Times are exceptionally hard for higher education institutions.
The 2012 changes in university funding launched a destabilising decade in which rapid expansion of some institutions has threatened the existence of others – and the fee increase of 2012 has now been eroded by inflation.
Closures of admired departments and redundancies of long-serving staff are again hitting the headlines. And now on top of this a swathe of institutions face a painful increase in their pensions bill.
Institutions which had previously been polytechnics got university status in 1992. Their academic staff had originally been on local authority payrolls and in the Teachers’ Pension Scheme (TPS); and the new universities were required to remain in TPS.
