Our President, Professor Sally Mapstone DBE, FRSE sets out her priorities and vision for the sector at our annual conference 2024.
In my remarks to this conference a year ago I reflected that together we have a responsibility, to look forwards, to ask ourselves what society needs from our universities and then decide, together, how we are going to meet that need. I also suggested that in doing so, we have the chance to realise the next chapter in the story of our great universities.
We can allow our distinguished, globally competitive, higher education system to slide into decline. Or we can act together, as institutions, and with government, to ensure that higher education is able to deliver for the nation into the 2030s.
Twelve months on we stand at a fork in the road in the history of our institutions. There is now a clear choice. We can allow our distinguished, globally competitive, higher education system to slide into decline. Or we can act together, as institutions, and with government, to ensure that higher education is able to deliver for the nation into the 2030s.
Our universities are amongst the key agents of change the UK needs in order to transform and thrive over the next ten years. Properly supported, they have the track record, capacity, and potential, to create and share knowledge, generate economic growth, pump prime creativity, and widen access and life-long opportunity for the next and future generations.
Increasingly, universities need – and want – to collaborate with each other, work in partnership with local, national and devolved governments, industry and communities. In so doing, of course, they must retain the autonomy of thought and governance that enables and nurtures the fresh thinking and innovation that are key to a society and economy that are resilient and productive, compassionate and competitive. We must be future facing rather than backward-looking.
The most effective forms of change involve retaining what is good and having the courage to reinvent and refresh where that is necessary and adds value. At their best universities function in a culture of enquiry and debate that pursues the common good while championing innovative forms of delivery alongside tested models. The pace of change that our world has seen in the past decade has both tremendous challenges and manifest opportunities.
As crucibles of ideas and test-beds for innovation universities have a responsibility to prioritise engagement with the key drivers of our era, with climate change, AI, the advocacy of humane values, and bioscience at the forefront. But universities are also fundamentally and irrevocably about people, diverse communities of all ages and backgrounds, from first years straight out of school to adult learners, from wellbeing staff to research staff and professors.
And education increasingly is a life-long experience, available to an ever-more diverse range of individuals, and sustained across one person’s lifetime by many different sources including institutions, workplaces, and online. The skills and knowledge that learners require are also changing faster than in the past. Our staff cater for those needs, UK universities are only able to deliver the immense economic and social impact they do because of them. These staff, many of whom come from overseas to our world-leading institutions, use their diverse expertise and adaptability to drive forward our universities’ missions.
Those of us here in this room as leaders and representatives of our many institutions are the temporary custodians of a precious and vital national asset, but we can also see where our system has weaknesses and needs to be improved. We have a duty to champion and defend our universities but also a responsibility to be honest and unafraid to deal with those things that can be better, where we have the means to achieve that.
That is the task we have set ourselves over the last 9 months with our work to produce a blueprint for the next chapter of our universities, Opportunity, Growth, and Partnership. As a new government takes office in the UK, the time is ripe for both a stocktake, and to set out a blueprint for the future of higher education and research. Working with a group of ten Commissioners, largely drawn from outside the sector, as well as in close consultation with our members and other interested parties, we have done just that. In the next few weeks, we will publish the result of this work. During the course of our conference, today, we will set out some of its key themes, and share with you the ideas that we have been developing.
Our blueprint will make the case for a reset, on the part of both universities and government, of how universities serve our society and country over the next decade and into the future.
Our blueprint will make the case for a reset, on the part of both universities and government, of how universities serve our society and country over the next decade and into the future. Our approach to writing this blueprint has been evidence-based, change-oriented, and consciously reform driven. It will characterise what we already do that works, in respect of education, research, knowledge exchange, and innovation. But it will also look hard at what should change, and where we need government to work with us to achieve still more.
Each chapter will incorporate recommendations both for universities and for government, expounding what universities can do themselves, not just what we want from government. It explicitly positions us as partners with government in the missions it has set out. But it does so with an equal alertness to the autonomy and agency of which we are, as a sector, so proud and which we so fiercely defend. The blueprint is careful to respect the devolved nature of policy, and focusses on England where it best makes sense to do so, while other chapters have UK wide application.
We intend to prioritise a future focused on increasing participation by those least likely to enter higher education, and growing the pool of highly skilled and capable talent available for the labour market. We want to see collaboration and coordination across regions and the tertiary sector as a whole. We look for ways in which universities can make a greater contribution to delivering the knowledge and skills needed to support sustainable local and national growth, a bigger role for innovation and creativity in addressing societal challenges, and a coherent international strategy which includes sustainable levels of international student recruitment. Universities need to become an integral part of industrial strategy and the devolution agenda. We will set out clear proposals on sustainable funding and better regulation; but we have consciously looked both at what the sector can do, as well as what we need from others. Finally, we will argue that policy should be guided by a deeper understanding of the broad public benefits which flow from the activities of our universities, and contribute to that goal through new analysis.
But above all, our blueprint will say as explicitly as we can that at a national level there is a clear choice. To be a country of the future and not the past, to safeguard the prosperity of coming generations, to remain competitive and at the global forefront in research, this government and our universities have to choose to invest and choose to reform.
To do this our blueprint will make the case that it is a solid investment not a drain on public finances and it will articulate why and where that investment most needs to be made. However, it will also acknowledge that universities cannot, and should not, lay the entirety of the university sector’s funding pressures at Government’s door. We need to continue to operate more efficiently.
Today we are publishing new analysis for the first time which reveals that investing in higher education and research is indeed a very sound bet. This analysis shows the full scope of the economic impact of the UK’s higher education sector for the first time. The London Economic analysis for UUK shows that UK higher education and research delivers a net contribution of £265 billion to the economy or put it slightly more succinctly a quarter of a trillion pounds from activity undertaken in a single year.
To break that down a little, at least year’s conference I highlighted the more than £100bn of economic impact our sector generates through spending and educational exports. But this report highlights that in 2021/22, our sector generated an additional £63bn of economic activity through research and innovation, including through productivity spillover into the private sector. Our teaching and learning activity generated £95bn - both through the salary premium graduates get themselves, and through the direct contribution to the Treasury they make through higher tax contributions. This net contribution to the Treasury is estimated to be £75,000 per first degree graduate with further contributions for those that continue to postgraduate level.
Our universities generate over £14 of economic impact for every £1 of funding
London Economics found that overall, our universities generate over £14 of economic impact for every £1 of funding. This is around eight times higher than the average return of £1.80 for each £1 of public investment for other government projects between 2010 and 2022.
Put simply, the UK cannot afford not to invest in its universities. Higher skills development drives productivity, creates prosperity for individuals and generates net benefit for the Treasury. Our research and knowledge exchange powers advances in the public and private sectors. And our institutions are central to the economy of their local area through their direct and indirect spending and employment.
And the need for investment is clear. Across the UK, a long-term decline in government funding has increased the pressure on universities to deliver world-class teaching and research with less and less. In England, government grants declined by 78% over a decade, while the tuition fee has eroded in value to £5,924 in 2012-13 terms. The funding per student is now lower than before the increase to £9,000 fees. Welsh universities had their fees capped at a lower level than English institutions until 2024 and, over the last decade, funding per student in Scotland has declined by over £2,500. In Northern Ireland funding per student has lagged behind England by over £1,000 each year.
The most recent data shows a £1.7 billion deficit across the UK in teaching alone, with a further £5 billion loss in delivering research. I know from my visits to universities across the whole of the UK that whilst the exact cause of the funding challenge varies, we are all feeling the crunch.
The state benefits from you going to university but so do you, and therefore the system should be funded as such.
Our blueprint will address where this investment is most needed. The full cost of teaching UK students needs to be met by the funding system in place in each of the nations of the UK. In England the current income contingent loan system was designed to be a co-payment model. It was designed to recognise that higher education is both a public and a private good.
The state benefits from you going to university but so do you, and therefore the system should be funded as such. However, over time through changes to loan repayment terms and the removal of maintenance grants in England this balance has shifted and, in our opinion, shifted too far. The Exchequer now only contributes to 16% of the cost of funding a student through higher education with the rest, 84%, picked up by the graduate in England. This balance needs redressing through increased government investment. Action is also needed, by universities and funders, to make sure that more of the end-to-end costs of research are met if we are to have sustainable research base.
On the subject of university investment and reform our blueprint will also be clear that greater effectiveness and efficiency in delivery is necessary for our universities to thrive in the next decade. We have to choose to reform. To do things differently. To prioritise some things and deprioritise others. Our operating models need to evolve to become more effective and efficient.
I recognise that so many universities represented in this room are already making very significant cuts to balance our budgets. As we discussed at our conference on financial sustainability earlier this year, reform may open opportunities to do things differently, and better in the way universities teach and conduct research, and to focus on areas of real strength. This may create the impetus to try things which would otherwise have felt impossible, or to collaborate where previously there was no reason to do so. But it also means hard choices about what universities should stop doing. We cannot continue to do more with less.
In the last year, Universities UK has led a programme of work to help universities learn from each other and from those outside the sector about how they might transform themselves. We commit to extending and deepening this work, and we will be guided by you in how best to do that.
Over the course of today we will have the chance to explore our emerging thinking on the content of our blueprint in more detail; in a plenary with some of our commissioners and through breakout sessions focussed on some of the document’s key recommendations. We will not achieve the ambitions this blueprint will set out if it is not a shared endeavour, if we do not come together as a sector collectively to deliver them. All of you in this room are crucial partners in the realisation of the change we will set out and I hope by the end of today you will leave with a clear sense of the role you can play in helping us to steer this sector on to the path which leads to thriving universities who serve society, rather than the decline of a once great sector.
Of course, our blueprint has not been developed in and will not released into a vacuum. 2024 has brought changes in the office holders of First Minister in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales and a new labour Government in Westminster. In these first days and weeks there have been some welcome signals and interventions from this government and I’m sure that, like me, you are looking forward to hearing more from the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology later today.
Yesterday, at this conference, we heard from the Minister for Skills, Jacqui Smith, that there is recognition of the need to put universities on a sure financial footing and that government is giving this focus now – though this will not happen overnight. We also heard that this government is willing and determined to change the mood music, it has already started to refocus the priorities of the OfS and is eager to collaborate with the sector. All of this is genuinely appreciated, and I would like to thank the Minister for setting this out.
However, we need to continue to be very clear about the magnitude and urgency of the funding sustainability challenge that so many of us are having to confront on a daily basis and I give you my word that UUK will actively and urgently continue do this. We welcome the opportunity to work closely with government to ensure that our universities are able to continue to be the enablers of a more dynamic and growth focused future that the Minister characterised yesterday.
We welcome the opportunity to work closely with government to ensure that our universities are able to continue to be the enablers of a more dynamic and growth focused future that the Minister characterised yesterday.
It is clear that this government is determined to be mission led and we welcome recognition from the minister yesterday that universities are central to the delivery of two of their most important missions: opportunity and growth. The news that the opportunity mission will be led by the Department for Education is very welcome because our universities have a crucial role to play in this area. The refined mission of the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology on transforming public services and fuelling economic growth through science and technology is also something are sector is integral to delivering and I’m sure we will all embrace greater collaboration with the department on this. This should include, in my view, the equally important contribution of the humanities, creative arts, and social sciences in this regard, often in conjunction with tech, science, and medicine.
Our universities can be valuable partners in delivering all five of the missions this government has set itself however, not just those of opportunity and growth. Over 100,000 medical and teaching professionals qualify at our universities every year, they make discoveries which will be crucial to achieving monumental goals such as the clean energy transition and they enrich their communities with learning, knowledge sharing, service provision and access to arts and culture.
If evidence of this is needed, then you should look no further than the University of Reading in which we are meeting today. From producing the world-renowned warming, warning stripes, a simple infographic showing average global temperature rise since the preindustrial era which is now globally famous and starting everyday climate change conversation, to creating a new drug for childhood epilepsy which reached patients after a decade’s research, staff and students at this university, as at all of our universities, are at the forefront of driving meaningful, impactful change.
Our message to government is clear, our universities can be, must be, key partners in achieving the goals you have set out. We can work with you to drive growth, opportunity and equality but we need your investment and your support to do so.
I want to finish with some reflections on the past year. Over the course of the last year, in response to the terrible conflict in Israel and Gaza and on other subjects, we have tried to foster an environment of respect and tolerance, where students feel safe and can emulate these values in their own interactions, be it through protests, conversations, or debate.
We have been challenged by our own communities, and, on occasion, vociferously so. At times it has felt as though we are pulled in contradictory directions: bound to protect free speech; and simultaneously to prevent hate speech, antisemitism, Islamophobia; to keep our campuses calm and welcoming spaces for all our staff and students, and to facilitate and support legitimate protests and expressions of strongly held views. We have been challenged with accusations of hypocrisy because of what we will not say in relation to one topic, and what we have said in relation to others.
However, I want to say to you that I want to commend the way this sector has responded to the profound challenges of the last year. We have worked to balance the rights of all those in our communities with our legal responsibilities and the values of our institutions. We have all learned a great deal from each other, and I want to thank you for your willingness to share your experiences – good and bad – so that we can all build on each other’s insights.
I’m sure we will not have got everything right, but our guiding principles are strong, and they are the correct ones. Our duty is to our universities, our students, our staff and our communities. It is our job to facilitate the contradiction, to hold space for the difficult conversation while fostering a respectful environment. As our staff and students return from the summer break, I know that we remain committed to managing the tensions which will undoubtedly arise and that we will continue to learn from each other as we do so.
One of the privileges of this role has been to get out and to visit some of your universities. These visits are hugely salutary and I want to thank every institution which has hosted me so far. I can’t mention everyone but let me mention some abiding memories:
One of my earliest visits was to the dynamic and flourishing campus of the University of Hertfordshire, and I want to take this opportunity to acknowledge the contribution which its equally dynamic and flourishing Vice-Chancellor Professor Quintin McKellar has made to Universities UK over the past nine years as a board member and and most recently as Vice-President for England and Northern Ireland. On behalf of UUK thank you for so much Quintin.
UK universities are one of the immediately identifiable and high-quality assets associated with the United Kingdom delivering over a quarter of a trillion pounds in economic impact.
This is my final speech at an annual conference as President of Universities UK, but I hasten to say that I do have the remainder of this academic year to go! I will continue to hugely prize working with all of you and working with the outstanding Universities UK team, led by Vivienne, who bring us together, advocate and make the case for us in so many essential ways. As UUK members, and as our blueprint will set out, our aims must be to lead strong institutions, support more people from more diverse backgrounds to go to university, drive greater growth and prosperity through skills, knowledge creation and transfer and research, and make a vital contribution to the cultural fabric of our society. To achieve that we need to make changes to the way our universities operate; government needs to make crucial choices; and UUK needs to make our compelling case, in order, to secure that mission, the mission of higher education and research in service of others, for the future.
UK universities are one of the immediately identifiable and high-quality assets associated with the United Kingdom delivering over a quarter of a trillion pounds in economic impact. They have global recognition and reach, while acting as key anchor institutions in their localities. But we cannot rest on our laurels, and we must not be afraid of change. The worst thing we as institutions, and our partners in government could do is to become complacent. In a world where our current success is no guarantee for the future, and where other higher education and research systems are leaping ahead, we need to show, as the UK’s universities have done over the centuries, that, working with government and now also with an increasing range of other partners, we can revitalise ourselves for the remainder of the current century.
Our blueprint will be offered in a spirit both of ambition and humility, realism and excitement. Our students and staff, present and future, and the wider communities that we are here to serve, deserve, and should demand, no less.
