In the Dark

Just a quick post to pass on the news that the Welsh Assembly has now published its draft budget for 2011/12 (and following years). You can find the documents related to this here, the most useful one of which is this.

I haven’t got time to comment in detail but, being a university employee, I skipped directly to the section about Higher Education and found the following:

In order to direct funding to schools and skills, the majority of budget reductions have been focused on specific budgets. Higher Education will receive a reduction over the next 3 years of £51m. This amounts to some 11.8%, compared to the severe reductions proposed in England. The planned reductions will facilitate the statutory commitment to provide financial support for Higher Education students, numbers of which have increased significantly over the past two years. This does not predetermine the Welsh Assembly Government’s response to the Browne Review. The reductions include the efficiency savings we expect to be delivered through the implementation of our Higher Education strategy, For our Future. The commitment to the development of the University of the Heads of The Valleys (UHoVI) and Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol (formerly Coleg Federal) will, however, remain a priority to
be funded from this budget.

In other words, Higher Education is to bear the brunt of protecting the budgets for Schools (which remains roughly level in cash terms) and  Further Education (which is cut by about 2%). Clearly the WAG must either think that  maintaining funding for Higher Education  is a low priority or that money saved from HE can be recouped some other way (i.e. through increasing fees or cutting student support).

An 12% cut in cash terms is much worse in real terms, of course, but the draft budget doesn’t give any details of how this is going to be broken down in terms of research and teaching allocations. Moreover, the Welsh Assembly has yet to formulate a response to the Browne Review which has resulted in proposals for tuition fees up to £9000 per annum in England. Since the Welsh Assembly elections are to be held next May, it is highly unlikely that a new tuition fee system for Wales  will be in place before then. Moreover, the fact that funding is being diverted into the new institutions described above suggests that even less money than this will be available for established universities.

We also don’t know the extent to which research will be protected. In England, a cut of 40% has been applied to teaching budgets from next year, with research funding largely preserved. It appears something similar is going to happen in Scotland, but with a much smaller overall cut to the universities budget there. Will Wales follow the same pattern, or will it sacrifice any chance of having high quality research-led universities by single-mindedly pursuing its “regional agenda”?

This entry was posted on November 17, 2010 at 5:59 pm and is filed under Education, Politics with tags HEFCW, university funding, Wales, Welsh Assembly Government. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.