Council promoting HE teaching and research faces axe

The Higher Education Funding Council for England or HEFCE, the buffer between universities and government in the UK which has existed for almost a century, faces the axe under plans to shift higher education firmly into the market place. The shake-up will pave the way for new institutions to challenge the country’s established universities.

A Green Paper is expected soon, but the authoritative Conservative website ConservativeHome says that it will lead to the abolition of HEFCE.

HEFCE distributes government funding to the universities (£3.97 billion or US$6.1 billion in 2015-16) in line with general policies declared by ministers. It follows the pattern of the University Grants Committee, set up after World War I to act as an intermediary between Whitehall and individual institutions.

The article on the ConservativeHome website is by ex-MP Paul Goodman, its executive editor and a former Daily Telegraph journalist. He writes: “Although it [HEFCE] has oversight duties that its predecessor did not, the clue to its deficiencies are in its title: there is too much stress on giving money to universities – hence ‘funding council’ – and too little on how it is spent.”

Goodman writes that Jo Johnson, the universities minister, wants this to change.

“The new body will be charged with overseeing the metrics that measure teaching, and ensuring that universities offer value for money to students, taxpayers and employers," Goodman wrote.

“It will also be empowered to allow new entrants to enter the higher education market: here is the means of busting the system open that the minister wants.”

Johnson wrote in the Financial Times shortly after his appointment that the market in the higher education sector was “frankly anti-competitive”.

He was particularly critical of a requirement that new entrant higher education institutions still had to have their degrees validated by an existing university, which he characterised as “akin to Byron Burger having to ask permission of McDonald’s to open up a new restaurant”.

He said: “We need to bust this system wide open.”

Mark Leach, editor of the well-informed WONKHE blog, said it appeared that Goodman had been officially briefed or had seen a draft of the Green Paper. He reported a source close to the Green Paper's development confirming that the article is largely accurate.

The replacement for HEFCE will also vacuum up the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, and the Office for Fair Access, set up by the last coalition government to ensure universities diverted a proportion of their enhanced tuition fee income into programmes to maintain and widen access opportunities for disadvantaged groups.