With ‘tariff-for-the-day’ Donald Trump back in the White House and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer talking of boosting defence spending to pay for peace-keeping troops on Ukraine’s frontiers with an expansionist Russian Federation, the financial perils of Britain’s universities risk slipping even further down government priorities in the UK’s spending review.
Somehow, amongst everything seemingly spiralling out of control, UK universities and higher education institutions need to find one or two key things they can agree on if they have any chance of being heard in the run-up to the next phase of Government’s multi-year Spending Review, which is due to be published in late Spring 2025.
I’ve looked at some of the submissions to the Treasury from higher education stakeholders, including the Russell Group and Guild HE, for inspiration and to see where any agreement may lie.
A good place to start would be the submission from Universities UK (UUK), which is supposed to be the ‘collective voice’ of vice-chancellors, principals and chief executives, or whatever higher education bosses like to call themselves these days.
A series of asks
This boiled down by a series of asks – including asking for more money for research and innovation; reinstating maintenance grants and increasing maintenance loans for students and generally putting the higher education system back on what it called a “sustainable and secure footing’.
UUK also wants permission to charge future UK students more to go university by index linking tuition fees to inflation “on an ongoing basis” and it wants the government to help sort out the soaring cost of pensions for university staff and provide “greater flexibility for VAT on shared services”.
The 14-page document makes the case for spending more by arguing that “for everyone £1 invested in university research and innovation, the UK gets £10” and “for every £1 of public funding for teaching activities, the UK higher education sector generates approximately £13 in economic impact across the UK.”.
Everything costs money
While former deputy vice-chancellor David Pilsbury, who is now chief development officer with international pathway provider Oxford International, described the UUK’s pitch as “pretty concise and covering most of the key issues”, he remarked: “Everything costs money and there is no prioritisation”.
He told me: “When there isn’t any money, the carrot offered is to power growth through research and bringing talented people to the UK. However, I doubt that will be sufficiently compelling to put higher education above the funding line given everything else.
“It’s like the introduction of fees, (almost) everybody loves universities, just not enough to fund them properly.”
So, where else should we look to prise the purse strings of Labour government Chancellor Rachel Reeves in the current tough fiscal situation?
Leapfrog Germany for research
Perhaps, unsurprisingly, the Russell Group of research-intensive universities, wants to boost spending on research and innovation so the UK can leapfrog Germany to be one of the “top three G7 nations for R&D intensity”.
How that can happen, without putting up taxes to also fund Starmer’s defence spending plans and prepare for a possible tariff-war with the United States, is unclear.
However, I liked the way the higher education premier league players pitched their brief 5-page summary in terms of helping the government deliver its industrial strategy and “deliver cutting-edge health and social care innovation”.
Despite being written before Trump’s latest pronouncements about direct negotiations with the Russians over Ukraine’s future, the Russell Group managed to think ahead and talked about “championing UK prosperity whilst safeguarding national security”.
That’s a good soundbite, but will it bring it bring more cash to the sector?
International students
So far, only undoing changes to immigration rules introduced by the last (Tory) government can guarantee a boost to international student recruitment and a quick monetary fix for universities in financial distress.
And most in the sector seem reluctant to risk the wrath of the Reform Party (and right-wing press) and so few dare ask for the dependant ban for overseas masters’ students to be lifted.
If the high rankers of the Russell Group and the sector’s umbrella lobbying arm – UUK – can’t convince the government that higher education is in a desperate state (partly due to over optimistic growth forecasting), has anyone else got an idea or two?
Specialised and vocationally-orientated
As someone who once managed public and media relations for a polytechnic as it left local authority control and set a path towards becoming a comprehensive university on Teesside, I automatically have a sense solidarity with the more specialised and vocationally-orientated higher education institutions.
Particularly those which come together under the Guild HE banner and perform sterling work for their students and local communities, but without the same recognition as their bigger and more prestigious siblings in the Russell and other mission groups.
Perhaps they are more in tune with the Labour mission to improve access to higher level skills. What are they saying to the Labour government about how to spend any limited resources on higher education?
Dr Brooke Storer-Church, chief executive of Guild HE, told me she has two main asks (which sounds like the right number) but they come with a variety of recommendations.
Protect diversity
First, they want to protect the diversity of the sector by getting the powers-that-be to recognise that not all in higher education are large-scale, multi-faculty universities.
The Guild HE submission to the spending review, titled ‘Smaller-scale, specialist and non-traditional institutions are key to delivering Government priorities’, says: “The higher education sector is often viewed through the lens of large, generalist universities by the government, which overlooks the unique contributions and challenges faced by smaller-scale, specialist and non-traditional providers”.
And they take aim at the Office for Students (OfS) regulator in England for penalising smaller institutions by pointing out that if you registering just 25 students with the OfS, you pay a fee of £14,220 to the HE regulator, equivalent to £568 per student; while a provider with more than 20,000 students would pay a fee of £214,485, equivalent to just £10.70 per student.
Meet Government’s priorities
So, while still asking for more money, Guild HE claims what it really wants is a system that pushes funding to “where need is greatest or where funding could accelerate the drive to meet Government’s priorities”.
Such ‘high-impact’ support should come through things like the Strategic Priorities Grant (SPG) and other funding pots for specialist institutions, it argues.
Guild HE’s second priority is, unsurprisingly, all about student support and increasing opportunities and they call on the government to increase student maintenance loans and restore maintenance grants for poorer students and put more resources into outreach programmes in key areas like teaching, healthcare, construction and agriculture.
Breaking ranks over fees
They also appear to break ranks with the growing clamour for student tuition fees to keep on rising after the first ‘uplift’ in home tuition fees for nearly a decade was announced by the new Labour government as a ‘one-off’ to provide extra funding to higher education.
In its submission, Guild HE says: “While increased funding is undoubtedly necessary, placing the burden of this financial strain solely on students is unacceptable. UK tuition fees rank among some of the highest globally, while government contributions account for only 18% of the total cost of higher education.”
On the question of mergers and collaboration, which is talked-up by UUK with its ‘Transformation and Efficiency Taskforce’ chaired by Sir Nigel Carrington, Guild HE says while mergers may be beneficial in specific circumstances, “they are expensive in terms of time and resource, require years to deliver benefits, and do not necessarily result in cost savings”.
So, higher education stakeholders talk to government with many voices and they shouldn’t expect that salvation will necessarily come through rising tuition fees or a relaxation of immigration controls.
Making alliances
I’d like higher education to pitch its case by making alliances with other areas in desperate need of extra funding – and the extra skills that the country needs – like teaching, the health service, and construction.
Start working from how further and higher education can make a difference by training more doctors and nurses and giving people the skills needed to make a better Britain, the one people thought they were voting for when they elected Starmer’s government.
And despite many of our top politicians and civil servants being Oxbridge or Russell Group educated, don’t forget to ask what I call the less glamorous side of higher education for their ideas.
As for the government; if Health Secretary Wes Streeting and others sitting around the cabinet table don’t want to rely on importing talent to fill vacancies in the National Health Service and other essential parts of the economy, they better invest more in skills training and further and higher education.
- Main image from Guild HE
