Last year’s annual funding letter to the (England) sector from the Department for Education (DfE) appeared the day before Easter.
This year we’ve been spared the bad news over Easter, and instead have the bad news now that Easter’s all over.
The headlines in the letter to the Office for Students (OfS) are fairly grim. There’s a £2m uplift on the strategic priorities grant – that’s up 0.14 per cent on last year, and so a huge real terms cut (of £53m, if you take February’s CPI).
In the attached strings, the famous “magic money twig” (what’s supposed to be funding for universities to support students at risk of not completing but gets wheeled out as both a mental health and hardship fund by ministers at every opportunity) is “up” £5m – although given DfE allocated an extra £10m this year, that’s really a £5m cut.
The main text bit of this year’s letter – signed by just Gillian Keegan this year – is hauntingly familiar, adding to the sense of stasis surrounding the state in general right now. It weighs in at 1,822 words, as compared to last year’s 1,819 – and has pretty much the same headings. Even Gillian Keegan’s signature is a resized jpeg.
Not a word on the increasingly obvious financial problems that the sector is in, obviously – and seemingly obliviously.
