Oversight isn’t enough: rethinking partnership improvement in higher education

Partnership oversight in higher education has become increasingly complex. As universities work across larger and more diverse partnership portfolios, the challenge is no longer simply one of compliance or operational management. It’s about how institutions secure continuous improvement, respond proportionately to risk and, ultimately, safeguard students’ educational entitlement across a wide range of contexts. Yet historically, whilst universities have often had partnership oversight arrangements, they haven’t always had clearly articulated partnership improvement methodologies. That distinction matters.

At Buckinghamshire New University (BNU), we’ve been reflecting carefully on this challenge. In doing so, I've led our work on developing a Partner Improvement Strategy that seeks to move us from reactive oversight towards a more structured, evidence-informed and improvement-focused approach to partnership working. Importantly, this isn’t simply about creating another framework or monitoring process. It’s about establishing a clearer operating logic for how we:

• identify concern

• understand context

• deploy support

• monitor impact

• and intervene proportionately where necessary.

The problem with reactive oversight

One of the challenges within partnership oversight is that institutions can sometimes find themselves operating reactively. Decisions may be made too late. Intelligence can become fragmented across teams. Responses may vary depending on individuals or circumstances. Intervention activity can become episodic rather than continuous. In some cases, institutions may also unintentionally focus too heavily on compliance activity without sufficiently focusing on improvement itself.

The difficulty with reactive oversight is that it often reduces an institution’s ability to:

• intervene early

• build partner capability

• and prevent escalation.

That’s particularly important within a higher education landscape that is increasingly shaped by:

• regulatory scrutiny

• student outcomes

• continuation and completion metrics

• quality concerns

• and growing public accountability.

For us at BNU, this led to an important question:

How do we move towards a more proactive, transparent and consistent approach to partnership improvement?

Looking beyond higher education

Interestingly, some of the thinking that helped shape our approach came from outside the higher education sector. Our strategy draws heavily upon improvement methodologies used within the multi-academy trust sector, particularly the work of Sir David Carter, the first National Schools Commissioner.

Terms such as:

• stabilise

• repair

• improve

• and sustain

are already well-established within school improvement and trust development work. What interested us was not simply the terminology itself, but the underlying philosophy:

• tiered intervention

• evidence-informed decision-making

• continuous monitoring

• proportionate response

• and the recognition that improvement is dynamic rather than linear.

Whilst schools and universities are clearly different sectors, the core improvement principles remain remarkably transferable. At BNU, we’ve adapted this thinking into a higher education partnership context in a way that aligns with:

• OfS Conditions of Registration

• student protection responsibilities

• partnership governance

• and institutional accountability.

The key shift: from oversight to improvement methodology

One of the biggest shifts for us has been recognising that partnership oversight and partnership improvement are not the same thing. Oversight alone does not necessarily secure improvement.

What matters is whether institutions have a clear methodology for improvement, an agreed operating logic and disciplined processes for implementation, evaluation and review.

Our Partner Improvement Strategy therefore operates around a relatively simple but disciplined cycle:

1. diagnose

2. deploy support

3. monitor impact

This sounds straightforward, but it fundamentally changes the nature of the conversation. The focus shifts away from:

• isolated incidents

• or disconnected monitoring activity

towards:

• root causes

• trajectory

• capacity and capability

• implementation fidelity

• and impact over time.

It also reinforces an important principle:

Improvement planning is not a document. It’s a disciplined process.

Improvement isn’t linear

One of the most important aspects of the strategy is the recognition that improvement rarely happens in a straight line. Partners may progress rapidly, plateau, experience setbacks or move between levels of support over time. That’s why we deliberately designed the strategy to be dynamic.

Our four-tier model of stabilise, repair, improve and sustain is not intended as a labelling exercise. Rather, it provides a way of understanding current context, risk, trajectory and the level of support or intervention required at a particular point in time. Importantly, movement between tiers is normal. That reflects the reality of organisational improvement, particularly within complex operational and regulatory environments.

Continuous intelligence gathering

Another key shift has been moving away from isolated monitoring points towards continuous intelligence gathering. Tiering decisions are not based on a single issue, one dataset or one visit. Instead, they draw together multiple sources of intelligence including:

• Academic Partnership Tutor visits and interactions

• quality assurance activity

• operational intelligence

• risk assessments

• student voice

• external examiner feedback

• and regulatory concerns.

This collective intelligence model is particularly important because no single team or individual ever holds the full picture of a partnership. Cross-university visibility and intelligence-sharing therefore become critical components of effective oversight.

100-day cycles and continuous review

Within Priority Improvement Planning (PIP), we’ve also introduced a structured methodology based around continuous 100-day cycles. Rather than treating improvement planning as an annual exercise, the approach creates shorter, more disciplined cycles of:

• implementation

• monitoring

• evaluation

• and refinement.

Partners submit updated PIPs at the beginning of each cycle for review and approval. Those plans are not automatically accepted. Detailed feedback and resubmission may be required where greater clarity, precision or evaluation is needed. Alongside this, we operate:

• spotlight reviews during the cycle

• and floodlight reviews at the end of each cycle.

The floodlight reviews are particularly important because they look both backwards and forwards simultaneously evaluating progress made whilst also shaping the next phase of improvement activity. I often describe this through the metaphor of the Roman God Janus: looking backwards to evaluate impact and forwards to shape what comes next.

Student protection remains central

Ultimately, though, this strategy is not simply about governance structures or improvement frameworks. At its heart sits student protection. Everything within the model is intended to ensure students receive their educational entitlement, experience high-quality provision and and are protected where concerns arise.

That’s why the strategy also contains clear escalation mechanisms, including teach-out arrangements where necessary. These are safeguards of last resort, but they are important. Universities need clear and transparent routes available where risks become too significant or where confidence in improvement cannot yet be secured.

Final reflections

Partnership provision within higher education continues to evolve rapidly. As that happens, I suspect universities will increasingly need approaches to oversight that combine:

• improvement science

• proportionality

• continuous intelligence gathering

• and student-centred intervention

At BNU, our Partner Improvement Strategy is still evolving. Like all improvement work, it will continue to adapt over time. But fundamentally, the strategy represents an attempt to move partnership oversight towards something that is earlier, clearer, more consistent, more evidence-informed and more improvement-focused. Ultimately, partnership oversight should not simply be about identifying problems. It should be about creating the conditions for sustainable improvement and better outcomes for students. As Sir David Carter reminds us, “improvement is not linear, it’s messy.” And it’s exactly that complexity that demands a more disciplined, system-wide approach to partnership improvement: one that understands not just what needs to change, but how improvement is sustained over time.