Scotland’s universities at risk due to funding cuts, SNP warned

The new leadership of the Scottish government has been urged to follow its warm words about higher education with firm commitments after a “disappointing” funding settlement for universities.

Indicative budget allocations for teaching, research and innovation announced by the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) on 14 April represented a “flat cash settlement”, Universities Scotland said, with seven of the country’s 19 institutions facing a cash cut.

Alastair Sim, the director of Universities Scotland, told Times Higher Education that Scottish universities have had to weather “successive years of real-terms cuts in public funding”.

“This year by year salami-slicing by Scottish government, combined with rampant inflation, risks a managed decline of Scotland’s world-class university sector,” he added.

Humza Yousaf, who replaced Nicola Sturgeon as first minister earlier this month, paid tribute to the higher education sector in his first speech to the Scottish Parliament.

His first days in office have been tarnished by questions about the Scottish National Party’s finances under his predecessor, but he has been urged to make higher education spending a key priority in the months ahead.

“We hope that the Scottish government’s warm rhetoric will be supported by a real commitment to ensure that our universities can thrive and can make their full contribution to the nation’s success,” Mr Sim said.

James Miller, the principal of the University of the West of Scotland, said Scotland was dependent on a strong, sustainably funded higher education sector because it underpinned all areas of the economy, from science and the arts to healthcare.

He said warnings about a “managed decline” were “not an exaggeration” given the real-terms cut in funding over recent years and “when you couple that with a forecast of flat cash or even worse by way of a funding settlement in the coming five years”.

Professor Miller said he was particularly worried that the gulf in research funding between Scotland and England was widening, threatening Scotland’s competitiveness in this area.

Mary Senior, the Scotland official for the University and College Union (UCU), said there was currently a political consensus that the country should maintain its commitment to provide free higher education to domestic students, but this policy “needs to be properly resourced”.

“We have got deep concerns we have had a decade of stagnation in terms of flat cash settlements, which are actually real-terms cuts to the sector. With inflation being in double digits, this is unsustainable,” she said.

But funding issues should not be used as a “get out of jail free card” by university employers, Ms Senior warned, and the union was still convinced that the sector’s issues with pay and precarity could be addressed by principals re-evaluating their priorities and spending less on senior managers’ pay and “vanity projects”.

She said the UCU would be pushing to convince the new higher education minister, Graeme Dey, that more funding “is the key that can enable us to address so many of the other issues in the sector”.

A Scottish government spokesperson said universities and colleges had been allocated nearly £2 billion, “demonstrating our commitment to supporting our learners and institutions”.

The allocations maintained “overall funding levels in teaching and research despite the challenging fiscal environment”, the spokesperson added.

tom.williams@timeshighereducation.com