Universities too reliant on cuts to balance the books – Blunkett

Universities need to be more ambitious and not just rely on cutting jobs as a way to balance the books, former education secretary David Blunkett has said.

The English sector also needs “much greater amalgamation”, the Labour peer said, with struggling institutions subsumed into others that have “a vision of the future”.

Speaking to Times Higher Education at the Duolingo English Test conference, Blunkett also called for universities to be more enterprising about “winning people over in the public”, including by offering more evening classes for local residents.

“Mass redundancies and retrenchment are the order of the day…I’d like them to be much more ambitious about how they do manage their finances,” he said.

“Instead of retrench, retrench, retrench, why not look, as a business would do, at new opportunities? It’s just as though, in the DNA at the moment of most universities, their way of balancing the books is to cut.”

“The ambition needs to be put back into the system,” the Labour grandee added, “whilst the reality of balancing the books is obviously still an imperative”.

One example of “ambition”, he said, would be collaborating more with existing enterprise.

“Research is an obvious one, which they can do in collaboration with business, as we saw with the vaccine challenge,” Blunkett said, referencing the work the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca did to develop a vaccine during the Covid-19 pandemic.

On those failing to fix their finances, Blunkett said: “They should be amalgamated with other institutions who’ve got a vision of the future. I don’t want universities to fail, because if they do they have a massive detrimental impact, not just on the opportunity of [local] students who don’t think of going across the country [to study], but on the community and the economic activity that disappears.

“If there’s a problem, let’s look at much greater amalgamation, like Greenwich and Kent have done,” Blunkett said, referencing plans for the two south-east institutions to form a new superuniversity.

Blunkett, who served as secretary of state for education and employment between 1997 and 2001, also denied that he had any regrets about the introduction of university tuition fees, over which he presided.

Brought in by Labour in 1998, the system originally required students to pay upfront, means-tested fees of up to £1,000 a year, although this cap increased to £3,000 in 2006 before the controversial tripling of fees introduced by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition in 2012.

Blunkett said he did not feel any unease about having started the ball rolling but he was concerned that more recent updates to the system had “changed the terms on which people are operating”.

“My initial introduction of tuition fees was based on family income and was paid upfront, and a third of families didn’t pay anything,” he said, adding: “I believe that was a sensible model.”

Blunkett, who chairs the University of Law and is professor emeritus at the University of Sheffield, also urged university leaders to speak to Reform politicians who won local government seats in the recent 7 May elections.

“I think inviting in councillors who have been elected in very large numbers across the country to find out how important the university is locally to their constituents is a very sensible thing to do,” he said.

Asked how this might appear to more left-leaning students, Blunkett acknowledged institutions would need to approach such meetings delicately.

“You’ll need to be very careful how you do it and what you’re presenting, so it’s not counterproductive,” he said, “but why wouldn’t a Reform councillor want to know about the fantastic engineering department or the medical school… or the urban regeneration plans that can be helped by a university?”

georgia.luckhurst@timeshighereducation.com