I've just written 'independent and autonomous'.
Yes, all of that. And they are charities and so on, so they have expectations in respect of that in any case. The university governing body obviously is an important part of the machinery, particularly in terms of generating constructive challenge for the executive within universities. The governing bodies all are expected to behave in a way that is consistent with the guidance produced by the Committee of University Chairs, the CUC guide, which identifies good practice. So, it’s a higher education code of governance and all Welsh universities work to that code. That code is itself up for review at the moment. So, that is an opportunity for that to be strengthened. Just in terms of governing bodies, it's also important that governing bodies engage in a process of continual refreshing, because that gives you a greater variety of perspectives, which is important. But it’s also important they have people who understand the higher education business as well as from other contexts. Getting that mix right is important. As it happens at the moment, there are also issues about ethnicity and gender balance. Half the chairs of Welsh university governing bodies are female. Half the vice-chancellors are female. That’s a positive position for Wales to be in. But I think our view would be that when you get an increase in the contextual pressures that we’ve been discussing already this morning, the role of the governing body actually becomes even more significant. So, we have encouraged the sector, both the chairmen of the university councils, but also the vice-chancellors, to engage in a process of an independent review of governance in Wales. We’ll be alongside that. We’ll be supporting that. But, actually, it’s important that they own it. And it hasn’t been hard for us to encourage that—they have been keen to take this opportunity to take stock. The Welsh higher education system is part of a UK system—they don’t want to be a million miles away from the rest of the UK in terms of expectations, but there is scope in Wales, given the scale of the sector, to actually construct something that is more challenging, I think, in terms of expectations, than might be the common denominator across the UK, and maybe some more exemplification. Importantly, in this exercise, we are not just interested in governance process. It’s going to be quite hard to do this, but I’m very keen that we engage—and the sector are up for this—in governance culture, because, actually, you can do process checks and you’ll have the right structure of committees and have the right sort of papers going, but, in the end, it’s the dynamic within that room and who’s asking which questions and how well informed they are, and whether it's an open culture or is it a defensive culture—these are really what influences the quality of decision making.
And how different are those cultures across institutions?
I think it’s very hard to say. We don’t sit in the governing bodies of those institutions. Very occasionally we get to observe one. Typically, that’s at a point where there are sufficient difficulties going on that we feel that we need to—