by Rob Cuthbert

Higher education has always been something of a playground for junior politicians; HE ministers usually serve only short terms, and many are practising for bigger jobs. (Liz Truss and Boris Johnson were both briefly shadow HE ministers.) The Coalition period was an exception, with David Willetts serving for four years and evidently deeply engaged and interested in HE. Since he left in 2014 the political game-playing has sadly degenerated, becoming ever more disconnected from the real issues facing the HE sector.

In 2024 fifty or more universities have declared or are likely to declare redundancies, as their funding position becomes ever more perilous. Student fees have been frozen at £9250 for a decade, and their real value has declined to the extent that they are now worth no more than the £6000 which applied in 2012 before the fee went to £9000. According to Mark Corver of DataHE: “… universities have lost, in real terms, around a third of their income since 2012. Most of that has happened recently. Universities have lost the equivalent of almost £3 billion from their annual UG teaching funding in just the past 18 months.”

The long-running dispute in half the sector over changes to the Universities Superannuation Scheme might have recently been resolved, but there are now major concerns about the cost of the Teachers’ Pension Scheme in the other half. UUK chief executive Vivienne Stern and UCEA chief executive Raj Jethwa wrote to Minister Robert Halfon on 18 March 2024 asking for more flexibility in whether post-92 universities must offer TPS membership to their staff, noting that 27% of post-92s had declared redundancies in 2022-2023 and 46% had done so since August 2023. TPS contributions rose sharply on 1 April 2024 as Tom Williams reported for Times Higher Education on 18 March 2024.

Pay disputes have led to repeated strikes and action short of strikes, especially marking and assessment boycotts, affecting the whole sector. This, coupled with Covid, has meant increased workloads for academic and professional staff in major and repeated reconstruction of teaching programmes, with many universities relying increasingly on a precariat of staff on short-term contracts. Negotiations between employers and staff are inevitably complicated by the wide range of institutional fortunes, which makes affordable resolution for everyone difficult to achieve. Covid and employment disputes have brought massive disruption for students, with class actions for compensation continuing as an additional looming threat to HE budgets. Problems with student mental health have reached epidemic proportions, affected not only by the pandemic and loan-driven student debt but also the spiralling cost of university and private student accommodation, which is in short supply in many places.

In 2024 we do expect a general election, but we don’t expect the massive problems for UK HE to be an election issue. Voters mostly care much more about cost of living, the energy crisis, climate change, wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the NHS … and even within education, universities rank well behind schools and nursery places as topics for political debate. As Tom Williams reported for Times Higher Education on 16 May 2023, HE Minister Robert Halfon declared that “… the sector was in a “fairly strong” position – compared with much of the economy given the current financial difficulties – and implied management may be to blame at universities faring badly, rather than his government’s funding system.” Halfon resigned unexpectedly on 26 March 2024, so after 14 years of Coalition and  Conservative government we have our ninth new HE Minister, Luke Hall. It is the eleventh such appointment, since both Jo Johnson and Chris Skidmore served twice, and only four of the 11 appointments lasted for more than a year. There is a striking contrast with appointments as Schools Minister, the role in which Nick Gibb has served for most of the last 14 years, despite being sacked and reappointed by successive prime ministers.

For most of the Coalition period the Universities Minister was David (now Lord) Willetts, who was perhaps the main architect of the Higher Education and Research Act (HERA) 2017, eventually steered into law by Jo (now Lord) Johnson. HERA legislated for the HE ‘market’ and created a new regulator, the Office for Students (OfS). The policy sought to drive up quality through competition, with an influx of new ‘alternative’ providers; the Act made extensive provision for failing HE institutions to go out of business. Willetts’ special adviser, Nick Hillman, later became an effective Director of HEPI, but his HEPI blog of 14 February 2024 asked ‘Whatever happened to all those alternative providers?’,  while still defending the policy to which he contributed. A more plausible view is that the HERA version of the ‘market’ in HE had been tried and comprehensively failed. Against the success of a few new providers like the Dyson Institute there have been many more seeking to provide mostly lower-level courses, mostly in business, mostly in London. Operating an HE institution is a complex, difficult and long-term activity, and after relaxing requirements for entry to the higher education ‘market’, government was forced to crack down on the more egregious excesses of some of the new alternative providers. ‘Driving up quality through competition’ has been shown up as a fantasy; what always worked much better was relying on the intrinsic motivation of people in HE to do the best for their students, in what has always been vigorous competition with other institutions. Self-regulation is of course inadequate: HE institutions need external quality assurance and control, but the OfS chose to do away with the QAA, the designated quality body, by setting conditions which jeopardised QAA’s international credibility and forcing QAA to step down. Instead the OfS has set up its own quality arrangements in an apparently long-term plan which goes against all the expectations when HERA was enacted. 

That was the good news. A new government was entitled to try a new policy for HE, as it did. It didn’t work, so what happened next? Not repeal, of course, but neither was it, as we might have hoped, adaptation of the new policy to make it work better. In the chaos and increasingly rapid turnover of the post-Brexit administrations, politicians in the DfE and elsewhere became obsessed with culture wars. They brought forward a major new piece of legislation which had nothing to do with HE finance, staffing issues, student problems, or even the supposed focus of ‘levelling up’. Obsessed by immigration numbers, government even doubled down on HE’s financial problems with visa restrictions seriously affecting international student recruitment, especially for postgraduate recruitment which for many years had underpinned the viability of STEM disciplines. It was convenient for government that the OfS continued to give reassurances about HE finance, but it was hardly surprising, since government had installed a Conservative peer as the OfS chair.

The new legislation was the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023, education’s contribution to armaments in the culture wars. There were, of course, problems in some, perhaps even many, HE institutions over what might and might not be said in different contexts. A HEPI blog by Josh Freeman on 13 October 2022 argued that there was a problem with self-censorship and ‘quiet’ no-platforming. In the US some prominent university presidents lost their jobs arguing with politicians about the need to protect diversity in HE debate. The war on woke has not perhaps reached that pitch in the UK yet. But the Act required OfS to appoint a free speech ‘tsar’, as it did, and OfS issued proposals on 14 December 2023 on how the free speech regime will operate, launching a consultation on 26 March 2024. The results are unconvincing to those on the ground in the institutions. Jim Dickinson blogged for Wonkhe on 6 March 2024 about the shambles which government has created with its free speech legislation: “We are literally less than six months away from OfS opening a complaints scheme under which one group of students will say another’s actions amount to antisemitism, while the other will say they are threatening their right to express legally protected anti-Zionist beliefs – both saying their free speech is threatened as a result, both arguing they are being harassed, and both reasonable in asserting that they were assured their free speech and protection from harassment was assured.” The Act may even rival the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 for its unworkability in practice.

The principal cheerleader for the new Act was Education Minister (and for two chaotic days in the fall of Boris Johnson, Secretary of State for Education) Michele Donelan, who continued to champion it even as she moved to become Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology in the Sunak administration. Donelan relied on a press release from right wing think tank Policy Exchange to pick a fight with UKRI about the members of its Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Committee. The release was written by Donelan’s former special adviser Iain Mansfield. UKRI suspended its Committee and their membership pending an inquiry, which exonerated the members, one of whom sued Donelan for libel and won £15000 damages, as Faye Brown reported for Sky News on 12 March 2024. The damages were paid by the government, prompting widespread disbelief; Leader of the House Penny Mordaunt even suggested that we should cut Donelan some slack because she had not taken the £16000 redundancy payment to which she was entitled  from her two days as Secretary of State for Education. It would all be deeply embarrassing, if government ministers were still capable of feeling shame.

The playground urgently needs more grown-ups, to do higher education policy as if higher education mattered.

Rob Cuthbert is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Management, University of the West of England and Joint Managing Partner, Practical Academics rob.cuthbert@btinternet.com. Twitter @RobCuthbert