The entire funding model in England and Wales is predicated – at least nominally – on how much it costs to educate a student.
The realisation that our understanding of how much it actually costs to do this is – at best – vague is a little disquieting.
Indeed from 2020-21 the old measure for this – the transparent approach to costing for publicly funded teaching (TRAC-T) – has been officially discontinued, leaving us flying largely blind in terms of what the government actual needs to put in to the system per student at a subject level at precisely the moment that fee freezes, inflation, and DfE-mandated shifts to direct funding are conspiring to make it harder for providers to do pretty much anything.
When providers make the argument for fee uplifts or subsidies, when students question what experience their fees pay for, or even when politicians rage about the profligacy of or lament the poverty of universities they do so on shockingly thin evidence.
