Offer reforms if you want extra cash, universities told

British universities were told to “try their very best” to break out of the higher education “funding box” and stop simply moaning to politicians that they needed more money without offering any reforms in return.

Both Conservative government ministers and their political opponents were “sick of universities all coming to say the funding system is broken”, the Universities UK annual Political Affairs in higher education 2024 conference heard.

The all-day event on 20 June couldn’t have been timed better, coming midway between political parties in the United Kingdom publishing their manifestos and the British general election on 4 July 2024.

Opinion polls currently predict a Labour victory of historic proportions.

Jim Murphy, a former secretary of state for Scotland in the last Labour government when Gordon Brown was prime minister, told the conference that the plight of universities in relation to funding was already widely recognised across the political spectrum.

Higher education’s role in economic growth

He advised higher education stakeholders, who are preparing for an expected change of government on 5 July, to alter their tune and said a likely Labour government would want to hear how universities can play a key role in economic growth after the election.

“So balance that with a sense of jeopardy that parts of higher education are going to break if the system isn’t changed. Mix optimism with jeopardy,” said Murphy, who now runs Arden Strategies, a political consultancy firm advising corporates and governments across the world.

He told universities to try their very best “to escape from just being in the higher education funding box” for the new government. “You need to be in seven or eight cabinet ministers’ inbox trays because the decision on the future funding of the sector will not be taken by the education secretary. True, they will have an important voice in it, but not the decisive voice,” he said.

It will be a cabinet collective decision as to how to respond to the funding crisis in higher education, which will need to be agreed across government departments, and not just the Treasury, but also by trade and industry, health and other ministries.

“So, get yourself out of the higher education funding box and into as many of the alternative siloes as you possibly can,” said Murphy, urging universities to see how they can align higher education with Labour’s missions as set out in the party’s election manifesto.

Greater alignment with the EU

Dr Chris Adams, director of Shearwater Global and a former chief of staff to the Liberal Democrat party president, echoed some of the points made by Murphy and told the conference that politicians and their advisers were “sick of universities all coming to say the funding system is broken. We know that already.”

His party (Liberal Democrats) is expected to do well in the general elections, but Adams accepted that its influence in the next parliament would probably be limited to being “a force for radicalism on the left” to push Labour to go faster on certain issues, including greater alignment with the European Union.

For higher education, this would probably mean easy wins like re-joining the EU-led Erasmus student mobility scheme, which he didn’t expect would be a controversial step if Labour won a landslide at the general elections.

A ‘variety of voices’

For the Conservatives, Guy Miscampbell, head of political and social research at Focaldata and former special adviser to Gillian Keegan, the secretary of state for education in the last Tory government, told the conference he accepted that the opinion polls cannot all be wrong and conceded that a Labour victory was very likely.

He said one of the problems with the way universities approach government is the “variety of voices” when talking about issues such as concerns over quality assurance and how to improve regulation of the sector.

“Some universities would say [to the Department for Education] that they understood the political pressures [we were] under, while others would shout at ministers that there was no quality issue in the sector. Often those were ones on the warning list for a variety of different reasons,” he noted.

Miscampbell said there were also different messages coming out of higher education about concerns from a large part of the Conservative Party about “low quality” degrees and whether this was fuelling increased migration to the UK. “There was often a lack of recognition from the worst actors,” he said.

On the complex issues surrounding the financial sustainability of universities, Miscampbell said these were often presented to government ministers in what appeared exaggerated terms “and made it difficult for ministers to triage”.

Three Tory tribes

He said Conservative MPs were split into three tribes when it came to higher education: the first included former higher education ministers like David Willetts, Chris Skidmore (who has just vowed to vote Labour in the election) and Jo Johnson, who viewed universities as “agents of economic growth and innovation” and were more aligned with how the sector sees itself.

“A second grouping sees universities as cultural institutions that are propagating a left-wing ideology that hates the UK,” said Miscampbell, and this tribe was more closely aligned with Nigel Farage’s right-wing populist Reform Party.

A third tribe, which forms the Conservative mainstream view, took an economic view and agreed universities “can do good, but should be treated like any other sector and [there was a need to] accept there are good bits and bad bits” and that the sector needs regulations and incentives.

“This is the group that believes 10% to 18% of people don’t benefit from going to university and they want to get rid of that bit and keep the rest and that [view] is not going away until the sector has an answer,” he said.

What all three political strategists addressing the Universities UK conference agreed upon was that an incoming government, of whatever political colour, would put fixing the roof in schools where poor-quality concrete is in danger of falling on pupils’ heads, and increasing nursery school places, way ahead of spending more on higher education.

A long-term fix

Final word to Murphy on what the Labour might do if and when it is elected to power after 14 years of Tory rule in the UK: “There will be lovely mood music about partnership working and celebrating the sector,” he said, but Labour will be a party in a hurry to get things done.

“So, no matter what version of funding mechanism you are advocating – and, of course, the current system doesn’t work, it has to take into account that Labour wants a long-term fix; they want that global competitiveness; they want international students.

“But they don’t want what is happening in Scotland, which is domestic students being squeezed because they have no bounty on their head,” he explained.

Scotland offers free tuition fees to Scottish students but charges the same tuition fees £9,250 (US$11,600) as English universities to English students and much higher fees to international students.

“The Scottish system is not progressive,” said Murphy. “People who never go to university are paying for people whose families always go to university.

“Young working-class Scots are failing to get into universities because they are being squeezed out by those who come with a premium on their head because they are paying to get in. You don’t want the Scottish system,” he told English universities.

Nic Mitchell is a UK-based freelance journalist and PR consultant specialising in European and international higher education. He blogs at www.delacourcommunications.com