The review of post-18 education and funding commonly known as the Augar Review was published this morning.
The review’s key recommendations for Higher Education are:
- The average per-student resource should be frozen for three further years from 2020-21 until 2022-23. On current evidence, inflation based increases to the average per-student unit of resource should resume in 2023-24.
- The cap on the fee chargeable to HE students should be reduced to £7,500 per year. The report considers that this could be introduced by 2021-22.
Government should replace in full the lost fee income by increasing the teaching grant, leaving the average unit of funding unchanged at sector level in cash terms. - The fee cap should be frozen until 2022-23, then increased in line with inflation from 2023-24.
- Government should adjust the teaching grant attached to each subject to reflect more accurately the subject’s reasonable costs and its social and economic value to students and taxpayers. Support for high-quality specialist institutions that could be adversely affected should be reviewed and if necessary increased.
- Government should take further steps to ensure disadvantaged students have sufficient support to access, participate and succeed in higher education. It should do this by:
- Increasing the amount of teaching grant funding that follows disadvantaged students, so that funding flows to those institutions educating the students that are most likely to need additional support.
- Changing the measure of disadvantage used in the Student Premium to capture individual-level socio-economic disadvantage, so that funding closely follows the students who need support.
- Requiring providers to be accountable for their use of Student Premium grant, alongside Access and Participation Plans for the spend of tuition fee income, to enable joined up scrutiny.
- Unless the sector has moved to address the problem of recruitment to courses which have poor retention, poor graduate employability and poor long term earnings benefits by 2022-23, the government should intervene. This intervention should take the form of a contextualised minimum entry threshold, a selective numbers cap or a combination of both.
- The report recommends withdrawing financial support for foundation years attached to degree courses after an appropriate notice period. Exemptions for specific courses such as Medicine may be granted by the Office for Students (OfS).
It will be up to the government to decide, at the upcoming spending review, whether to follow these recommendations. Our University response has been made as a member of both the Russell Group and Universities UK (UUK).
