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.’
