Northern Irish universities ‘in limbo’ after year of no government

The continued failure to restore power-sharing in Northern Ireland has left its higher education system “in limbo”, a vice-chancellor has warned.

Northern Ireland has effectively been without a government since February last year, when the Democratic Unionist Party, driven by its opposition to the Northern Ireland Protocol, triggered the collapse of devolved government.

The Northern Irish government had pledged a “full review” of higher education, but the delay in starting the review caused by the lack of functioning executive is already damaging the sector, said Ian Greer, president and vice-chancellor of Queen’s University Belfast.

A growing funding crisis in the country has sparked fears that the Department for the Economy’s budget for further and higher education could be cut by almost 20 per cent in 2023-24.

Speaking to Times Higher Education during the recent conference hosted by Queen’s to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, Professor Greer said there were some “determined leavers” in Northern Ireland who wanted to study in Great Britain, but many other young people felt that they had to because they could not get a place at Queen’s or Ulster University, causing a brain drain.

“Fundamentally for the students in NI, we need a new funding model, and we need the government to look at the various options to do that,” he added.

He said Queen’s would be happy to work with any model that the government decides, but gave some possible examples – the Scottish approach of free tuition at the point of access, the English model funded by student loans, or Northern Ireland’s current hybrid model.

“The important thing in any funding model in Northern Ireland, or indeed elsewhere, is to make sure that you look after the widening participation students and the disadvantaged,” Professor Greer said. “We believe we should perhaps even be reducing fees for these students.”

He added: “We think we need a proper analysis and debate to allow the people of NI to decide what way they want to go, because the current system is displacing significant numbers of students from our population, leading to a skills shortage for the economy and costing the families who have to go to GB more money.”

Complicating matters further are recent estimates from Ucas that forecast a 20 per cent rise in the number of school-leavers from Northern Ireland seeking a university place by the end of the decade – a larger increase than in Scotland or Wales.

Queen’s calculates that in order to simply match the current level of higher education provision in Northern Ireland to the growing population, the country would require an additional 5,000 places by 2030.

“If we don’t address the problem, what we’ll see is a worsening of the problem and we’ll see a bigger brain drain, potentially losing our highly skilled people to other parts of the UK,” said Professor Greer.

“We’ll see our universities being disadvantaged compared to our English peers, and we’ll see our economy suffering. So doing nothing isn’t really an option.”

With no executive in place, the sector is only able to deal with short-term budgetary pressures and cannot take a strategic long-term view of higher education, Professor Greer said.

“We’re in limbo,” he added. “We drift from year to year without having a firm budgetary plan in our heads.”

For Northern Irish universities, performance in the Research Excellence Framework is not tied to quality-related (QR) funding as it is in England, but it is a fixed pot – another “anomaly” that Professor Greer would ask Stormont to look at if it were operational.

“The breakdown of the executive is not causing these problems, but it’s stopping them being addressed because you’ve got to have a government in place to address them,” he said.

“Our universities here have significant structural disadvantages the way we’re set up.”

patrick.jack@timeshighereducation.com