The Westminster government’s rebuff on English university funding is not “the end of the conversation” because there is an urgent need to consider the cost balance between individuals, the government and “potentially employers”, while a review would risk “pushing things off”, according to the Universities UK president.
As English university funding declines amid a long-running tuition fee cap freeze while Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish universities also see funding constrained, Dame Sally Mapstone’s speech at the UUK conference in September saw her make a significant intervention, calling for a “potential rebalancing of who pays for the costs of higher education”, recognising that its benefits are “neither wholly public nor private”.
At the same conference, in her on-stage interview with the higher education minister, Robert Halfon, he repeated his warning, initially made in an interview with Times Higher Education, that raising the tuition fee cap during a cost-of-living crisis was “just not going to happen, not in a million years”.
What did she make of that message?
It was “very decent of [Mr Halfon] to turn up”, a step to “building relationships, having conversations, getting people to explore a different point of view”, Dame Sally, the University of St Andrews principal, told THE after taking up her two-year UUK post in August.
