The universities brief has never sat easily within government. For many years, English universities were notionally the responsibility of the Department for Education but were effectively regulated via funding incentives via the Higher Education Funding Council for England.
In 2007, they were moved to the Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills (subsumed within the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills in 2009), where they remained until 2016 when Theresa May moved them partially back to the Department of Education while keeping their research responsibilities within the new Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS).
While this partial move back to the DfE recognised the importance of the sector to the country’s taught higher education needs it has become increasingly clear over the last seven years that the complexity of universities’ overall activity is not well understood or indeed a priority for DfE and those working within the Department therefore often seek to apply a schools mindset when it comes to regulation of what is just one aspect of their work.
The Department’s focus is not on how universities could better foster innovation or train the next generation of researchers and academics. Instead, early-years, primary and secondary education dominate the Department’s agenda and schools take up more than two-thirds of their budget. The ‘back-to-work’ Budget could, for example, have been an opportunity for the Department to present universities to the Treasury as their key priority for addressing England’s skills needs given over 80% of employers trying to recruit struggled to find individuals with the relevant qualifications and skills last year. Instead, extending free childcare to encourage parents back to work emerged from the Chancellor’s speech as the Department’s political priority.
