Drawing on extensive experience in higher education, Professor Stella Jones-Devitt, Director of Operations at Applied Inspiration, reflects on a challenge that will resonate with evaluators across sectors: learning what works depends not just on good methods, but on leaders who understand evaluation and create the conditions for it to thrive.
Why has senior leadership in higher education stalled? A reflection eight years on with resonance for all sectors
Revisiting old challenges and asking what’s really changed?
Eight years ago, Liz Austen and I penned a piece for Wonkhe, voicing our frustration with the stagnant state of senior leadership in higher education. We argued that what was really needed was a more diverse and critical approach to leadership – one that moved away from the insular social networking circles so often replicated at the top. Instead, leadership seemed to have persistently “zombified” itself, clinging to the same tired ideas and familiar faces, no matter how ineffective.
So, has anything changed since then?
Frankly, not much. There’s still a worrying lack of effective senior leadership across many areas of public life, and higher education hasn’t escaped this trend. In 2026, the sector is, operationally speaking, on its knees – much like other public service areas. Honest evaluation of executive leadership behaviour, actions, and outcomes remains a rarity, about as likely as stumbling upon a Fabergé egg in your attic. Why is this the case? To help answer, I’ve produced a simple acrostic that might shed some light…
Volume
For years, higher education has played a numbers game, often cramming in more and more learners without considering whether it’s actually feasible to meet their needs. Add in the endless rounds of resource cuts during periods of forced expansion, and you get a system that’s lost any sense of effective proportionality.
Arrogance
It’s astonishing that multi-million-pound long-term decisions are so often left to a handful of executives, aided by policy advisors whose main concern is short-term reputational risk. Any evaluator will tell you: making the right decisions requires robust evidence. Yet too many strategic imperatives are driven by surface-level thinking rather than a commitment to long-term goals backed by tangible data.
Numbers-driven
For many at the top, the focus is simply on making the numbers add up to ensure organisational survival. To some extent, this is understandable, but how many leaders actually engage in meaningful scenario planning – analysing the potential impacts of financial cuts or changes in growth over time? Poorly thought-out or excessively harsh cutbacks can devastate organisational culture and undermine resilience for when the next crisis hits.
Impenetrability
And so, the cycle continues. Top level leaders remain hard to access, difficult to scrutinise, and resistant to genuine structural change which includes their own performance. If we’re to break the deadlock, maybe it’s time to embrace transparency, invite challenge, and genuinely listen to voices beyond the usual echo chambers and group think processes.
Transience
There’s a prevailing belief that remaining in an executive position for more than three years is somehow detrimental for ambitious senior leaders. I note that this continual movement frequently coincides with the point at which strategic failings begin to surface in effectiveness reviews. All too often, senior leaders are appointed, make disruptive changes, and then depart, leaving their successors to untangle the organisational complications that only become apparent when actual evidence, rather than impressive rhetoric, comes to light.
Yellow-bellied
This involves an absence of accountability for poor performance. Leaders driven by ego seldom acknowledge their shortcomings at strategic level, refusing to accept negative assessment of their own impact. Even though they bear ultimate accountability for organisational outcomes, they are quick to assign responsibility elsewhere – typically pointing to those in more junior positions as having misunderstood or failed to implement their grand visions.
So there you have it: vanity is a key component of ineffective senior leadership. If evaluation – of self as well as organisational – replaced vanity, it could be a very different space.
Author bio – Professor Stella Jones-Devitt
Professor Stella Jones-Devitt is a leading expert in critical pedagogic research and inclusive education, and the Director of SEER at Applied Inspiration. She has held senior roles at several universities and is a National Teaching Fellow and Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Stella has led numerous high-profile national and international evaluation projects, contributed to curriculum development, and is committed to widening participation and amplifying marginalised voices in higher education through innovative and inclusive research methodologies.
