Send in the consultants

UK Research and Innovation wants to bring in external advisers to rearrange its organisational model.

It was Stephen Sondheim, in A Little Night Music, who wrote the great lament of painful change Send in the Clowns. In the song, unexpected upheaval comes “just when I’d stopped opening doors, finally knowing the one that I wanted was yours”.

And just when you thought that the architecture of UK higher education had found some stability, UK Research and Innovation is heading for a period of disruption.