Universities Watchdog Braces For "Cold Spots" As Courses Get Cut To Save Money

In an interview with PoliticsHome, the chief executive officer of the Office for Students Susan Lapworth said that ministers face a situation whereby certain degree-level subjects become unavailable in certain parts of the country as cutbacks start to pile up.

The potential for so-called "cold spots" — in which parts of the country are left without provision — will be of particular concern for disadvantaged pupils as the government stresses the need to widen access. 

Universities have blamed rising costs, a fall in income from overseas students and the freezing of tuition fees for the drastic cuts made to courses and staff in recent months.  

Cardiff University announced several cost-cutting measures in February, with nursing, music, and modern languages among the subjects facing being impacted. In the same month, Edinburgh University revealed swathes of job cuts, as it faces a £140m black hole.

Asked by PoliticsHome if the watchdog was concerned about provision cold spots emerging as the sector sees closures, Lapworth said that the OfS was looking closely at institutions of all sizes.

"One of the things that we're mindful of is that an individual university doing that kind of work...is making perfectly rational commercial decisions about its financial model.

"But if you then step back and look at the pattern in aggregate for the whole sector, those individual decisions might stack up to suddenly realising that we've got no modern foreign languages in a particular part of the country."

She added: "It's about the changes at large that we're seeing across the sector. And we're starting to look at that. We're also signaling to the government that that's something that we think ministers ought to be helped to think about as well because there needs to be a strategic view of the sector."

The Department for Education has been contacted for comment.

Lapworth also warned that redundancies and efficiencies could put the quality of the student experience at risk. 

"Institutions cutting academic staffing would, in principle, flag as a risk that we might want to explore a bit more fully," she told PoliticsHome.

However, Lapworth insisted those organizational changes can be made "without imperiling quality".

"What I don't want to do is to suggest that any university that's making those changes is damaging quality," she said.

She warned that the higher education landscape could "start to become increasingly difficult" in the next few years "if nothing changes" in terms of financial pressures on universities.

The watchdog chief said she does not expect to see a large number of universities fall over in the immediate term.

However, she said that the regulator is witnessing "a bundle of those really small providers under quite a lot of pressure" and thinking about what happens to students when those institutions close their doors. 

She admitted that the watchdog was having far more of these conversations with those institutions than they were a couple of years ago and there is no doubt about how tough it would be if a university did go under. 

"If you're dealing with a large multi-faculty university, lots of subject areas, students at lots of levels, maybe some international students. International students with visas. It gets very complicated very quickly."

Lapworth said that she was having those conversations with ministers, but the choice of what action to take would ultimately come down to the government, not the regulator. 

While a university is yet to collapse under the weight of financial pressures, industry insiders say it's been a close call in recent years.

PoliticsHome understands that officials in the last Tory government discussed the possibility, but it is still unclear whether the Treasury would agree to prop up a university, especially in the current fiscal climate. 

Universities are also facing geopolitical pressures, most recently from across the pond.

The OfS chief told PoliticsHome previously that English universities "might see opportunities" to recruit students and staff from the United States following Donald Trump's return to the White House.

In February, president Trump gave schools and universities in the US two weeks to drop diversity initiatives or risk losing government funding, as part of a wider crackdown.

Lapworth said universities in England may not have given "as much thought to the free speech consequences of their equalities work as they perhaps should have done", adding she can sometimes see tensions emerging between the two. 

In January, the government said it would reintroduce a piece of legislation brought in under the previous Conservative government that aimed to protect free speech on university campuses.

Lapworth said that the OfS has consulted on guidance for universities and this will be published in the spring or early summer. 

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