The strategic imperative of cooperation between HE professional associations

As I approach 2 years as AHUA Executive Director I have been trying to reflect on what I have learnt about university professional associations and to think about the future for AHUA and the wider landscape of professional associations.

The sector’s Professional Associations are fantastic institutions. They strengthen communities of practice growing their collective resilience. They develop key skills and support those new to the profession. They share the expertise of the professionals they represent with regulators, sector bodies and government, advocating for the experiences, needs and perspectives of practitioners to inform policy, funding and national priorities. They give people a home that celebrates their profession and role in a wider HE system. There is a valid question about where the tipping point might be between nurturing the expertise of specialist professions within professions versus creating silo mentalities and undermining the drive for collaboration, efficiency and sharing practice and whether we have reached that tipping point already. That’s perhaps particularly true given finances are increasingly tight for associations and the institutions who invest in membership with them.

I say all this reflecting on my own experience in AHUA and getting to know Registrars, Secretaries and COOs but also reflecting on the make-up of many other sector associations, full of talent and similar commitments to networking, developing and advocating for a specific part of the sector’s workforce. I want to find ways to create those valuable exclusive spaces for executive level administrators to come together and share with each other in confidence AND for them to benefit from the collective influence of collaboration with others, from the stimulus and challenge of also sharing spaces with other experts operating in other roles and specialisms. I think there are forms of collaboration that enable both exclusive spaces and collective strength while being more efficient and effective the sector.

There are already some examples of associations leveraging their collective power. Speaking for AHUA, we have chosen to place ourselves in the heart of the UUK transformation and efficiency taskforce, a group whose greatest success in my view is to convene representatives from UUK, AHUA, CUC, Advance HE, Guild HE, UCISA, Jisc, BUFDG and others to share responsibility for some of the most pressing issues of the sector. We are working in partnership with AHEP  on an experiment to host a joint conference in September 2027 bringing together a different range of people into a space where we can share. AHUA have convened Shakespeare Martineau, AULP, UUK and Guild HE to coordinate work on the OfS student protection consultation and to see how we could develop sector guidance on that issue. We have been increasingly working with CUC on work that is of common interest but can benefit from both CUC and AHUA members perspectives. We have a long-standing relationship with HUMANE finding ways to connect European senior administrators to UK executive level registrars to learn from one another. Where AHUA faces a problem, challenge, opportunity or significant change I pick up the phone to association peers and ask them if they can help me out or I can share the opportunity with them for mutual benefit.

Often our members encourage AHUA to consider how it could grow its capacity to offer more activity, greater influence and a wider development proposition. I take that encouragement positively – the ambition of our members to advance our work is in many ways testament to the quality of what we offer while remaining one of the leaner associations with a very modest staff team and comparatively low affiliation costs. As I think about that challenge, the encouragement to think about how we increase capacity and impact, my mind turns immediately to how we might grow by leveraging continued partnership working. By finding mutually beneficial partnerships with other associations, commercial partners, sector bodies and with members institutions.

I know I’m not the only one trying to nudge and accelerate that change to greater collaboration. A particular kudos should go to PHES who has arguably led the way in some of the most significant professional association collaborative activity designed to manage risks of and secure benefits from collaboration between professional associations while allowing them to retain a high degree of autonomy and independent identity. PHES provides a home and a vehicle for collaboration and shared services for a number of professional associations (BUFDG, UHR, HESPA, AUDE, AULP and others).

Moving towards a more collaborative mindset, something that our university members are being challenged to do, will take some time to embed across all the associations, not least because it requires the right relationships and foundations. The work with the UUK transformation and efficiency taskforce has regularly cited that successful partnerships (be that merger, shared services, collaborative ventures etc) have a far greater chance of success when built on a history of partnership and cooperation. Relationships matter in the success of collaboration and if that’s true for universities then it’s also true for AHUA. We need to build increasing cooperation with other organisations, perhaps initially smaller scale conversations and opportunities though in time these could grow to be more substantive.

Over the summer the AHUA Executive will be working on a summary plan setting out our key priorities for the Association and then exploring this with the Board in September. I hope that, when we share that with members they can see how a collaborative mindset is shaping and extending our work. I also hope this will become increasingly clear to other associations: that as they take on new opportunities, grow programs, craft new job opportunities, replace critical staff roles or start major projects they also ask themselves ‘who can I work with’, ‘how would I work with them’ and ‘why’? I believe this cultural shift can help strengthen associations and the sector.