University Alliance has published their budget submission to the Treasury, which was submitted on Tuesday 10 September, outlining their asks for the October 2024 Budget and 2025/26 Departmental Expenditure Limits.
Three asks have been highlighted as part of the submission, with each ask accompanied by a policy recommendations and an explanation of the rationale and benefits.
The three asks are:
1. Address financial shortfalls for higher education students
The government should increase student maintenance support. It is vital that maintenance entitlements and parental income thresholds are uprated to widen support to more families. Means-tested maintenance grants should be reinstated to end the perverse phenomenon of the least well-off students graduating with the most debt.
2. Address public sector recruitment and retention
Policy recommendations include:
- Implementing manifesto commitments to spend £450m extra per year on recruiting new teachers and to review the way bursaries are allocated. The government should work with the higher education sector to design incentives that can help reverse under-recruitment, as well as improve retention.
- Ensuring universal geographical coverage of teacher training opportunities is maintained by adding an additional phase to the Initial Teacher Training (ITT) market review accreditation process to allow for “near miss” providers to achieve accreditation.
- Convening a cross-government health education task force, established well before the conclusion of the 2025 Spending Review, to coordinate delivery of the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan (LTWP) and urgently identify a package of student recruitment and early career retention incentives.
3. Give universities greater flexibility to set their pension arrangements
- This can be done by reviewing HE participation in the Teachers’ Pension Scheme, and removing the requirement for higher education corporations in England to offer access to the Local Government Pension Scheme to new employees.
The submission also outlines University Alliance’s priorities for the 2025 Spending Review, including a recommendation that the government takes the tough but necessary decision to increase one or a combination of: domestic tuition fees, public investment in universities, or contributions from employers to put the higher education sector on a sustainable financial footing.
