Universities reel from Hefce budget cuts

16 Mar 11
University and college finance directors in England are digesting details of massive cuts to their budgets for the next academic year

By Mark Smulian

17 March 2011

University and college finance directors in England are digesting details of massive cuts to their budgets for the next academic year.

The Higher Education Funding Council for England has said it will distribute £6.5bn for the 2011/12 academic year to 254 universities, colleges and directly funded further education institutions.

This will represent a 58.1% cut in capital funding and 33.2% reduction in various special funding programmes.

Overall, teaching and research funding will fall by 6.5%, made up of an 8.2% cut in the former and 2.8% in the latter.

Hefce has also cut institutions’ funds by £190m for the current academic year, which expires in September, because of changes to government funding decisions that take effect in the 2011/12 financial year, which begins next month.

Chief executive Sir Alan Langlands said: 'This is a challenging settlement for universities and colleges. In distributing the grant we have tried as far as possible to ensure a smooth transition to the new funding arrangements for higher education in 2012, when more public funding will be in the hands of students and less routed through Hefce grants.’

He said Hefce would try to protect student participation levels and use its research funding to ‘ensure internationally excellent and world-leading research is properly supported’.

The University and College Union said the way the cuts fell would particularly harm newer urban universities and those that specialise in arts and humanities.

This was because more of their funding came from the teaching budget, which was being cut more severely than that for research.

General secretary Sally Hunt said: ‘Exceptional universities that concentrate on teaching and widening participation [will be] left to scrap it out in an untried market place.’

Professor Steve Smith, president of Universities UK, the universities’ representative body, said: ‘There remains a great a deal of uncertainty about funding over the coming years.

‘The government must now provide more clarity on final plans for the 2012 system as soon as possible.’

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