenty pages that the executive reads than sixty pages that nobody opens.
Email is the only channel I read reliably. Tell me who you are, what you are working on, what timescale you have in mind, and whether you have already decided what you want me to do or want help deciding. Both answers are fine.