The new president of Universities UK has called for a “potential rebalancing of who pays for the costs of higher education”, recognising that its benefits are “neither wholly public nor private”.
Dame Sally Mapstone, principal of the University of St Andrews, made the comments at the organisation’s annual conference, where she also said the English sector should accept it was “appropriate” for the regulator to limit student numbers on courses falling below quality thresholds, following recent plans announced by the government.
With universities in England seeing their tuition fee income being eroded by the freeze in the £9,250 fee cap, and universities in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland also under funding pressure, Dame Sally highlighted a number of areas where progress was needed on funding.
Dame Sally told the conference, held at the University of Manchester, that there must be “enhanced maintenance support for students in England, reinstating maintenance grants for those who need them the most”, and “more places overall for people at all life stages to study in a way that best suits their needs”.
Overall, she continued, the aim must be to “reduce our universities’ reliance on less stable sources of income by securing a more sustainable funding model. A sustainable model must reverse the long-term decline in funding for teaching, ensuring a greater proportion of our research is covered by public grants, addressing the real-terms decline in [quality-related research] and equivalent funding, and scaling up the funds that support innovation.”
Dame Sally, speaking after a UUK-commissioned report said universities contributed £116 billion a year to the UK economy, continued: “To achieve these aims we need to be up front about what is required: increased public investment, and in teaching funding a potential rebalancing of who pays for the costs of higher education, retaining but reforming the income-contingent loan system in England. Higher education and research are neither wholly public nor private goods and their funding model must carefully balance this.”
Dame Sally went on: “We must be realistic, however, and where we can be so constructively, pragmatic. Increased public investment at a time of fiscal tightening is a hard, hard thing to ask for and an even harder thing to secure.
“To gain the increased investment we need, we must help earn it.”
Dame Sally also said: “It is clear that the UK economy has a growth problem…As a nation we must address this challenge; I believe our universities can and should play a key role. We know that increased levels of higher education have been the main factor making a positive and consistent contribution to productivity growth in the UK in recent years.”
Universities “cannot ask for increased public investment in the current context unless we have done everything we can to ensure our universities and the ways they operate are as efficient and innovative as possible”, Dame Sally added.
She also said: "Funding stability would allow us to develop a long-term, shared plan with our staff to arrest wage decline and precarity, and to invest in and reward the hard work and potential on which we all rely.”
On quality, Dame Sally said: “I believe it is imperative that we face head-on the question of whether and how we are delivering quality education to our students. If we don’t, we run the risk of undermining not just our hope of sustainable funding but also our reputation as institutions that are here to serve and act in the best interests of others.”
She added: “I think we have to accept that it is appropriate for a regulator to try to limit the growth of provision that is found not to be meeting that quality baseline and to introduce incentives into the system to grow the provision that does. Manifestly, we need to make sure that the baseline is the right one and that the regulator has fair and proper processes in place to assess performance against it, but I think we need to take on board that the premise is the right one and be constructive in how we engage with it.”
On Horizon Europe, following the announcement that the UK would rejoin the European Union research programme, she said: “We know that international collaboration with our closest partners is fundamental to our future success and to the government’s ambitions for us as a global science superpower. Horizon Europe has been the basis of scientific collaboration for over 30 years…Horizon lets us do things that would not be possible without that scale of collaboration.”
