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  • Mapping how the industrial strategy is, and isn’t, showing up in HE policy

    Mapping how the industrial strategy is, and isn’t, showing up in HE policy

    While for the average member of the public the industrial strategy might just be that thing the government drones on about while guaranteeing a £1.5bn loan for Jaguar Land Rover, it’s been one of the key talking points and organising principles in higher education policy in 2025 – at least in the English system, despite the strategy being UK-wide.

    The run-up to June’s publication of the finalised strategy was characterised by plenty of debate about whether sufficient recognition was being paid to higher education’s role, and far less – depressingly, but rather characteristically for the sector – about how the strategy seeks to reshape the higher education and research systems to achieve its ends.

    As an indicative example, one entirely unremarked on aspect of the strategy – admittedly buried in a complicated graphic on page 34 of the technical annex – was that one of its outputs is increased enrolments in higher education and apprenticeship subjects that address skills shortages in the eight chosen sectors. In the strategy’s theory of change, an output is the result of a policy intervention, and some 18 are chosen in all – one of them involves changing what subjects higher education students study. This was surely worthy of closer attention.

    Six months after publication, we can see the industrial strategy showing up all across the new HE landscape that Labour is oh-so-gradually taking steps to unfurl – in the Lifelong Learning Entitlement, in maintenance grants, in capital funding, in high-cost subject premia, in local innovation funding, in PhD scholarships, in strategic research funding. In some of these areas we just have mere hints to go on, whereas in others the strategy is already a central organising idea. It’s also clear that in different areas of government, the strategy is being interpreted in different ways and used to achieve different priorities.

    We’re going to take a run through all of this, and attempt to gauge where the strategy is cutting deep and where it’s running pretty shallow. But to begin with we need to look back over the development process since Labour came to power, in order to understand what the industrial strategy is seeking to achieve and – just as importantly – where.

    From green to white

    The Invest 2035 green paper in autumn 2024 chose eight “growth-driving sectors” to be the focus of policy intervention and prioritisation (cue a degree of huffing and puffing that universities were not given enough prominence). This was followed by a consultation to greatly refine the detail and identify sub-sectors within each that were most key.

    Each of those concepts got a rebrand – the growth-driving sectors became the IS-8, the sub-sectors were rebadged as “frontier industries” – but at heart this was the thrust of the move from green paper to finalised strategy: a process of concentrating on a subset of the initial sectors.

    If you’re interested in how these choices were made, we are told that a five-point assessment of different possible sub-sectors took place, based around the criteria of growth potential, strategic alignment, sector interconnectedness, rationale for intervention, and presence of policy solutions.

    Here they all are (the IS-8 are the headings in red boxes, while the frontier industries are the bullet points):

    (the frontier industries in the finalised defence industrial strategy, published in September, were essentially unchanged)

    So with the chosen priority areas selected, our next step would be to think about how higher education fits in, you would think. But there’s a further element that is regularly overlooked – how the industrial strategy relates to place.

    A bowl of clusters

    The final strategy is clear throughout that its “picking winners” philosophy extends not just to specific parts of the economy, but also to the location in which they will be supported:

    The Industrial Strategy will concentrate efforts on those places with the greatest growth potential for the IS-8 sectors, namely city regions and clusters.

    The focus on sectors “cannot be divorced from considerations around place,” we are told – the “specific relationships between sectors and between places” has to be part of the equation. “All economic activity occurs somewhere,” it uncontroversially emphasised. All this focus on place “does not preclude” support for sectors in other, non-beknighted locations, however. And so:

    We focused on identifying and prioritising those city regions and clusters most important to the delivery of the Industrial Strategy. This process identified a set of unique city regions and clusters across the IS-8. To drive effective policy and maximise their growth potential, we also considered the interconnections between them.

    A cluster, in case you were wondering, for the purposes of the strategy is a geographically-connected network of “businesses, research capabilities, skilled talent, and support structures in related industries.” These ecosystems bring benefits of proximity for the businesses within them, including “deeper labour markets, knowledge sharing, innovation spillovers, and collaboration opportunities.” Their specificity makes them “well-suited to benefit from targeted support.”

    Similarly to the frontier industries, the move from green to white paper saw a process of cluster identification, which we’re told in the technical annex involved qualitative and quantitative analysis and engagement within government and with external experts, all to draw up a longlist (which we don’t get to see). This was then winnowed down to retain those with “highest growth potential” for each sector. Here’s a diagram of the process, for reference:

    In terms of the results – well, if you’re searching for specificity on exactly what is covered by each cluster, the finalised strategy documents don’t make it easy for you to pinpoint what’s included. Here’s the map for advanced manufacturing, taken from the technical annex again:

    This, however, assigns geographies to the sector as a whole, rather than to particular priority industries. For that, we need to look at the sector plans which (for the most part) were released alongside the industrial strategy. Here’s the first part of the map for advanced manufacturing again, this time with the priority industries specified:

    The regions in question are very broadly drawn at times – the clean energy industries map groups together Oxford and Solent (two areas which are not connected in any way, surely?) and has one “Scotland” cluster which includes Aberdeen, Highlands and Islands, the North Sea coast and, oh, the entire Central Belt. The bullet points are odd too, a mix of promotion of existing capacity and plans for future actions.

    There’s a much more thorough mapping of industrial strategy sector geographies available in the form of the DSIT cluster map, which was one of the inputs to the selection process. However, it’s only currently available for five of the IS-8, and is at the sector, rather than subsector, level.

    Handily, the map lets you superimpose university and R&D facility locations onto the clusters, which in theory would let you assess which are the “right” places for different kinds of higher education provision and research, were you so minded.

    It’s not clear this is on the government’s radar for tying together industrial strategy and HE policy, however – rather, what we’ve seen so far largely has its roots in a different way of thinking about the country’s skills needs.

    Demand for priority skills

    To recap: in order to finalise the industrial strategy, the Department for Business and Trade identified priority sectors (and “frontier” sub-sectors) of the economy, and engaged in a degree of prioritising certain places. At the same time, Skills England was taking a complementary but at the same time rather different approach – identifying priority occupations and priority skills.

    The main piece of work here was the quango’s Assessment of priority skills to 2030 report, which we looked at when it first arrived in August. But it’s worth going over some of the main beats of the analysis performed, and recognising how it represents certain choices beyond what the industrial strategy itself set out.

    The report looks at “future employment demand across 10 key sectors important for delivering the government’s Industrial Strategy and Plan for Change priorities” – see our initial coverage for some of the oddities in how this forecasting was performed, but what’s done is done – and then goes on to pinpoint the “key education pathways” associated with the priority occupations in these sectors.

    In addition to the IS-8, Skills England had been asked to roll in both health and social care and construction. For each of the ten sectors, it looks at a specific subset of occupations – those where there is expected growth in employment, current skills shortages, general “high demand” or which are otherwise judged important in some way. Each list was chosen by the lead government department for the sector in question.

    By my calculations – removing the duplicates on the “priority occupations” tab of this spreadsheet – this brings us to 148 unique occupational areas which, in theory at least, are now the government’s priorities. This is as defined by SOC20 units (the four-digit codes), of which there are 412 in total. Feel free to check whether your job is there or not.

    This wasn’t all though. Skills England then took an additional step – some might say leap – in plotting a link between these priority occupations and higher education subject of study. In coming to a judgement about what education pathways “feed” the priority occupations, one approach would be to actually look at the occupations themselves (for example, musicians are one of the priority occupations in the creative industries sector, so surely music degrees would be a winner?). But a different approach was taken, one that aggregates up degree choice and field of employment.

    As seen in table 6 of the report (and in an expanded version in the accompanying spreadsheet), what Skills England chose to do instead was to generate a percentage for each subject area – at the very top level of the Common Academic Hierarchy classification, i.e. the broadest possible brush – according to the historic likelihood that a graduate of a degree in that field would go on to be employed in a priority occupation:

    The probabilities were applied to a cohort of education leavers from LEO Graduate and Postgraduate Outcomes who were in sustained employment in the year after education, to estimate their occupations at 4-digit SOC. We include graduates and post-graduates employed in the 2021 to 2022 tax year and who graduated in 2019 to 2020 academic year.

    This, essentially, generates a ranking of higher education subjects, by their past propensity to funnel graduates into a list of priority occupations chosen by government departments. These choices tie in with – but are very much not the same as – the industrial strategy. They are also place-blind, in a way that the strategy sought to avoid.

    Not just a desk exercise

    While the fact of the Westminster government deciding that there are certain occupations that are more of a priority than others is notable in itself, the Skills England report isn’t just a fun bit of modelling – policy consequences have followed, even if they haven’t been spelled out.

    For one thing, the top ten ranking of priority subject areas has given rise to the list of subjects eligible for modular provision under the Lifelong Learning Entitlement. It took a bit of digging at the time for us to make that connection, but it’s since been essentially confirmed by DfE.

    The list isn’t exactly the same – medicine and pharmacy aren’t given the LLE nod, presumably not being seen as well-suited for unbundling. And Skills England’s analysis found that business and management degrees had a higher likelihood (53 per cent) of leading to employment in a priority occupation than health and social care degrees (51 per cent) – again, you can imagine the careful political choices being made there, though further transparency from the department about what exactly its thinking is for modular study would have been welcome.

    If you’re not a big believer in the presence of much demand for loan-backed modular study, this may seem like only a minor exercise in picking winners, especially as the government has said that the current list is, in theory, just a starting point. More important, perhaps, are the clear indications that a similar process will be used for determining which courses of study are eligible for maintenance grants. The department had previously indicated that it would use much the same list as for the LLE, only to somewhat walk this back in the slight policy paper that accompanied the Budget:

    It is crucial that the list of subjects eligible for maintenance grants is informed by the best and most up-to-date evidence on skills needs. This list will be confirmed in advance of grants being introduced in the 2028 to 2029 academic year.

    We will: draw on further stakeholder engagement and ongoing work from Skills England to assess future employment and skills priorities; explore alignment with the subject lists for Lifelong learning entitlement (LLE) modular and priority additional entitlement funding.

    What we can read into this is that a similar process will probably be employed, though coverage might not match up precisely, especially if you are erring on the side of scepticism regarding how much funding is going to be put towards the grants (or optimistically pinning hopes on ministerial nods to rolling it out further in future years).

    The third area where we might expect the Skills England subject ranking to show up in policy relates to the ongoing reforms to the Strategic Priorities Grant (SPG). Returning to the parliamentary written answer referred to above – which in passing I will observe seems an odd thing for former Reform MP James McMurdock to have been asking after – the Skills England list is also juxtaposed with plans to align SPG funding with “the priority sectors which support the Industrial Strategy and the Plan for Change and future skills needs.” Making high-cost subject funding more effectively targeted towards what was then termed “priority provision” was first announced in the SPG guidance letter to the Office for Students back in May.

    Given the specific choices made in translating “priority sectors” into “priority subjects”, it’s worth considering a few further consequences of the department’s decision to use Skills England’s analysis in Assessment of priority skills to 2030 as a basis for determining subject-level policy decisions. First, even if you go along with the logic steps in the process, it is noticeably based on old data. Is it possible that at some point the modelling gets updated with new graduate outcomes figures, and we see (say) chemistry no longer make the top ten, with its spot taken by languages and area studies (for example – it was only a handful of percentage points lower down on the ranking generated by data from the 2021–22 tax year)?

    This wouldn’t be any kind of stable basis on which to determine which subjects are funded as high cost, which are in scope for modular provision, and which attract small maintenance grants for disadvantaged students. Yet taken to the extreme it’s the consequence of the way DfE has gone about its planning.

    The approach also bundles together subjects into top-level classifications and then applies broad-brush percentage propensity scores to them, ignoring essentially any other factor, such as applicant or institution characteristics. Once you go down this road of picking priority subject areas, some loss of resolution is probably inevitable. But it didn’t have to be done in this way (indeed, as was much remarked at the time someone from the department stepped in and took out landscape gardening from the architecture, building and planning subject group, with no explanation given). If you’re going to pile one methodological assumption on top of another, shouldn’t the chosen process at least go out to consultation?

    Cosplay

    But methodology aside, there’s also a question of whether this approach is in the spirit of the industrial strategy, which as we have seen in its purified form had a focus on frontier industries and their geographical distribution.

    Let’s take the Lifelong Learning Entitlement modular provision process as an example. If you want to apply to deliver a module of a full degree programme at level 4, 5 and 6, as we’ve already seen it will need to be in one of the subject areas generated from Skills England’s calculations – but also, you will need the Department for Education’s approval for it to qualify for loan funding.

    The process of applying was set up in an interesting way. Providers are required to demonstrate that their modular “offer” has been developed in response to employer and learner needs. Applications will be required to have established relationships with employers or industry bodies relevant to the subject area, and show that specific employer (and/or learner) engagement in the module’s design has taken place. Indicative evidence includes letters of support from industry bodies, evidence of co-design of curricula, and even “learner or employer consultation summaries, surveys or focus group findings.”

    This is quite the thing – the proportion of full degree programmes that could say they have been through such a process of due diligence is probably pretty slim. It’s a level of reflective employer engagement quite rarely seen in the sector, as opposed to gestures at the promise of fairly generic “employability” outcomes. Part of the reason for this is how time-consuming it appears.

    There’s certainly a question whether all this admin is worth it – there are various other hoops to jump through as well, in order to demonstrate to DfE a track record of delivery over time as well as evidencing quality [sic] through continuation and completion data. It would make more sense if being able to offer modular provision through the LLE was really the treat that the government seems to be hoping, and you could be confident (as opposed to extremely sceptical) that you would have potential students knocking on your door to enrol on your freshly approved course.

    But we could certainly draw some lines to the industrial strategy – not only has the provision been restricted (in a manner of speaking) to those subjects most relevant to the strategy, this provision is also directly linked up with the industries in question, and stems from engagement with specific areas, both in terms of prospective students and graduate employers. It’s also of a piece with the recent moves on local skills improvement plans that Labour is looking to nudge universities towards. Put simply, it is very out of character for higher education policy over the last decade or more to have the government approving whether provision can go ahead based on individual provider contexts, rather than what we might term the “have at” approach of letting anyone anywhere deliver anything and then seeing if the market will accommodate (if that is not too much of a simplification of post-2010 policy).

    There is one mammoth caveat, however. The issue is that everything I’ve outlined above only applies to a small proportion of providers in England – anyone with a TEF gold or silver, or who had a suitable headline Ofsted rating back when they were not obsolete, can skip all of this. So all the finickety detail which gestures at a move to a different kind of system is basically irrelevant for all but a small number of providers who both performed poorly in the 2023 TEF (wait, wasn’t bronze a mark of “high quality”?) and who fancy throwing their very expensive hat into the LLE’s very small ring.

    This is the perfect encapsulation of how the Department for Education’s adoption of the industrial strategy has – so far at least – the appearance of a performance rather than a real sea change. It is to an extent choosing priority subject provision that meshes with the strategy, though in a way that is very STEM-focused in a way that plenty of the strategy is not. And then it is more or less letting anyone participate who fancies taking a crack at it, with a small number of exceptions for whom the process would actually be much more in keeping with the strategy’s principles.

    There are pragmatic reasons for taking an expansive approach to the LLE rollout, of course, given the well-founded fears about how much demand is there. It will be interesting to see how the approvals process develops over time.

    The same could be said for both maintenance grants and SPG reforms. Tying them (in some way yet to be determined) to the Skills England list is a kind of gesture towards the strategy, but a more thorough engagement would involve thinking much more deeply about types of provision, specific subject choice rather than top-line groupings, and – most of all – place. At time of writing, there is little indication the department is minded to go in this direction for either policy.

    And there is surely little appetite in the sector for it to do so. It would be highly interventionist, get bogged down in bureaucracy, and result in far more by way of “picking winners” than the current vibe of endorsing the idea of specialisation but doing little to make it happen. But you could make the case that it’s what an industrial strategy-led higher education policy should look like.

    Other futures are possible

    These particular moves are only a small slice of the much greater volume of work the industrial strategy has kicked off, much of it very relevant to higher education. For a start, the way the capital funding element of this year’s SPG allocations was set up was structured around the IS-8 sectors directly, rather than Skills England’s interpretation of which subject provision is most likely to feed them. In the winning bids we can see plenty of projects linked to areas of the strategy, such as creative industries or financial services, that have not made the cut for the LLE and presumably will not for maintenance grants either.

    Skills England’s own future moves are important to watch as well. The work-in-progress UK Standard Skills Classification holds the potential for much more nuanced work about the links between study, employment and place than has filtered into policy so far.

    On a larger scale, the sweeping changes to R&D funding which the government is slowly bringing to bear show a much more thorough engagement with the industrial strategy, even if the place elements are not always there. From our vantage point at the end of 2025, we can see a range of different ways the strategy is reflected in new initiatives, and different levels of prominence, from lip service to central governing principle.

    The half a billion pounds in investment for the Local Innovation Partnership Fund has one of the tightest connections. Each “triple helix partnership” (which will include an academic institution) that wants to bid will need to define a cluster in which it will operate and link its proposal to strategic objectives such as the industrial strategy. For the open bidding competition, expert panel recommendations will inform a final decision from ministers – but in picking successful applications, the government will also “seek to ensure adequate geographic and sectoral balancing that aligns with regional assets and national capability.”

    On the Innovate UK end of R&D, the industrial strategy is exceedingly directive. In advanced manufacturing, the government’s desire to directly support automotive industry R&D was so strong that it had to refer itself to the Competition and Markets Authority to ensure it wasn’t breaching laws around state aid.

    For funding flowing solely to universities, the picture is not yet as clear. The reforms to Higher Education Innovation Funding (HEIF) announced in the autumn are more focused on economic growth in general. Revised accountability statements ask higher education providers to “consider” how to support the industrial strategy’s “key foundations”, but for now at least this sounds like an instruction to make passing reference to the strategy in one’s narratives, rather than a spur for deeper changes.

    Over in the curiosity-driven “bucket” – with apologies to anyone who’s already sick of that terminology – the strategy’s influence is less clear. The post-16 white paper did promise that institutions will be recognised and rewarded, including through REF and QR, for “demonstrating clarity of purpose, demonstrating alignment with government priorities, and for measurable impact.” This seems to be a reference to the ongoing review of strategic institutional research funding – but as Research England’s Steven Hill said on Wonkhe last week, this is a complex piece of work where change will take time.

    At the very least the government will start to understand university research through the industrial strategy lens. As the white paper put it:

    The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, together with UK Research and Innovation, will audit the provision of research activity which delivers against the Industrial Strategy, missions and sovereign capability, and assess changes in capability against our needs.

    We should also expect to see more further intervention to support doctoral provision in areas linked to the industrial strategy. The TechExpert scholarships, for example, are explicitly targeted not just at the broad industrial strategy sectors, but at specific “frontier industry” sub-sectors within them.

    Nights at the circus

    There are many models for how the industrial strategy could dictate or at least influence higher education and research across the UK (even if, as I started by saying, for political reasons much if not all of the impact is focused on England). Some of the ones we’ve seen different government departments and arm’s length bodies apply so far have the potential to be quite transformative, while others feel superficial as it stands.

    On paper, the government’s desire to push further ahead with the strategy as an organising principle for the state’s engagement with industry and geography should intertwine with a less place-blind higher education policy, though there are many forms this could take. Currently, whether for reasons of capacity, politics or inertia it doesn’t feel like this will be comprehensively realised any time soon. On the education side of things in particular, the government’s nods towards cold spots and local collaboration don’t yet seem to be reaching deep into the longer-term thinking which Jim Dickinson has characterised as “more graduates, just not that sort and not there” – a proper consideration of how place and subject of study interact.

    The political challenges around setting out a vision for higher education can’t be shrugged off either. It’s relatively painless for DfE to trumpet more apprenticeships, more engineering, and more computing. But as written, the industrial strategy should also support more creative arts provision, and it should encourage the delivery of more management training. And all the while it ought to be thinking about which places are most suitable for each.

    At the end of the day, the strategy is a recipe for a highly planned higher education system – and one that encroaches heavily on university autonomy. The initial indicators are that the government, at least in part, is happy to perform a certain coordination between it and the English higher education system, rather than follow some of its more radical possibilities through to their logical conclusion. There are plenty of reasons why this is probably something of a relief for the sector. But it also runs the risk of leaving higher education adrift from the government’s most important agenda for reshaping the state and the country, and ducking the big long-term questions about what universities do, and what they are for.

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  • What is student financial support for in 2025?

    What is student financial support for in 2025?

    UCAS has published its end of cycle data for 2025.

    Alongside the headline figures on acceptances – a record 577,725, up 2.3 per cent on last year – there’s new data on where students intend to live while studying.

    For the first time, UCAS has released figures on intentions to live at home, and they make for fascinating reading.

    Some 89,510 UK 18-year-olds who secured a place this autumn indicated they intended to live at home – up 7 per cent on 83,705 last year.

    That means 31 per cent of UK 18-year-old accepted applicants planned to stay in the family home, a record high and a slight increase on 30 per cent in 2024. A decade ago, it was 22 per cent.

    The figures differ sharply by nation and – crucially – by deprivation. Scottish 18-year-olds are most likely to live at home (46 per cent of accepted Scottish applicants), while Welsh 18-year-olds are least likely (21 per cent).

    But the deprivation gradient is where the real story lies – 52 per cent of UK 18-year-olds in IMD Quintile 1 indicated they planned to live at home, compared to just 12 per cent in Quintile 5.

    In England, that means the most disadvantaged young people are 3.5 times more likely to stay at home than their most advantaged peers.

    The new scholarships tool

    Alongside the figures, UCAS has launched a new scholarships tool designed to help students find the financial support available to them – a development that, given the data above, feels pretty timely. As UCAS chief executive Jo Saxton puts it:

    Every young person should have the chance to make choices based on ambition, not affordability – which is why UCAS has launched a new scholarships tool to help students find financial support and keep their options open.

    Saxton is careful to note that staying at home can “absolutely be the right choice for some”, such as those with caring or family responsibilities – but for others “it may close doors and limit access to courses or the wider university experience.”

    The growing numbers, she suggests, may be driven by rising costs of living and broader financial considerations.

    One of the persistent criticisms of institutional financial support has been its opacity – the postcode lottery of provision that makes it extraordinarily difficult for prospective students (and their advisers) to understand what’s available where.

    Research by Brightside found widespread confusion among young people from low socioeconomic backgrounds about the differences between bursaries, scholarships, and fee waivers, with one commenting that it was almost like universities were “hiding this information away.”

    A centralised tool that aggregates the information is a substantial step forward.

    What are bursaries supposed to do?

    The UCAS development invites another question – what, precisely, is all this student financial support supposed to achieve? As providers face their own financial squeeze – and as I noted last year, some are cutting planned support with OfS approval – it’s worth examining the policy rationale that’s supposed to underpin institutional bursaries and other forms of financial support in 2025.

    In England, the Office for Students’ topic briefing on financial support sets out the regulatory expectation. Providers must, it says, take an evidence-led approach to developing financial support measures, providing a clear rationale for how financial support investment will help to reduce the gaps in access, success and progression.

    Where providers have committed significant resources to financial support, OfS requires “strong evidence” in access and participation plans of how this will “help to improve outcomes for underrepresented students.”

    The difficulty – and OfS acknowledges this – is that the evidence base has been historically thin. The topic briefing noted that previous sector-level analysis has found little evidence that financial support affects student outcomes.

    OFFA research from 2010 found no evidence that bursaries influenced students’ choice of university – subsequent research in 2014 found no evidence that institutional bursary schemes had an observable effect on continuation rates.

    A review by Nursaw Associates concluded that “financial support is not the most important factor in students’ decisions to apply to higher education” and that students receiving financial support have “comparable non-continuation rates with those who receive no financial support.”

    There is, however, a footnote. That same review found that “a sizeable minority of students feel financial support does impact on their behaviour” – suggesting that bursaries may affect attitudes and relationships with institutions, even if the impact on hard outcomes proves harder to detect at sector level.

    What TASO says

    The Centre for Transforming Access and Student Outcomes (TASO) ought to know, and it distinguishes between pre-entry and post-entry financial support. For support offered after students enter HE, TASO’s assessment is that there’s a high-quality body of evidence that finds financial support can have a positive impact on retention/completion – but with a significant caveat:

    …most of the existing research comes from the USA and more evidence is needed on the impact of financial support in the current UK context.

    The key UK study TASO cites is Murphy and Wyness (2016), which found that increasing financial aid by £1,000 increased the likelihood of obtaining at least an upper second-class degree by 3.7 percentage points.

    That’s meaningful – though hardly transformative.

    TASO’s overall verdict is that there is a reasonable evidence base to support the use of needs-based grants to promote retention/completion, but less strong evidence that this approach can improve attainment/degree classification.

    Crucially, TASO is clear about what remains unknown:

    Currently we do not have enough evidence to make claims about which forms of financial support (bursaries/grants/fee-waivers/scholarships) are most effective.

    It also notes that the sector is lacking causal studies about the impact of financial support offered by HE providers in the UK – and that even UK studies from the 2000s might not be relevant anymore, given that the system of student finance has considerably evolved.

    What providers say they’re doing

    The (fairly) newly approved Access and Participation Plans give us a window into how providers are framing their financial support – and the patterns that emerge are revealing.

    Cost pressures

    Across virtually every plan, financial support is positioned as addressing what OfS terms “EORR Risk 10” – cost pressures that can jeopardise a student’s ability to engage with and complete higher education. The language is consistent to the point of being formulaic – bursaries exist to “alleviate financial concerns,” “reduce the necessity for students to undertake excessive paid work,” and allow students to “focus on their studies.”

    Bournemouth University’s framing is typical – its maintenance bursary aims to:

    …reduce financial anxiety and enable students to focus on their studies.

    This is, in policy terms, a success-stage intervention. The dominant theory of change is that financial support improves continuation and completion by reducing the competing demands on students’ time and attention – not that it drives access in the first place.

    Only a handful of plans make explicit claims about bursaries influencing choice of institution, reflecting the weak evidence base on that question.

    The variation in provision

    The amounts on offer vary enormously. At the top end, Imperial College commits over £12.6 million annually to financial support, with its Imperial Bursary providing up to £5,000 per year for students from households with incomes under £70,000.

    King’s College London forecasts over £10.1 million annually through its King’s Education Grant scheme, offering £2,000 per year for students with household incomes up to £25,000. The Courtauld Institute – small but London-based – offers up to £3,000 annually for students with household incomes of £45,000 or less, plus a competitive scholarship worth £10,000 over three years.

    At the other end, provision is far more modest. Anglia Ruskin’s core bursary offers £300 for households up to £25,000, and £200 for those between £25,001 and £42,875. Leeds Arts University’s Creative Practice Support Bursary provides £400 in Level 4, £500 in Level 5, and £700 in Level 6.

    Aston offers just £500 in first year only for households under £42,875. Birmingham Newman’s Support Fund averages around £429 per grant application.

    The household income thresholds at which support kicks in also vary wildly – £25,000 at many providers, £30,000 at Bradford, £42,875 at others, £45,000 at the Courtauld, £63,000 at Sheffield Hallam, and £70,000 at Imperial. A student from a household earning £50,000 would be entitled to substantial support at some institutions and nothing whatsoever at others.

    Care leavers and estranged students

    If there’s one area of genuine consensus across the plans, it’s the treatment of care-experienced and estranged students. These groups consistently receive the most generous and comprehensive support – reflecting both their acute financial vulnerability and the sustained lobbying by organisations like Stand Alone and Become.

    City University of London offers £3,500 annually through its City Cares Bursary, plus up to £2,500 in hardship funding and a £750 graduation package. Bournemouth provides £3,000 per year plus guaranteed year-round accommodation. Coventry covers 52 weeks of accommodation costs – valued at approximately £8,320 per care leaver annually – recognising that these students have nowhere to go during vacations.

    King’s adds an extra £1,000 annual award on top of its standard bursary. Liverpool Hope offers a 50 per cent accommodation discount plus a catering package. Northumbria’s new Unite Foundation partnership offers free 52-week accommodation for up to six eligible students.

    The rationale is that these students face not just financial disadvantage but the absence of family safety nets. The consistency of provision here – and its relative generosity compared to income-based bursaries – suggests the sector has internalised the argument that care leavers require qualitatively different support.

    Hardship funds

    Beyond core bursaries, hardship funds have expanded substantially across the sector. Northumbria commits £3 million annually – a figure that reflects both genuine need and, perhaps, an acknowledgment that predictable bursary amounts cannot address unpredictable financial crises.

    Kingston forecasts over £2.2 million in total financial support, with its Student Support Fund providing up to £3,000 for students with dependents. Birmingham City maintains a Financial Assistance Fund of £1.375 million annually. Canterbury Christ Church’s Access to Learning Fund can award up to £3,750 for students in extreme hardship.

    The growth of hardship provision raises an interesting question – is this evidence that core bursaries are insufficient, or that student financial precarity has become so acute that even “adequate” maintenance plus bursary doesn’t prevent crisis? Several plans note rising applications to hardship funds as a driver of expanded provision – Falmouth explicitly states it has “substantially increased funding for the Hardship Fund to meet demand.”

    Expansion of in-kind support

    A notable trend is the expansion of non-cash support – laptops, textbooks, food, accommodation subsidies – that address specific barriers rather than providing general maintenance. Birmingham City’s “BCU Advantage” scheme provides students from the most disadvantaged backgrounds with a “laptop for life.” Anglia Ruskin offers one free core electronic textbook per module to all Level 4 students.

    Several providers now run community pantries, food banks, or subsidised meal schemes – Birmingham Newman offers discounted food after 2pm, Canterbury Christ Church has a “Helping Hand menu,” Leeds Trinity provides a “£2 hot meal deal.”

    This shift reflects a recognition that cash bursaries, however welcome, may not address specific resource barriers. A student who can’t afford a laptop faces a qualitatively different problem from one who needs help with general living costs – and a textbook scheme that reaches all students may be more equitable than a bursary that requires application and means-testing. The Open University’s Study-Related Costs Fund, providing grants up to £250 for IT equipment, explicitly addresses the “digital exclusion” risk that’s particularly acute for distance learners.

    Progression-related support

    There’s also growing emphasis on progression-related financial support – interview travel costs, placement expenses, work experience funds, internship bursaries – reflecting recognition that financial barriers don’t end at graduation. Aston offers a £1,250 placement bursary for students from low-income households or those undertaking unpaid placements. City University’s Micro-placement Fund provides up to £500 for participation in micro-placements. Arts University Bournemouth offers up to £300 for costs associated with accessing graduate employment opportunities.

    The rationale is explicitly tied to closing progression gaps. As Bournemouth’s plan notes, “internal data shows that placements are strongly associated with improved degree attainment and progression into high-skilled employment” – but low-income students face financial barriers to participation. Liverpool John Moores is developing new “ring-fenced paid internship programmes” specifically for Black students and care-experienced students, “targeting sectors where progression gaps are largest.”

    Scholarships Plus

    A handful of providers are explicitly integrating financial support with non-financial interventions – what York St John calls “Scholarships Plus.” The idea is that cash alone is insufficient – bursaries should be accompanied by activities designed to enhance confidence, belonging, and career readiness.

    Sheffield Hallam’s Student Success Scholarship is “highly targeted at students with household incomes under £63,000 who belong to defined ‘priority groups’” – but the purpose is explicitly to increase “the student’s capacity to engage fully with their studies,” not just to provide income replacement.

    It’s a more sophisticated theory of change than simple cash transfer – but it also raises questions about conditionality and whether support should require participation in additional activities. The evidence base for “scholarships plus” approaches is, if anything, even thinner than for straightforward bursaries.

    Front-loading versus smoothing

    The plans also show up divergent approaches to how support is structured across the student lifecycle. Some providers front-load support, offering higher amounts in first year when transition challenges are greatest. Aston’s £500 bursary is first-year only; Kingston’s £2,000 bursary is first-year only. The rationale is that this is when financial barriers to continuation are most acute.

    Others have moved in the opposite direction. One provider I looked at last year shifted from higher initial support with reduced amounts in subsequent years to a flat £1,000 across all years – a “smoothing” approach. Leeds Arts University actually back-loads its support: £400 in Level 4, £500 in Level 5, £700 in Level 6 – reflecting the higher material costs of final-year creative projects. Norwich University of the Arts does something similar: up to £500 in Year 0/1, £300 in Year 2, £200 in Year 3.

    The evidence on optimal timing is essentially non-existent. Does front-loading improve continuation? Does back-loading support completion? Does smoothing reduce financial anxiety across the whole course? The plans assert various rationales, but few cite robust evidence for their chosen approach.

    Evaluation, evaluation, and inflation

    OfS requires providers to evaluate their financial support using “robust methods” – and several plans reference the OfS Financial Support Evaluation Toolkit, quasi-experimental designs, or commitments to ongoing evaluation. Birmingham mentions it “will continue periodically” to evaluate its financial support offer “based upon the OfS financial support toolkit.” East Anglia commits to evaluating financial support “using a quasi-experimental design.”

    But the reality is that there’s little evidence of systematic evaluation across the sector – and almost no evidence that planned reductions in financial support have been evaluated for negative impacts. Providers cutting bursaries don’t appear to be required to demonstrate that this won’t harm continuation or completion. The OfS toolkit exists, but its use appears patchy at best.

    Also notable is what’s absent from the plans. Inflation – the factor that has most dramatically affected student living costs over the plan period – is rarely mentioned except in relation to the maximum tuition fee that providers hope to charge.

    Students facing a cost-of-living crisis that has seen food prices rise by over 25 per cent since 2021 are, apparently, not worthy of quantified analysis. Bursary amounts are stated in nominal terms with no commitment to uprating – household income thresholds are fixed with no acknowledgment that £25,000 in 2028 will be worth substantially less than £25,000 today.

    Kingston’s new “Back on Track grant” – up to £500 for students experiencing “short-term financial difficulty due to cost-of-living increases” – is one of the few explicit acknowledgments that inflation has changed the landscape. But this is framed as crisis intervention, not as a reason to revisit core bursary amounts.

    Coherence

    Overall we see a sector that has internalised a consistent rationale for financial support – addressing cost pressures to improve continuation and completion – while implementing it through inconsistent mechanisms. A student from a household earning £25,000 might receive £5,000 at Imperial, £2,000 at King’s, £1,000 at Kingston (first year only), £500 at Aston (first year only), or £300 at Anglia Ruskin. The same student with care experience might receive anywhere from £1,000 to £8,000+ depending on institution, location, and whether accommodation is included.

    This is, of course, partly a function of institutional resources and student demographics – providers with higher proportions of disadvantaged students must spread resources more thinly. Murphy and Wyness (2016) found precisely this – a decentralised bursary system creates inequalities, with disadvantaged students at better-resourced institutions receiving substantially more. As they noted:

    …universities with a higher proportion of disadvantaged students have to spread their resources amongst more students, limiting the amount that each student can get.

    But there’s a deeper coherence problem. The regulatory framework asks providers to demonstrate how financial support will “improve outcomes for underrepresented students” – yet the evidence that institutional bursaries achieve this at scale remains weak.

    Providers are, in effect, being asked to evaluate something that the sector-level evidence suggests may not work in the way the policy assumes. And when providers conclude that their bursary scheme isn’t delivering – or that resources would be better deployed elsewhere – OfS appears willing to approve reductions without requiring evidence that this won’t cause harm.

    Meanwhile, the broader context is getting worse. Maintenance loan increases have failed to match inflation; the parental contribution threshold has been frozen at £25,000 since 2007; and today’s UCAS data shows disadvantaged students increasingly constrained in their choices. The total planned financial support across the sample I examined last year was set to fall from £20 million in 2020-21 to £17 million by 2028-29 – real-terms cuts, approved by OfS, at precisely the moment students need more support.

    The UCAS tool matters

    This is why the UCAS scholarships tool feels significant – not because it solves the underlying problem, but because it at least addresses one of the compounding factors. If bursaries are to have any effect on access (rather than just continuation), prospective students need to know what’s available before they make choices.

    The current system, where information is scattered across hundreds of institutional websites with different eligibility criteria, different application processes, and different timescales, serves no one well.

    A centralised tool won’t fix the postcode lottery of provision. It won’t address the fact that some providers are cutting support while others expand it, and it won’t resolve the fundamental question of whether institutional bursaries are the most effective use of access and participation spend. But it might – might – help more students discover support they’re entitled to, and make slightly more informed choices as a result.

    As Saxton notes:

    …we need to remain alert to these challenges and more research is needed to fully understand the impact on student choice and progression.

    That research gap – what financial support actually achieves, for whom, and under what conditions – remains the elephant in the room. Until it’s addressed, we’re left with a system where providers invest hundreds of millions of pounds annually in financial support, regulators require evidence of impact, but we still don’t really know whether any of it works.

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  • 2025 higher education in twelve charts

    2025 higher education in twelve charts

    Not every big higher education story has an accompanying chart – but many of them do have an accompanying data release that allows us to dig into problems and hopefully help us identify solutions.

    I’m lucky enough to have the chance to visualise some of these things for you all, and these are twelve (well, thirteen…) things that I have found interesting, informative, and useful over the past twelve months.

    As always, if there are data-related questions please do get in touch – quite a few of the ideas for these charts came from my email inbox!

    Money matters

    This doesn’t even feel like a 2025 thing – it feels like an eternal complaint, but over the last couple of years things have intensified. We’ve (by “we” I mean all four devolved administrations) systematically and deliberately underfunded higher education for years, and acting surprised when universities have to stop doing valuable things – or doing them less well – is the inevitable result.

    Financial issues have also led to the late publication of audited financial statements, as institutions have had to rework budgets to pass the “going concern” test. In December 2025 we finally got a near-complete set of financial data for 2023-24 (obviously not including the University of Dundee or Dartington Hall) and even a cursory look at the key financial indicators suggests that things are gradually (and then suddenly) getting worse. Striking for me is the growing number of very well known providers running a large deficit as a proportion of total income. You can do this for a few years (judiciously liquidising assets and drawing on reserves) but you cannot do it for much longer.

    [Full screen]

    Saying goodbye

    One of the ways in which these financial woes have manifested themselves is in difficult and painful provider-level decisions to stop employing many of our friends, colleagues, and inspirations across every area of university activity. Staff costs are, and remain, the biggest proportional cost in nearly every university and college – and years of austerity mean that every other cost has been cut to the bone).

    Your campus unions have been working hard to blunt the impact of these cuts and negotiate alternative approaches that can keep the whole show on the road. If you have a good branch it is a fantastic thing, and even if the machinations of national union politics have turned you off please do continue to support the people performing this often thankless and often essential work. Everyone knows that nearly all universities are struggling – and it is only through working together (unions and managers) that we get through this while still being a university.

    Here’s the change in academic staff numbers (we still don’t have a mandatory data collection in England for all of the other amazing staff that make universities work!), by cost centre, at your university (or anywhere else you want to look) between 2022-23 and 2023-24. Next year’s data – given the scope and scale of cuts announced – will look even worse.

    [Full screen]

    The end of “high tariff providers”

    Changes in recruitment strategies mean that all kinds of universities are making often surprising low tariff UCAS offers, with providers who traditionally cater for applicants with less evidence of academic prowess (or being middle-class) both struggling and wondering if the increasingly busy posh kids place up the road is actually set up to provide the support students need.

    As is often the case with recruitment data we can’t really look at the issue directly – there’s some kind of an omerta about discussing this – but by looking at where providers are growing recruitment while getting less applications we can see some instances where a prime diagnosis may be a lowering of entry requirements.

    [Full screen]

    To be clear, the elite end of the sector becoming less elite is not a bad thing in and of itself – but we need to be clear that providers more used to stellar A levels are able to provide the support that less advantaged students need, and we need also be a little more open about what the future is for the other providers who have historically done this work very well.

    Mind you, posh kids who do really well at A level are less likely to go to university if they apply. What’s that about?

    Subcontractual obligations

    The last few years have been busy with attempts to spot and root out “low quality courses” – who remembers the PROCEED metric? – but these attempts seem to have landed on sub-contractual provision… particularly when this happens at high volumes at unregistered independent providers. There’s been steps taken to compel registration, and to reinforce the responsibility that lead partners have over the quality of the provision carried out in their name.

    But to do all that took the release of previously unseen data on the size and shape of the subcontractual universe. It’s not perfect (in fact it is rather old data) but for the first time we have some understanding of who is (or was) working with who – and what the outcomes (B3) metrics look like.

    [Full screen] (and there’s also a version allowing you search by lead provider)

    Didn’t get the memo

    Alas, nobody told shadow minister for policy renewal (the current opposition’s Temu David Willetts) Neil O’Brien who spent the spring playing with SLC data to determine which institutions had graduates who were not paying back loans. He did not do very well – in that he didn’t bother controlling for any of the things (including, mystifyingly, subject area) that we know affect earnings and thus graduate repayment.

    Using LEO data and some assumptions (so in indicative terms only) I had a go at doing something similar – and it turns out that the biggest determining factor for low levels of repayment is the likelihood that someone attending a given provider has a disadvantaged background.

    [Full screen] (and here’s a look by subject area which makes the point that that is very obviously a determinant of earnings too, so perhaps the lads at whichever think tank is helping Neil will spot that different providers teach different subjects in different proportions.)

    Commuter line

    Who is teaching the students who – for financial, work, caring obligations, or other reasons – want to study locally? There’s various data driven ways to answer that question, but all of them require that you accept someone else’s definition of living “locally” and none of them let you do things the other way around (which providers recruit in a given locality).

    I had a go at this with one of my favourite HESA Student tables and a little bit of Tableau magic. It’s not entirely satisfying (I’m using the central point of each local authority area which… isn’t ideal) but it is fun.

    [Full screen]

    Levy or not

    A new tax is just the thing for a cash-strapped sector, and one on the one area of income where universities can actually meet the associated costs and run a profit was the Christmas gift all of us wanted. The money will stay – broadly – in the sector (with some of it going to grants for less well off students doing government priority subjects) but the big surprise was a shift from a proportional model (where the providers that charge the highest fees pay a bigger levy) to a flat rate, disproportionately hitting those who can’t or won’t charge a premium.

    You can model the impact yourself here – and ponder the implications of a single sector tax that directly affects the ability to cross-subsidise public funded work.

    [Full screen]

    It’s maybe my second favourite new data release. The favourite has to be the Standard Skills Classification from Skills England – because who doesn’t love a vocabulary that links together other vocabularies?

    Spinning around

    And who doesn’t love yet another new new data set? – this one is another belter. Universities often prove to be the launching pad for companies who are able to commercialise products, processes, or services developed from academic practice (research, teaching, capacity building). It’s still in experimental mode – we had two versions this year and this is a plot of the second one (which saved me the bother of manually linking it to Companies House data – thanks HESA friends!)

    [Full screen]

    Premium content

    The idea of a graduate premium – that your newly minted degree holder will earn enough extra over their lifetime to cover the increasingly expensive loan repayments that are required from them – was everywhere this year, and those interested in getting an accurate rather than politically useful answer spent a lot of time hitting up on the limits of what available data can tell us. This is an area the Department for Education is actively working on – so expect some improvements in the future.

    For me, the most compelling answer came from a data source that DfE has pledged to abandon – the venerable Graduate Labour Market Statistics (GLMS). Under cover of historic problems with the underlying Labour Force Statistics (LFS) this will be axed in favour of improvements to a data source that can’t even handle the concept of part time work – LEO.

    I stumbled across a dataset showing hourly wages by highest qualification held within localities (NUTS3, UK deprecated international geographic identifier fans!), and the beleaguered Office for National Statistics were happy to fill in the gaps for me. In every area of the UK, graduates earn more for an hour’s work than people who haven’t attended higher education. And that has to count for something.

    [Full screen]

    New information, supposed to fry your imagination

    There were (thankfully) no changes to the National Student Survey this year – so just another data point in a timeseries that demonstrates that people leaving an undergraduate qualification do so with satisfaction rates that would turn any other service industry green with envy.

    [Full screen]

    No plans

    However, who gets to study is still very much a problematic question. If you read the wider education news you’ll know that the number of pupils with Education Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) has been steadily growing year on year – in 2024-25 it was above 600,000. But despite this growth, access to higher tariff (or prestigious I guess?) higher education providers for pupils with an EHCP is abysmal. In the 2023-24 recruitment cycle just 327 (that’s 1.5 per cent) of young people with an EHCP managed it – you could literally fit all of them in a lecture theatre.

    [Full screen]

    Bonus: You’ll never believe this one weird chart

    Yes, it’s the providers where more students get an undergraduate maintenance loan than an undergraduate fee loan. There are a few edge cases where this can happen, for an individual student what I’m looking for (call it a Christmas quiz) is an explanation that explains why these providers and why these volumes.

    [Full screen]

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  • Brown University Reels After Deadly Shooting

    Brown University Reels After Deadly Shooting

    Two students were killed and nine were injured in a mass shooting at Brown University on Saturday. The university’s president Christina H. Paxson described the incident as “a tragedy that no university community is ever ready for.”

    “The past 24 hours really have been unimaginable,” she said in a letter to the Ivy League university’s greater community Sunday morning, adding that most of the injured students remain hospitalized in stable condition.

    The shooting began just after 4 p.m. at the Barus and Holley engineering and physics building. The Providence, Rhode Island, campus was locked down until Sunday morning when local law enforcement officials ended the order, sharing that they had identified and detained a male in his 20s as a person of interest. That person was later released. State police and agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation remain on campus.

    Brown University President Christina Paxson leaving a press conference Sunday.

    Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe/Getty Images

    According to The Brown Daily Herald, the student newspaper, many of the students affected were in a review session for a Principles of Economics exam. One freshman, Spencer Yang, told The Herald that he was shot in the leg but others near him were “seriously injured.” He said he tried to help them and keep them conscious.

    “While we always prepare for major crises, we also pray such a day never comes,” Paxson said in her letter. “We know there is a long road ahead as students and families deal with the after effects of the events of the past day and the emergency that is still unfolding.”

    Joseph Oduro, a senior from New Jersey and teaching assistant for the economics class, told The Boston Globe that the review session had just wrapped up when the shooter entered carrying “the longest gun I’ve ever seen in my life.” Oduro crouched behind the podium at the front of the auditorium and huddled with a first-year student who had been shot twice in the leg. He stayed with her until she reached the hospital, The Globe reported.

    Oduro didn’t want to describe what he saw as first responders evacuated the classroom, but said it hurt to see his students “all in a state of panic and desperate pain.”

    University Provost Francis J. Doyle III announced Sunday morning, that “out of profound concern for all students, faculty and staff,” all undergraduate, graduate and medical classes, exams and final projects for the semester would not take place as scheduled. Students are free to leave campus if they are able, but if not, access to on-campus services will remain available, Doyle said. More guidance about the status of unfinished courses will be released in the days ahead, he added.

    Saturday’s events sparked anger and frustration among gun control advocates and affected students as the number of mass school shootings on record continues to climb. One student, Zoe Weissman, a college sophomore, survived the Brown shooting Saturday nearly eight years after she had been affected by a similar event in her hometown—Parkland, Florida.

    Weissman, now 20, was a student at Parkland Middle School when 17 people were killed and 18 injured at the nearby Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

    “Mentally, I feel like I’m 12 again. This just feels exactly how I felt in 2018. But honestly, I’m really angry,” Weissman said in an interview with MS NOW, formerly MSNBC. “This isn’t a new phenomenon, and we’re going to get to a point where there’s [more] people like myself who survived two of these.”

    Another Brown student, Mia Tretta, was shot in a 2019 school shooting in Santa Clarita that left two people dead, the New York Times reported.

    “People always think, well, it’ll never be me,” Tretta told the Times. “And until I was shot in my school, I also thought the same thing.”

    President Donald Trump addressed the shooting during a holiday reception at the White House Sunday, but did not speak directly to public concerns about gun control or the number of incidents on college or K-12 campuses.

    “Things can happen,” he said. “So to the nine injured, get well fast and the families of those two who are no longer with us, I pay my deepest regards and respects.”

    The campus shooting also gained attention from fans of the reality TV show Survivor. Season 48 runner-up, Eva Erickson, is a Brown doctoral candidate, and she shared on social media how she had left the engineering building minutes before the shooting began.

    “I am so, so extremely lucky that I was very unproductive at work today,” she said in a video eight hours after the lockdown began. “I was in my office in Barus and Holley in that area until 4 p.m. and I was like, man I’m just not getting nothing done on my code and randomly decided I would go to the gym … I left and about 20 minutes later, we get the warning.”

    Erickson added that while she appreciated all the thoughts and prayers she had received, it wasn’t enough.

    “We need more than thoughts and prayers,” she said. “This is ridiculous that as college students in America we have to worry about someone shooting up our classrooms.”



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  • Brown University student reacts to campus shooting (MS Now)

    Brown University student reacts to campus shooting (MS Now)







    Higher Education Inquirer : ‘I’m disappointed in our country’: Brown University student reacts to campus shooting (MS Now)




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  • Brown University teaching assistant recalls shooter opening fire in his class (CNN)

    Brown University teaching assistant recalls shooter opening fire in his class (CNN)







    Higher Education Inquirer : Brown University teaching assistant recalls shooter opening fire in his class (CNN)




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  • A Place Where Kids With the Toughest Behaviors Are Welcome and Can Heal – The 74

    A Place Where Kids With the Toughest Behaviors Are Welcome and Can Heal – The 74


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    Ann’s three young boys had been through a lot already. Her marriage to their father was marked by violence, and a divorce was followed by multiple violations of a protective order, she said. While their father sat in prison in North Dakota, she moved the family to the Twin Cities.

    But while the move gave them distance, it didn’t solve their problems, said Ann, who asked to be identified by her middle name to protect her children’s privacy. Her sons, especially the two youngest, suffered mental health issues including PTSD, ADHD and anxiety. Her middle son was diagnosed with disruptive mood dysregulation disorder, characterized by angry and sometimes violent outbursts.

    “I had 13 police calls within a nine-month period to my house,” Ann said. When a police officer handed her a domestic violence information card, she knew things had to change.

    Ann’s middle son had been enrolled in public school in a suburb of St. Paul, but after being removed from his mainstream classroom due to his behaviors, he wasn’t receiving the support he needed academically or emotionally.

    A social worker told her about Catholic Charities Children’s Day Treatment, located in Minneapolis Public Schools’ Wilder Complex and offering intensive supports to children in grades K-8 struggling with mental illness. Despite her nerves, Ann scheduled a visit. In one of her first interactions, an intake person said, “‘Because you’re here looking for help, you’re more advanced than most adults,’” Ann recalled. “I knew at that moment we were in the right place.”

    A trauma-informed approach for kids

    Jessica Dreischmeier, Catholic Charities Children’s Day Treatment Program director, said that her program is a good match for children like Ann’s sons. Staff not only understand the impact that early childhood trauma can have on mental health, but the program’s trauma-informed approach helps them make progress with kids deemed unfixable by other schools.

    “I would say a majority of the youth that come here for treatment have experienced some type of trauma,” Dreischmeier said. “We know that those symptoms can manifest themselves in a number of ways, including depression, aggression, anxiety, ADHD — and we have deep experience working with those kinds of kids.”

    With the right approach, she said, most kids can recover from mental illness.

    “One day might be hard, but over time we get there with pretty much everybody — which is awesome.”

    A long and loyal legacy

    Catholic Charities Children’s Day Treatment was founded in 1968 as an extension of St. Joseph’s Home for Children, founded in 1869 as a residential shelter for orphans. The day treatment program was created to provide an alternative option for children at St. Joseph’s who needed extra mental health support.

    St. Joseph’s Home closed in 2020, but the day treatment program continued. Enrollment is capped at 40 students who work with 17 full-time staff members. Students come from around the metro area but enroll in Minneapolis Public Schools through a partnership with the district. Mental health services are billed through health insurance.

    Many staff members have worked at the center for decades. Karen Johnson, a mental health practitioner who has been employed by the program for 24 years, said she feels a deep connection to the children in her care.

    “I should have retired five years ago,” Johnson said. “Each time I have that thought, another kid comes through the door, and  I’m like, ‘Now I have to stay until they finish the program.’ Then another kid comes.”

    A focus on parent connection and long-term success for kids

    According to the Minnesota Department of Human Services, there are 37 licensed mental health day treatment programs for children in the state. Still, Dreischmeier said that Catholic Charities’ program remains in high demand.

    “The need for mental health services for youth and children in Minnesota has been going up for a while,” she said, “but especially after Covid, it’s particularly evident.”

    A typical day for students includes two three-hour blocks – one for academics and the other for mental health therapy and treatment.

    Mental health support is delivered in individual and group settings with a focus on parent and guardian involvement, Dreischmeier said. Families are taught how to build strong connections with their child and to reinforce strategies they’re practicing at school.

    The kids work on setting goals for their life beyond the program. While students’ individual goals look different, the overall aim is a return to home life and a less restrictive school setting. “We’re hoping our intervention helps kids stay in their home and with their family and not have an out-of-home placement,” Dreischmeier said.

    ‘We’re not going to leave anybody behind.’

    For parents like Ann, the transition to day treatment often comes amid deep distrust of past educational settings. Families arrive feeling guarded, Dreischmeier said. They wonder: “‘Are you going to perceive my child as a problem?’ ‘Will you only see them for the behaviors they are having when they are having a hard time, or will you see my whole child?’”

    The kids often wonder the same thing, Johnson said. “A lot of these kids come here with no hope. They think, ‘People say I’m bad so I’m never going to be nothing.’ I try to change that narrative.”

    Dreischmeier said that her staff remains undaunted even by the students’ most challenging behaviors.

    “If something is hard, we’re going to all come together and work on it and talk about it,” she said. We’re going to move forward all together. We’re not going to leave anybody behind.”

    Academically, the aim is not just to keep students on track, but to move them ahead. In traditional school settings with larger class sizes and fewer supports, children with serious mental health issues are often separated from their peers and fall behind.

    Dreischmeier said things are run differently at Children’s Day Treatment, where the ratio of adults to students is much higher – often three adults to every six or seven students. “Students are really able to focus in and learn,” she said.

    On average, students participate in the program for a year to a year and a half, Dreischmeier said. Most then move back to their local community school. Some are recommended for further services, including residential and outpatient mental health programs.

    Surprised by hope

    After two years at Children’s Day Treatment, Ann’s middle son graduated  last year. Though he struggled in the beginning, she said, he eventually settled in and found success.

    “His graduation was the most incredible thing,” Ann recalled. “Staff said he’d emerged as a leader. We did not know that about my son. To hear his peers get up and give their testimonies about him – there was not a dry eye in the room.”

    Today, he’s enrolled at a school in her home district – something she never thought possible – where he continues to receive special education support. Ann’s youngest son enrolled at Children’s Day Treatment in the fall. She’s optimistic: “I’m just grateful for people like them who want to help children like mine.”

    This article first appeared on MinnPost and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.


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  • WEEKEND READING: Governance: a new salience

    WEEKEND READING: Governance: a new salience

    Author:
    Mary Curnock Cook

    Published:

    This blog is kindly authored by Mary Curnock Cook CBE, Chair of the Governing Body at the Dyson Institute of Engineering and Technology, NED at the London Interdisciplinary School and Council member at the University of Leicester, and HEPI Trustee. 

    Governance in higher education may have been quietly rising up the regulatory agenda recently, but at the 2025 AdvanceHE Governance Conference, it felt as if it had reached peak salience in the general discourse about the future of the sector.  Both higher education and Skills Minister, Baroness (Jacqui) Smith of Malvern, and Office for Students (OfS) Chair, Professor Edward Peck, were present to lend weight to the arguments for strengthening higher education governance.  

    Baroness Smith cited weaknesses of governance, including financial oversight (and ensuing precarity), optimism bias in recruitment forecasting, franchising scandals, and the lack of understanding of the cumulative impact of risks. She challenged governing bodies to play their part in reshaping the sector in response to the Skills White Paper.  The message was clear: universities are autonomous institutions, and she is expecting them to step up to collaborate with further education institutions and employers to meet the 2040 target of two-thirds of young people reaching at least Level 4 by age 25.  Government had announced inflation-related tuition fee rises to support this. 

    In his wide ranging ‘in conversation’ piece with AdvanceHE governance guru, Aaron Porter, the OfS Chair set out the regulator’s thinking on strengthening governance.  As a former vice-chancellor himself, Professor Peck knows that co-regulation with the sector will go down better than prescription, so the OfS is supportive of the current Committee for University Chairs (CUC) review of the HE Code of Governance and is collaborating with the sector on this and other initiatives to improve governance.  It is important, he suggested, for the CUC to get this right to avoid the need for a material increase in regulatory oversight of governance arrangements in universities, rather than the more risk-based model of regulation in this space which the OfS wants to test with the sector. He also expects the new CUC code to suggest arrangements that will provide assurance to the OfS and others that agreed governance standards across the sector are being met and improving. 

    Professor Peck said that too much of the regulatory compliance weight has been on the Accountable Officer role in the past.  He wants chairs to be empowered and governing bodies to see themselves as more central to the leadership and success of an institution.  And, in recognition of governing bodies stepping up to their roles, he says he has changed his mind about remuneration.  “Chairs and Audit Committee Chairs should be paid,” he said, noting the significant responsibilities they undertake. 

    This shift in the locus of accountability was signalled in November when Professor Peck wrote to chairs of institutions setting out the five risk areas that the OfS is currently focussed on.  These were: financial pressures, significant change programmes, third-party and off-campus delivery, misuse of public funding and legal compliance with freedom of speech legislation. 

    The letter said:

    In this context, the job of a governing body becomes increasingly important and demanding. [W]e agree with the view expressed by some in the sector that standards of governance are not consistent and, in some respects, may benefit from overall improvement.

    At the conference, he went further, pointing to the dangers of group-think in the sector, and directly questioning why members of Universities UK are the vice-chancellors themselves rather than the institutions they lead.  He points out that there are no independent members of the UUK Board as all the board members are vice-chancellors. Chairs of governing bodies had been forced to set up their own group, the CUC, outside of the UUK tent.  He doubted that UUK agendas and policy positions were much discussed at governing body meetings.  The challenge was implicit – what does it say about university governance if chairs are collectively excluded from discussions about sector policy, and are discussions with government about policy constrained by the lack of externality in UUK’s constitution?

    The conference also covered a lot of detailed ground about governance in the sector – the size of governing bodies, the balance of work done in sub-committees vs the board, governance of academic quality, the skills and expertise of board members and so on. And the findings of the Gillies Report about governance failures at the University of Dundee were never far from the conversation.  But with the weight of a ministerial address and the punchy input of the new Chair of the OfS, governance in HE takes on a new significance.  The framing of the CUC’s work on the Higher Education Code of Governance as a ‘refresh’ is perhaps understating the importance of this work.  

    HEPI has recently published a report on designing effective student governance, and a policy note on the ethical reform of university governance.

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  • As Justice Department priorities shift, concerns about protection of students’ civil rights escalate

    As Justice Department priorities shift, concerns about protection of students’ civil rights escalate

    by Sarah Butrymowicz, The Hechinger Report
    December 14, 2025

    The 10-year-old was dragged down a school hallway by two school staffers. A camera captured him being forced into a small, empty room with a single paper-covered window. 

    The staffers shut the door in his face. Alone, the boy curled into a ball on the floor. When school employees returned more than 10 minutes later, blood from his face smeared the floor.

    Maryland state lawmakers were shown this video in 2017 by Leslie Seid Margolis, a lawyer with the advocacy group Disability Rights Maryland. She’d spent 15 years advocating for a ban on the practice known as seclusion, in which children, typically those with disabilities, are involuntarily isolated and confined, often after emotional outbursts. 

    Even after seeing the video, no legislators were willing to go as far as a ban. Nor were they when Margolis tried again a few years later.

    In 2021, however, the federal Justice Department concluded an investigation into a Maryland school district and found more than 7,000 cases of unnecessary restraint and seclusion in a two-and-a-half-year period. 

    Four months later, Maryland lawmakers passed a bill prohibiting seclusion in the state’s public schools, with nearly unanimous support.

    “I can’t really overstate the impact that Justice can have,” said Margolis. “They have this authority that is really helpful to those of us who are on the ground doing this work.”

    Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter featuring the most important stories in education. 

    Within the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division is a small office devoted to educational issues, including seclusion, as well as desegregation and racial harassment. The division intentionally chooses cases with potential for high impact and actively monitors places it has investigated to ensure they’re following through with changes. When the Educational Opportunities Section acts, educators and policymakers take notice.

    Now, however, the Trump administration is wielding the power of the Justice Department in new and, some say, extreme ways. Hundreds of career staffers, including most of those who worked on education cases, have resigned. The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights also has been decimated, largely through layoffs. The two offices traditionally have worked closely together to enforce civil rights protections for students. The result is a potentially lasting shift in how the nation’s top law enforcement agency handles issues that affect public school students, including millions who have disabilities. 

    “There are those who would say that this is an aberration, and that when it’s over, things will go back to the way they were,” said Frederick Lawrence, a lecturer at Georgetown Law and former assistant U.S. attorney under President Ronald Reagan. “My experience is that the river only flows in one direction, and things never go back to the way they were.”

    Related: Tracking Trump: His actions to dismantle the Education Department, and more

    The Justice Department’s lawyers historically have worked on a few dozen education cases at once, concentrating on combating sexual harassment, racial discrimination against Black and Latino students, restraint and seclusion, and failure to provide adequate services to English learners. 

    In the last 11 months, however, the agency has sued over and opened investigations into concerns about antisemitism, transgender policies and bias against white people at schools. It sued at least six states for offering discounted tuition to undocumented immigrants and pressured the president of the University of Virginia to resign as part of an investigation into the school’s diversity, equity and inclusion policies. And it joined other federal departments to form a special Title IX investigations team to protect students from what the administration called the “pernicious effects of gender ideology in school programs and activities.”  

    As the Educational Opportunity Section’s mission shifted, it shrunk in size. In January, before President Donald Trump took office, about 40 lawyers tackled education issues. In the spring, the U.S. Senate confirmed Harmeet Dhillon as leader of the Civil Rights Division. Dhillon founded the conservative Center for American Liberty, which describes itself as “defending civil liberties of Americans left behind by civil rights legacy organizations.”

    After her confirmation, staff who weren’t political appointees began resigning en masse, concerned Dhillon would promote only the administration’s agenda. 

    By June, no more than five of the 40 lawyers were left, according to former employees. Some new staff have been hired or reassigned to the section, but the head count remains well below usual. It’s far from enough to sustain the typical workload, said Shaheena Simons, who was chief of the Educational Opportunities Section until she resigned in April. “There’s just no way the division can function with that level of staffing. It’s just impossible,” said Simons, who took over the section in 2016. “The investigations aren’t going to happen. Remedies aren’t going to be sought.” 

    Department officials responded to a list of questions from The Hechinger Report about changes to their handling of student civil rights protection with “no comment.” 

    The Department of Justice, including its educational work, has always been somewhat subject to White House interests, said Neal McCluskey, director of the libertarian Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom. During President Joe Biden’s term, for example, the agency pursued allegations of discrimination against transgender students, reflecting administration priorities. 

    McCluskey added, though, that the Trump administration is more aggressive in how it is pursuing its goals and is bypassing typical protocols, noting that in many cases “it’s like they’ve already decided the outcome.”  

    Related: Which schools and colleges are being investigated by the Trump administration?

    An investigation into allegations of antisemitism at the University of California, Los Angeles, for instance, took just 81 days before the department concluded the school had violated federal law. DOJ investigations typically have taken years, not months, to complete. 

    Lawrence, who also serves as president of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society, said he could not speak to specific investigations, but the UCLA timeline “does suggest a rather accelerated process.”

    A federal judge recently ruled that the administration could not use the findings from its UCLA investigation as a reason to fine the university $1.2 billion, which if paid would have unlocked frozen federal research funding. She wrote that the administration was using a playbook “of initiating civil rights investigations of preeminent universities to justify cutting off federal funding.” 

    As new investigations are opened, older ones remain unresolved, including one of practices in Colorado’s Douglas County Public Schools.

    In 2022, Disability Law Colorado submitted a complaint to the Justice Department about the district’s use of seclusion, as well as restraint, where school employees physically restrict a student’s movement.

    The following year, three other families sued the school system, alleging racial discrimination against their children. The students were repeatedly called monkeys and the N-word, threatened with lynchings and “made by teachers to argue the benefits of Jim Crow laws,” according to the complaint.

    Related: Red school boards in a blue state asked Trump for help — and got it

    The Department of Justice decided to investigate both issues. Four staffers were assigned to the restraint and seclusion investigation, said Emily Harvey, co-legal director at Disability Law Colorado.  

    As part of the inquiry, Justice officials visited the district twice. The second time was during the final week of Biden’s presidency. 

    After that visit, Douglas County didn’t hear anything about the investigation from the Trump administration until a mid-May email. “Good morning,” it read. “We are having some staffing changes.”

    The email, which The Hechinger Report obtained through a public records request, said that going forward, the district could contact two staffers on the restraint and seclusion case. The racial harassment case would be reduced to only one employee until another Justice staffer returned from leave in the fall. 

    One Douglas County parent, who asked her name be withheld because she is afraid of retaliation from the district, said that although she knew the investigation could take a couple of years, the longer it goes without a resolution, the more children could be harmed. 

    “The justice system is just moving so incredibly slow,” she said. 

    The parent said she knows of dozens of families who have dealt with restraint and seclusion issues in the district. Her own son, she said, was secluded in kindergarten. “He was scared of the person who put him in there. He kept saying, ‘I can’t go back,’” she said. “I never envisioned, until my son was secluded, a world where the school would not care about my child.” 

    When Harvey, of Disability Law Colorado, first contacted the Department of Justice, she hoped for statewide reform. She wanted to see a ban on seclusion, like Margolis had helped secure in Maryland, and for the state to commit to more accurate tracking of use of restraints. The way Colorado law is written, restraints must be recorded only if they last more than a minute. Douglas County, the second largest in the state with 62,000 students, reported 582 restraints to the Colorado Department of Education in the 2023-24 school year. The number of shorter-term restraints, however, is unknown. 

    “We believe this is an arbitrary distinction,” Harvey said. “My hope was that the Department of Justice would potentially weigh in on that as a violation” of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

    Related: How Trump 2.0 upended education research and statistics in one year

    Douglas County school administrators said in a statement to The Hechinger Report that their “focus is on taking care of each and every one of our students” and that they take all concerns seriously. 

    They have worked with the federal government to set up school visits and interviews during their visits, according to emails from January. 

    Subsequent emails between district and federal officials describe a phone call over the summer and requests for additional documents. Another DOJ employee was included in the messages.

    There are signs that the Justice Department is not abandoning restraint and seclusion work, said Guy Stephens, founder of the national advocacy group Alliance Against Seclusion and Restraint. A webpage about previous cases that was removed after Trump took office has been restored, and in July, the DOJ announced a settlement with a Michigan district over these issues.

    Yet Stephens has concerns. “There are still people very, very dedicated to this work and the mission of this work, but it’s very hard to work in a system that is shifting and reprioritizing,” he said.

    Former DOJ employees worry that it might not only be future investigations that are markedly different. The department has historically monitored places where it has reached agreements that demand corrective action, rewriting them if districts or colleges fail to live up to their promises. It also provides support to achieve the new goals. Now, provisions written into past resolutions might be at odds with Trump administration actions, and oversight of some settlements is ending early.

    Take, for instance, a DOJ investigation into Vermont’s Elmore-Morristown Unified Union School District over allegations of race-based harassment against Black students. Investigators found that the district didn’t have a way to handle harassment or discrimination not targeted at a specific person, according to David Bickford, the school board chairman. 

    As part of a settlement agreement signed two weeks before Trump was inaugurated, the district agreed to provide staff training on implicit bias. A Trump executive order, however, calls for eliminating federal funding for anyone that discusses such a concept in schools. 

    Bickford said that the district has complied with everything the settlement called for, including professional development. 

    The investigation itself, he said, was extremely thorough, and required handing over nearly a thousand pages of documentation. Since then, the district has sent regular reports to the department but has not received any lengthy response or input, Bickford said. He also noted there had been staffing changes in who the district reports to. 

    Related: Federal policies risk worsening an already dire rural teacher shortage

    Justice officials decided to end supervision of a 2023 settlement early following a racial harassment investigation in another Vermont district, Twin Valley. The original plan was to monitor the district for three years. In October 2024, investigators visited the district to check in. In a letter two months later, officials noted that while Twin Valley had made significant progress, they still had several areas of concern, including how the district investigated complaints, as well as “persistent biased language and behavior on the basis of multiple protected classifications; a pervasive culture of sexism; and lack of consistent and effective adult response to biased language and behavior.” 

    Even so, the department was pleased overall with its visit, said Bill Bazyk, superintendent of Windham Southwest Supervisory Union, which includes Twin Valley. “But things certainly sped up after the election,” said Bazyk, who started his job after the case had been settled.

    Throughout the spring, Bayzk and his staff checked in with the department, and in May the district was told oversight of the settlement would end a year early, as Twin Valley had fully complied with the terms. 

    “We were doing all the right things,” Bayzk said, noting that the district’s work on diversity and equity is ongoing. “We took the settlement very seriously.”

    The investigation began in 2021 after the American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont filed a complaint. Legal Director Lia Ernst said it is possible that Twin Valley resolved those lingering problems between December and May, stressing that it’s impossible to know from the outside. But still, she said, there is a larger pattern of ambivalence to the Justice Department’s approach to civil rights complaints.  

    “It is disappointing to see that one ending early,” she said. “It is my hope that it is ending early because Twin Valley has made so much progress, but it is my fear that it is ending early because DOJ just doesn’t care.” 

    Contact investigations editor Sarah Butrymowicz at [email protected] or on Signal: @sbutry.04.

    This story about the Justice Department was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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  • Why the AI Bubble Is Actually a $60T Black Hole (GEN)

    Why the AI Bubble Is Actually a $60T Black Hole (GEN)

     

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