Outsourcing—an English Perspective

Outsourcing is a strategy that is used in Englishuniversities as well as in the United States. This chapterdescribes some of the challenges and rewards associatedwith outsourcing in England.

NEW DIRECTIONS FOR STUDENT SERVICES, no. 96, Winter 2001 © John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 51

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Outsourcing—an English Perspective

Kenneth Hopkins

From an English perspective, American universities and colleges appear toshare their mission priorities between teaching, research, and a focus on stu-dent, or customer, support. The relative importance accorded to each ofthese three aspects may vary from institution to institution, but broadlyspeaking, the importance given to student affairs is no less than that givento teaching and research.

Indeed, talking with the many friends I have made over the yearsthrough National Association of Student Personnel Officers conferences andAmerican exchanges and links, the man or woman who inhabits the posi-tion of vice chancellor of student affairs (or a position with some equivalenttitle) has a key role and central importance in the life of most American uni-versities or colleges. The informal and anecdotal swapping of experiencesis of course a doubtful basis for confident generalized assertions; but askany British (not merely English) university head or director of student ser-vices about his or her relative importance in campus life, and the responseis sure to be tinged with an element of envy of the centrality the Americanhigher education system affords the student affairs feature of university edu-cation. Like poor children, with our noses pressed up against the outside ofthe window of the candy shop, most of us return to the United Kingdomfrom our visits to the States wondering how to get at the sweets, how todemonstrate that student support, the whole infrastructure that enables stu-dent enrichment and development, is as important as teaching andresearch—perhaps in the long run more important, both to individualhuman beings and to society.

This chapter introduces various models for student affairs inEngland. It also provides a case study of how one university approachedoutsourcing.

52 DEVELOPING EXTERNAL PARTNERSHIPS

Models for Student Affairs

The English student affairs setup struggles to catch up with the compre-hensive American model. The typical English student services departmentmay be roughly (if a little unfairly) characterized in one of the four follow-ing models.

Downspouts and Gutters. Here the presumption is that student sup-port is to be linked with housing and facilities. It is concerned with studenthousing, maybe with security, perhaps with catering, but above all, withfacilities and amenities. The director is essentially looking after buildingsor, at best, what is known in theatrical circles as “front-of-house” services.Although the play may be the thing (to abuse a Shakespearean phrase), stu-dent services is something else, something secondary—necessary perhaps,but not the thing itself.

Registry Reserves. Here the perception is that student services is akind of conglomeration of secondary academic focuses, a subset of areascomprising academic appeals, complaints, discipline, regulatory complica-tions. Sometimes—perhaps increasingly so these days, when there is pres-sure to widen participation and to increase the percentage of the populationthat attends college—to these areas of concern are added those of recruit-ment and retention, and maybe even marketing and community liaisonactivities.

The Hut out Back. This is a fairly outmoded model, harking back tothe 1960s and 1970s, when the student services professional felt able towithdraw from the roar of battle and provide a retreat for the wounded: spe-cialist medical or psychotherapeutic services cut off from the mainstreamactivity of the factory. In some universities a link with student union activ-ities has been added to this model so that together there is a stronger sharedresource for dealing with welfare issues.

The Body Corporate. With this model the perception of student ser-vices is that it fulfills a corporate function, assisting the central finance andpersonnel functions of the university, concentrating on student data or onstaff and student personnel and administrative needs. In recent times, withchanges in the mechanisms for student financial support in the UnitedKingdom, there has been a bringing together of the needs to give or loanstudents money with one hand and to take it from them with the otherhand—setting up debt collection processes.

“Core” and “Noncore” Models

These models are of course my own; and they are not, to steal from JaneAusten, truths that are universally acknowledged. British student affairs pro-fessionals may challenge them; but nonetheless there is something in eachmodel that would be recognized as constituting reality as they know it.Some might confess to having bits of one model and bits of another. But the

OUTSOURCING—AN ENGLISH PERSPECTIVE 53

American model, the central comprehensive student affairs focus, remainsat best a dream to aspire to (or at worst, something alien that cannot bebrought across the Atlantic, for fear of diluting the proper emphasis onteaching and research).

This, then, as I see it, is the difference between the British and theAmerican experience. And it is into this scene that the hand grenade of out-sourcing is being lobbed. I have consciously used a metaphor of combat, andthe first fundamental battle is to decide what in the life of a university maybe deemed to be sui generis and absolutely essential to its mission and whatmay be seen as secondary. In the United Kingdom this battle is typicallysummed up in the shorthand terms of core and noncore. Whereas teachingand research have largely been held to be sacrosanct—part of the untouch-able core of the university’s role and mission—the third aspect of universitylife, the student affairs aspect, has been put under very considerable scrutiny.There have been many pressures to consider the benefits of outsourcing bits,if not the whole, of the student affairs work in many English universities.

The British core-noncore debate may seem as metaphysical and unrealto American student affairs professionals as those late medieval disputesabout how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. On the otherhand, trying to think about what we do and what we do not do, and abouthow we do what we do, can be a worthwhile, if unsettling, analytical activ-ity. So if this analysis might be unsettling, why embark on it?

A Case Study: Kingston University

We begin with a specific case study: outsourcing at Kingston University.Kingston University is a medium-sized university with sixteen thousand stu-dents. Some twenty minutes by train from the center of London, headingout in a southwesterly direction (somewhere between seven and eight onthe imaginary London clock face). Kingston upon Thames is a fairly afflu-ent suburb surrounded by royal parks, just across the River Thames fromHenry VIII’s royal Tudor palace of Hampton Court. Kingston University is,in English higher education parlance, a “new” university, given the title ofuniversity in 1992, shortly after the Education Reform Act at the end of the1980s. Before then, Kingston had been called a “polytechnic,” and it wasunder the administrative control of the local authority. One of the best poly-technics, it was suddenly “set free” from local authority constraints, but atthe same time it had to establish itself in competition with all other UK uni-versities, some of which are genuinely old (Oxford and Cambridge for exam-ple) and some of which are merely old in the sense that they are not quiteas new as the newest. Explaining this concept to American colleagues alwaysproves difficult—until the true meaning of old and new in this context isextrapolated in terms of many years or just a few years of differential levelsof funding! Funding (and the urgent need to catch up in terms of capitalexpenditure) is probably the right place to start the core-noncore analysis.


Financial Considerations. The reality is that, as in so many educa-tional debates, pedagogical concepts and theories take a backseat to theoverriding priority of financial survival. Certainly, money was an essentialdriver in the debate at Kingston University.

One of the reasons that Kingston University considered outsourcing itsfacilities management and part of its student services was to save money;another was to make money. One of the main ways of saving money was touse the mechanism of outsourcing to reduce the staffing costs to the uni-versity radically. Outsourcing provided the impetus and the opportunity toreview the levels of service provision required and at the same time thestaffing levels necessary to deliver that service. In addition, it providedthe opportunity to adjust salary levels against the current job-market con-ditions and not continue to protect an ongoing process of incremental drift.It was in the housing and facilities services area that the most significantbenefits of cost reduction in staffing were deemed possible; certainly, threeyears after outsourcing, Kingston University would claim to have saved sev-eral hundreds of pounds sterling in its staff costs.

It was, however, through the emphasis on making money (as opposedto cost reduction) that outsourcing at Kingston University most sharplyimpinged on the core-noncore debate. Struggling to catch up and competewith old universities, Kingston University had managed in the first few yearsof its university existence to build some additional new residence halls. Itwas felt that apart from providing the basic university requirement of hous-ing undergraduate students during the academic term, the new residencehalls would offer the opportunity to make money by renting out space forconferences during summer vacation. This conference income potential, aswell as yielding possible and welcome additional income to the university’scoffers, might, it was thought, provide the double benefit of attracting largeexternal facilities management companies to take on the “loss-making” facil-ities services (such as cleaning, catering, reception, and security) if those“losses” could be offset against healthy conference income.

Apart from income generation of this kind, the view was also expressedthat a new university like Kingston, with historically poor levels of investment,needed a massive input of capital for expanding and improving its facilities.Having built some new residence halls, for example, Kingston University knewthat in order to be a nationally (perhaps internationally) recruiting university,it needed yet more residence halls. External facilities management companies,in order to secure long-term contractual commitment, will sometimes offerup-front injections of cash that can be spent on urgent capital projects.

Indeed, one bidder stated unequivocally in the early part of its docu-mentation that a very considerable sum of money would be made availableto the university immediately upon signing a facilities management con-tract. It was not until the weary but more wary reader had worked throughseveral inches of paperwork that, embedded in an appendix of financialmodeling, the mechanism for such munificence could be discovered—the


simple but unattractive and unimaginative mechanism of raising studenthall rents very considerably over the appropriate number of years!

Pastoral or Student Support Implications. Ongoing future incomegeneration and the injection of up-front capital provided the sharpest possi-ble context in which to conduct the core-noncore debate in relation to resi-dence halls. Over recent years at Kingston University, residence halls hadbeen developed and managed as part of the “core” student services and asintegral to the pastoral and educational role of the university. This was nowquestioned. Put at their starkest, the questions were these: Are student resi-dences hotels, or are they places where young men and women grow andlearn? Are residence halls real estate assets or educational arenas? Do resi-dence halls merely provide accounting problems, such as “on or off balancesheet” questions, or are they to be seen as part of the seamless whole of edu-cational and developmental opportunity that going away to college uniquelyoffers? In coming to a decision about what is core to the university’s provi-sion and what is noncore, what must be kept under the university’s directcontrol and what can confidently be outsourced, it is financial considerationsthat often prove deciding factors.

Quality and Effectiveness. However, cost is not the only criterion;quality and effectiveness are others. Outsourcing can be seen as more thanmerely the chance to throw overboard bits of the university’s cargo thatcould be deemed noncore and “not wanted on board” in order to make thejourney more profitable. It can also be seen as an opportunity to assesswhether additional external expertise could be brought on board so that theship might enjoy better, more effective sailing. Outsourcing catering andfood outlets to the competence of acknowledged market experts seems tobe a slightly less contentious direction for English universities to take. Largecatering companies not only have staffing expertise; they bring the pur-chasing advantages that their trade position and size can yield.

The creation and use of service-level agreements are fundamental to theenhancement of quality in this context. Service-level agreements have a dou-ble purpose: they set out what needs to be done and at the same time intro-duce measures by which delivery or performance can be assessed.

During the period of Kingston University’s direct management of itsresidence halls, service standards were introduced. These were “partner-ship” arrangements between the university and its students. They wereessentially constructed, to use biblical language, in covenantal terms: ifthe children of Israel do this (for example, keep God’s commandments),then the Lord will do that (for example, bless them). With echoes ofPentateuchal resonance the Kingston University hall resident was told, ifyou do this, then the university will do that (for example, if you behave likean adult, then the university will treat you like an adult): “If you . . . , thenwe. . . . ” In time this was refined into a more contemporary idiom. Studentswere told what was expected of them, in return for which they had the rightto expect something of the university: “We expect you to . . . You may


expect that we will. . . . ” As a developmental model designed to encouragehuman and social education, this proved very effective.

However, outsourcing requires a different kind of expression of servicestandards: service-level agreements that define in considerable detail whatthe outsourced management will provide and that at the same time extrap-olate a set of performance indicators or measures by which delivery can beassessed. Some service-level agreements, of course, go further and introduceelements of penalty (if certain standards are not reached, then the manage-ment is subject to some kind of pecuniary punishment).

This whole exercise of setting service levels to achieve more effectivedelivery is fraught with difficulty. On the one hand, the standards canbecome so detailed as to be tortuous and unwieldy; on the other hand, thestandards may be expressed in terms that are so bland and generalized as tobe hardly worth the paper they are written on. The unwieldy and compli-cated end up being so large that they are only really useful as doorstops inhot weather; the generalized can be seen as being so basic that they end upbeing filed away, forgotten or ignored. Nonetheless, clarity about servicedelivery can be a massive institutional boon as well as a benefit to the indi-vidual customer, the staff member or student of the university. Either way,at Kingston University it proved to be a time-consuming process that wasnever complete but always needed reviewing, monitoring, and adjusting. Itis extraordinarily paradoxical that this task of gaining better definition ofservice can be seen as both the biggest benefit and the greatest difficultysimultaneously.

So Kingston University, in trying to decide what was core and whatcould safely be outsourced, gave particular attention to financial aspects andto issues of quality and effectiveness: Among the responsibilities other thanteaching and research, what could the university outsource in ways thatwere financially beneficial and that would also enhance (or at least notdiminish) quality and efficiency?

Advantages and Disadvantages. What can be lost by outsourcing?What was lost at Kingston University? Unity was the first thing that went.The actual process of outsourcing was one that was deeply divisive. Whenthe line was drawn between core and noncore, where would it fall? Whowas in and who was out? Using finance and quality as defining factorshelped, but the divide still seemed at times to be arbitrary; and maintainingthe distinctions drawn has sometimes proved unconvincing. For example,at Kingston University planned maintenance and property strategy werekept in: they were too important to the core mission of the university andits future survival to be put out. Yet in rethinking its mid- to long-termproperty strategy, the university subsequently has been pleased to seek andto pay for the advice of external property consultants. And where exactlydoes the line fall between new building projects and planned maintenanceon the one hand and minor works and responsive maintenance on theother? The civil servant can have fun playing classification games.


If renting during vacation periods is outsourced, then how will theprestigious academic conference that requires a whole range of facilities(classrooms, lecture halls, computing and information technology equip-ment) as well as residential space be brought together? The easy reliance onsummer vacation language schools for Italian, French, or German school-children (a ready market to Kingston, so close to London, HeathrowAirport, and attractive tourist resorts) may be profitable, but the profile-raising national or international university event or conference may be dif-ficult to stage when bedrooms and all the other conference requirements areonly available separately, because the university has made a decision thatsome of these are too important to its core purposes to outsource.

Staff who were once part of a single enterprise find themselves, how-ever reluctantly, being drawn up on separate sides. With the loss of unitycomes loss of ownership and pride. The university distances itself fromexternally contracted staff. Staff who once would have taken a particularpride in their membership in an enterprise to which they were committed(a university) find themselves instead in effect working for a wholly com-mercial organization (an outside company).

The Wholly Owned Subsidiary Option. At Kingston University ahighly unusual option has been tried to offset these issues of divisivenessand loss of unity and ownership. After a brief but ultimately disappointingflirtation and engagement with a wholly external commercial facilities man-agement company, the university decided instead to construct its ownwholly owned but arm’s-length subsidiary company, Kingston UniversityServices Company (KUSCO). KUSCO was an imaginative attempt toachieve the financial and quality benefits of outsourcing without incurringthe disadvantages of loss of control, ownership, and unity. Whether this isa marriage made in heaven or a shotgun marriage forged at a time of greatturbulence is a moot point; but it was conceived as a compromise, a wayforward that would bring back together opposing views in a renewed com-mitment to the future of Kingston University.

The structure of a wholly owned subsidiary, the way it works, andthe ways in which it relates to its parent company (the university) may beof interest. KUSCO is a separately registered company and has its ownboard of directors. In the first period of the company’s existence, thechairman of the board and two other board members were completelyindependent of the university and worked on a pro bono basis. The uni-versity’s finance director made up the fourth member of the companyboard, with the university’s secretary acting also as the company secretaryfor KUSCO.

Experience over the first two years or so demonstrated the need forgreater overlap between the university’s board of governors (roughly equiv-alent to an American university’s board of trustees) and KUSCO’s board. Sothe university’s board of governors subsequently decided to appoint one ofits own members to act as chairman of the company board. The intention


was to avoid any divergence of mission. Clearly effective partnershipsdepend on objectives being both shared and sustained.

Day-to-day working relationships have proved most effective whenthey are a mixture of the formal and the informal. The formal element is asemimonthly meeting, for which minutes are kept, between the managingdirector (MD) of the company and the university’s authorized officer (UAO)for the outsourced contracts. The minutes together with recorded actionpoints are then widely circulated among senior staff (including faculty) inthe university and the company. The company’s books are also reviewedjointly on a monthly basis as part of this process. Informal arrangements, ofcourse, operate at many different levels, but the key to effective partnershipis mutual trust between the MD and the UAO. This mutual trust is notalways easy to maintain when there are conflicting priorities, but withoutit, this kind of enterprise cannot succeed.

KUSCO relates to the university community at large (both staff and stu-dent) primarily through a single-focus help desk. This single channel ofcommunication has proved a great success, with all requests for work andassistance recorded on a computerized program. The real difficulties havebeen around “closing the loop”—informing the student or staff customer ofthe progress of the work requested.

Disaggregation. From the students’ point of view, outsourcing hastorn apart the seamless pastoral provision so carefully brought together overthe previous decade. The disaggregation of residence hall management, notjust from the remaining university accommodations staff but also fromother important aspects of pastoral support that have remained within theuniversity’s core provision, has been a high price to pay. Close cooperationof medical and guidance staff with residence hall management has to bestruggled for, whereas before it had been axiomatic.

One simple example at Kingston University was the creation over theyears of a hall senior system (something that shared some characteristics ofthe U.S. internship model). Hall seniors were second- or third-year studentswho, in return for reduced rent, provided a network of peer pastoral sup-port for the new first-year undergraduate residents. The system was sus-tained by an initial and continuing training process given by diverseprofessionals across the range of student affairs work. Moves were afoot todevelop an accreditation or profiling benefit for the students who acted ashall seniors, and this would have been not only a further developmentalopportunity but also a value-added extra for graduating students’ curriculavitae when they sought full-time employment. With outsourcing, the orig-inal aims and purposes of the hall senior scheme were mostly lost, owing tocommercial pressures to see such students primarily as a source of cheaplabor.

Effect on the Senior Student Affairs Officer. One of the additionalquestions often asked is how the outsourcing affected the senior studentaffairs officer—how it affected me.


At the time when outsourcing was being contemplated, I was the headof student services. This was a third-level post, albeit a fairly senior one,with a large departmental staffing, a huge property portfolio, and very sub-stantial budgetary responsibility. What model of student affairs was I incharge of? Well, I was trying to embrace aspects of all four: I had lots ofdownspouts and gutters; I had some registry functions; I provided a rangeof excellent welfare and support services (which, incidentally, were notlocated dynamically “out back” but were—and still are—strongly involvedin the main business of the university); and I had some overarching finan-cial and personnel responsibilities. But I also had a dream—a dream of grad-ually creating a kind of comprehensive American-type model of studentaffairs provision.

The process of outsourcing therefore threatened my dream, drivingapart bits that I had been trying to hold together. The actual process itselfalso proved to be a time of low morale and considerable uncertainty. I wasin danger of losing an empire!

A Final Word

What has happened since? Well, the wheel has turned almost full circle forme. I am now the UAO for the whole of the outsourced contract. I havebeen able to implement a number of innovations, pushing hard at theopportunity, which slightly less direct managerial responsibility gave me,to address and affect overall university strategy and policy. I have been giventhe new title (familiar to American colleagues) of dean of students andbrought by a new vice chancellor (the equivalent of American chancellor)into his senior management team: a second-level, more senior post thanbefore. So I have lost an empire but gained influence—typically British andquintessentially English, don’t you think?

KENNETH HOPKINS is dean of students at Kingston University in the UnitedKingdom. He is a member of the university’s executive committee and its seniormanagement group and is also its authorized officer for outsourced facilitiesmanagement contracts.

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Outsourcing—an English Perspective