I recently had the pleasure of attending one of HEPI’s roundtable dinners, in partnership with TechnologyOne, to discuss how far technology can address the higher education sector’s biggest challenges.
The roundtable led, as one might expect, to an initial discussion about what exactly are the higher education sector’s biggest challenges. Top of this rather intimidating list was the financial challenges faced by providers across the sector.
Contrary to the recent announcement from the Office for Students that there are no widespread financial issues in the higher education sector, the reality on the ground – and shared around the table – is that providers are having to constantly respond to financial challenges. In effect, the sector may broadly be managing to stay financially solvent, but that is not the same as saying it is adequately funded.
Our students are facing significant financial difficulties themselves; this creates more barriers to them accessing and engaging with education, which in turn places greater demand on providers to do more to remove those barriers. This is happening while the unit of funding for higher education remains frozen, with no prospect of this changing in the next few years.
