From political activism in the 1980s to managing multi million pound capital projects in 2015. Rosie Niven talks to Roehampton’s pro vice chancellor Reggie Blennerhassett about his cinematic claim to fame and how the private sector can learn from universities.
You have two distinct roles at Roehampton. How have you succeeded in combining them?
I joined Roehampton in 2007 as director of finance and took on the pro vice-chancellor role four years ago. I think having been finance director puts you at an advantage if you have to combine it with other roles because you are already involved in the financial aspect of decisions on projects you are working on.
You end up taking overall responsibility for areas where you would not necessarily be the most technical expert, but if you have got a good team, it works really well. I found it fascinating to learn more about the areas that I’d taken on from the people running them directly.
It’s been a really interesting time here because we have been developing the capital programme, which we are in the middle of building and there was a lot of work involved in that.
What are the biggest efficiency challenges at Roehampton?
Space utilisation is one. We have a mix of historic buildings and others that have been built throughout the decades. They pose different challenges when you are trying to adapt them to up-to-date teaching and learning.
One thing we lack is large lecture space. Some of our larger groups, are taught together initially and then they break out into smaller groups. Another issue is if we are doing specialist teaching and the room is set up in a certain way, it restricts your ability to use them in other ways.
We’re building a new library, which got the go-ahead yesterday and is scheduled to open in September 2017. That will free up the existing library to provide flexible space, because requirements are ever changing and you want to be able to adapt the space as quickly as possible. But designing things to be too flexible can also be problematic because of the risk of creating buildings that serve nobody. There is a balance you have to strike by giving up some of the utilisation, but getting greater efficiency from the teaching space.
Another challenge, which is something all universities are grappling with, is short-termism – changes in direction, whether they are fundamental changes in funding, or new policies affecting higher education. If you take the national scholarship programme where a whole new level of bursary giving was put in place and then it disappeared quite soon after, putting all that in place and then having to rewind it is not very efficient.
How do you balance the ‘business as usual’ with the need to improve the way things are done?
That’s the $64 million question. You have to manage this carefully because it is very easy to get distracted.
I think it is really important to delegate, to have good people working for you who can deliver the business as usual. You need teams to be focused on the business as usual, you don’t want to forget that when everyone is running round, working on exciting projects.
We have been investing in our systems to automate as much of the routine that we can, to make processes more efficient, but also to improve the data we collect. We are implementing a new HR system and will also introduce a new student record system in the next three years.
The other thing we have put in place is a project prioritisation protocol. In a creative place like a university, people have lots of good ideas. What you need to do is work out where they fit in with all the other ideas in terms of priority. It is very much about saying “OK, we have to do all these things, but we can’t do them all at once”.
We introduced the list last year when it became evident that people who we’d asked to implement projects were being pulled in all kinds of directions. It was an interesting exercise because it meant that people could appreciate how it was becoming difficult to work with all these different priorities. They were just told “this is the most important thing you have to do” along with everything else that was the “most important thing”. Everyone agrees that prioritising makes a huge difference.
Are you using a particular system to capture that information?
Our chief information officer manages a list that we all agree to. We’ve got a spreadsheet, which sets out what resources are required, who is required to deliver the project and the priority and we have a year in which we are going to slot it into based on the priority.
Can you describe the leadership challenges that pro vice-chancellors face in terms of encouraging cultural change within universities?
Trying to convince people they need to change because the external environment has changed, can be a real challenge. Colleagues who work in universities question things and quite rightly. Universities are having to respond to lots of different agendas. TEF is one, Prevent is another. We know that within our community people will have strongly held views. What you have to do in those cases is really explain the position from the university’s perspective and you have to do that a number of times to win people over.
With things like the teaching excellence framework, you can’t just wait until the green paper has been consulted on and becomes legislation – you have to work out what it is going to be like so you are ready for it. And if you are talking about 2018/19, you need to be working now to make those changes.
Is there more that universities could do to promote their efficiency achievements to government?
We have had a bit of a bad press from government, which is a shame. Universities are, on the whole, very efficient organisations. The assumption is that if you are in the private sector you are massively more efficient than universities, or the public sector. I am not sure that is true, having worked with some private sector organisations. I think they have a lot of lessons to learn from us in having to be efficient.
We probably hide our light under a bushel here – there are a lot of things that we do as a sector that are real exemplars of efficiency. Roehampton is a member of the cost sharing group Kingston City and we have a procurement sharing arrangement with University of Surrey.
Sometimes people say, why don’t you share your finance department or your HR department, but actually, if you did that with a group of universities, the scale of it isn’t enough to make any difference. And there can be differences in the way things are done, which means that you don’t drive efficiencies through it. You have to find services that makes sense to bring together.
The other story universities should push more is the added value we offer to our students and the impact this has on the national economy and its efficiency. That’s a message that we don’t sell enough.
What do you enjoy most about your role?
I am very fortunate to work in a fantastic university. I’ve got great colleagues and it is very rewarding to be delivering the vision of the university.
I’m lucky to have a job with variety. You might have your day planned out and something will land on your desk that you have to do straight away. It can be anything from trying to secure the new library project to sorting out a blocked toilet.
It’s great when you embark on capital projects, seeing the buildings built and the students occupying the building. The most enjoyable day of the year is graduation and actually going along to the ceremonies. It is gratifying seeing the output of all that hard work for students graduating.
You were involved in the Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners campaign depicted in BAFTA winning film Pride. Can you tell me more about your role in making the film happen?
Stephen Beresford, who wrote the film had an argument with his then partner about the 1990s pit closures. Stephen uttered the immortal words, “why should we support the miners, what have they ever done for us”, and his partner told him about a gay and lesbian group in the 1980s that supported the miners.
We had made 20 minute film about the campaign called “All out! Dancing in Dulais”. Stephen found the video and was rolling through the credits when he saw my name, which is an unusual name. He tracked me down and I put him in touch with other members of the group. He did his research, came to see my partner Ray and myself three or four times and spoke to all the main group members.
On the final occasion Stephen came to us and said he had created the screenplay based on the true story, but he’d had to dramatise in certain ways, and of course he’d had to reduce the number of characters. He wanted to call two of them Reggie and Ray and asked us if we’d mind, telling us “they are not you but an amalgam of members of the group”. So we said “not at all”.
There’s a scene in the film where they driving down to Wales in a bus and the women are singing “every woman is a lesbian at heart”. The Reggie and Ray characters challenge them on this, saying “my Mum’s not a lesbian”. So they sing the song, “every woman is a lesbian at heart”… and then at the end they go “…including Reggie’s Mum”. At that point I had to ring my mother and get her permission. She thought it was hilarious.
The film brought the group back together, we reformed for a year and did a huge amount of talking about the strike with anyone from youth groups to accountancy firms, there was a huge amount of interest in how we got people engaged. It’s an unlikely alliance. But on that first trip down to Wales, we made friends for life.
Reggie Blennerhassett is pro vice chancellor and director of finance at the University of Roehampton
