All-staff talk on UUK Blueprint - watch again

October’s all-staff talk provided an overview of the recent Universities UK (UUK) report on creating a sustainable future for the higher education sector, and what it might mean for Reading.

Following the staff news story on the main points in the report, Vice-Chancellor Professor Robert Van de Noort talked through UUK’s role, the purpose and significance of the report, and how useful it will be for our own future planning.

He also provided clarity on how influential the report is realistically likely to be on UK Government policy, and the view of our University Executive Board on the recommendations.

Robert was joined by Professor Dominik Zaum, Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Academic Planning and Resource), and Professor Parveen Yaqoob, Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research and Innovation), to discuss the report’s recommendations on stabilising university funding and research funding specifically.

Stable funding and research

Looking at the report's funding requests, Dominik explained how the value of tuition fees has decreased over the past decade due to the fee cap keeping them relatively stagnant since 2012 despite significant rises in inflation.

This, combined with declining teaching grant direct funding from government, international student recruitment challenges and unsustainable quality-related research funding, has contributed to the financial pressures facing Reading and the entire sector.

Dominik outlined the key proposals of the Blueprint report, including the indexing of tuition fees to inflation, and the restoration of the teaching grant to strategically support vulnerable and high-cost subjects.

He pointed out that the proposed fee increases would only stabilise the resource for teaching and prevent the further decline in funding, but not reverse the decline.

The other part of the report’s proposal is for the long-term transformation of the sector, including reviewing the operational models of universities, and greater specialisation and reduced duplication; a process that would need strong coordination, and support from government.

Parveen explained that research across all UK higher education institutions is not fully funded, due to the funding model for research councils being set at 80% of full economic costing, but in reality delivering only 69%. Although Quality-Related (or QR) funding, based on REF performance, is intended to fill some of the gap, it does not come close and has seen a real-terms decline over the last few years.

This means that around a third of the cost of research needs to be funded by the institutions themselves, often through non-research income, such as international student fees. This has created instability and left universities with a growing funding gap.

Achieving positive Research Excellence Framework scores and commercialising research is therefore important for generating revenue streams for researchers and universities. Not all research has commercial value and there will always be support for blue-skies and curiosity-driven research. However, it is likely that research funding will increasingly be directed towards the government five missions, of which economic growth is a top priority.