Over the course of a long career in higher education, the two areas Anthony McClaran knows best – admissions and regulation – have changed beyond all recognition, in completely opposite ways.

A former chief executive of Ucas, who ran quality watchdogs in the UK and Australia before becoming a vice-chancellor, McClaran has had a front-row seat as regulators became more interventionist and controlling, while admissions turned into the Wild West.

That’s not to say the departing leader of St Mary’s University, Twickenham, who retires this week, agrees that both are going in the right direction.

Part of his remit running Australia’s Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (Teqsa) between 2015 and 2020 was to rein it in after it started life “very, very heavily on the regulatory side”, helping to reinforce a sense of proportionality to regain the trust of the sector.

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He has in the past that England’s Office for Students (OfS) should learn lessons from what happened in Australia. But while the regulator has attempted to reset its relationship with universities in recent years, it continues to lean into an interventionist instinct – with its free speech complaints scheme that is about to launch the latest example of it tackling the sector’s issues head on.

McClaran, who ran the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) from 2009 to 2015, when universities’ attitude to regulation was to keep it in-house, is reluctant to criticise the regulator directly. He puts great hope in the appointment of new joint chief executives Ruth Hannant and Polly Payne, who he has worked with, to ensure that “lessons will be learned” from where the OfS might have gone wrong in the past.

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But one of McClaran’s reflections from Teqsa is that regulators can’t do it all. His time in Australia saw issues with free speech and sexual harassment in universities come to the fore, and the regulator was under pressure to provide ways of addressing these problems.

“We had to remember…higher education regulation wasn’t happening in a void,” said McClaran.

“There are also laws so, for instance, sexual harassment can be prosecuted and I think one of the things we were very clear about was that we should not seek to create additional regulation where there was already a legal framework.

“Being very clear about where our jurisdiction as the regulator ended and where the jurisdiction of the civil authorities and the police began, was important in the way that our thinking evolved over time.”

Another issue when trying to confront these knotty sector-wide issues is that regulators on the whole, according to McClaran, are too focused on looking at the practices of individual institutions, which means they “sometimes miss that bigger cross-cutting picture”.

Despite the interventionist turn of regulators – and the governments that back them – most have shorn any interest in getting involved in admissions.

McClaran – who said one of his biggest fights at Ucas was getting rid of paper applications – left the admissions service before the end of student number caps.

A former admissions officer at the University of Warwick, he said trying to keep within the allocations under the old system was like “trying to land an aircraft on a rather narrow landing strip because you shouldn’t undershoot and you couldn’t overshoot, otherwise there were penalties in both directions”.

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St Mary’s, a small Catholic institution based in south-west London with about 5,000 students, has managed to maintain fairly steady numbers over the past decade but much of the rest of the sector has seen wild fluctuations in recruitment since controls were eased.

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The university, which celebrated its 175th anniversary last year, hasn’t been immune to cost pressures seen throughout the UK sector, opening a mutual resignation scheme in 2024.

McClaran said in such an environment it was important to systematically review your course portfolio.

“We are looking very regularly at what our intakes are, what our data is telling us, what the prospects are for recruitment, and then trying to make decisions along those lines.”

This has led the university to branch out into new areas, with physiotherapy and computer science courses proving successful and a new School of Medicine set to open in September.

But he is keen to stress the importance of remaining a multidisciplinary university that is not looking to “shrink down” to only offering the things it is particularly well known for.

McClaran gives the example of theology, a subject in decline in many parts of the UK. Boosted by the institution’s religious tradition – it is able to offer ecclesiastically recognised Vatican degrees as well as civil qualifications – the university has been able to grow theology enrolments via online education.

“That’s because we had confidence in what we were doing and we thought imaginatively about the ways in which we would offer that subject.”

The Catholic tradition has also helped in attracting international students, said McClaran, and he believes it is behind the university’s approach to student support that sees it gain high scores in exercises such as the National Student Survey.

It is also the UK’s other Catholic institutions that he would look to in an era of enhanced cooperation and service-sharing, although that is a matter for his successor, Norwegian Øystein Lund, who is a trained Catholic priest.

“As a Catholic institution, as a church-founded institution, we are part of the diversity of the sector,” said McClaran.

“There has been a tendency, largely due to all sorts of funding drivers, towards homogeneity across the sector, but I think we need that diversity.”

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tom.williams@timeshighereducation.com