06 March 2009
By David Williams
Government grants for universities will rise by 4.1% this year to almost £8bn, with the highest increases aimed at those institutions providing world-leading research.
The Higher Education Funding Council for England announced its recurrent grants for 2009/10 on March 5 – a total allocation of £7.99bn. Teaching grants have reached £4.78bn, up by 2.5% on last year, while research funding has leapt by 7.7% to £1.57bn.
A further £1.15bn granted for capital funding includes £219m brought forward from future budgets to fight the recession. There is also £134m to be distributed to support links between universities and business and £362m in other funding.
The settlement follows the Research Assessment Exercise, a peer-review process undertaken by universities to evaluate the quality of research. For the RAE-adjusted part of research funding, the body has allocated seven times as much for a top-rated, ‘world-leading’ institution than for an ‘internationally recognised’ one.
Hefce chief executive Professor David Eastwood said the settlement rewarded excellence wherever it was found.
Among the main beneficiaries are small institutions ranked highly under the RAE, including the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, whose total grant has risen by a third, and Cranfield University, up by 15.3% on last year.
But the result is a mixed picture for the larger universities, and the leading Russell Group is receiving a smaller share of the total national grant.
Settlements for Cambridge, Birmingham and King’s College London are all beneath the 4.1% average increase.
Imperial College London will receive 0.1% more in 2009/10 than in this year – its funding would have been cut without a one-off ‘moderation’ payment of £3.7m designed to ease a longer-term reduction.
The college’s rector, Sir Roy Anderson, said: ‘It is surprising that ICL, ranked top of all UK institutions for its proportion of research judged world-leading or internationally excellent, should suffer a real decline in its allocation of research funding.’
However, the overall settlement has been broadly welcomed by Universities UK. ‘I think they’ve just about got it right in terms of balance,’ a spokesman said.
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