Tag: coming

  • Fear, arrests and know-your-rights: How one school district is grappling with ICE coming to town

    Fear, arrests and know-your-rights: How one school district is grappling with ICE coming to town

    by Alexandra Villarreal, The Hechinger Report
    January 23, 2026

    NEW HAVEN, Conn. — “They took her, they took her, they took her.”  

    Those were some of the words Assistant Principal Cora Muñoz could discern while on the phone with the guardian of one of her students. As the caller sobbed and struggled to speak, Muñoz realized that immigration enforcement agents had detained a kid from Wilbur Cross, the high school she helps lead. 

    Again.

    There was a reason why Muñoz was a go-to contact for the student and her guardian: She — and New Haven public schools more broadly — have worked hard to earn the trust of immigrant families in their diverse district, even as the second Trump administration has made it easier for immigration officers to enter schools and launched a mass deportation campaign.

    The district’s teachers and administrators have nurtured deep relationships with immigrant-serving organizations and helped kids access resources — attorneys, social workers, food — when needed. They’ve hosted sessions to inform students about their rights, and sent home cards with legal information in case of an encounter with immigration officers. And when the worst has happened — when someone’s child or parent has been detained, which has occurred over and over in recent months — they have taken immediate action, writing letters in support of the family member’s freedom and raising money alongside a larger coalition of advocates trying to bring that person home. 

    “In these moments where it’s hard, you show up,” said Muñoz, “and you do what you can.”

    Yet nothing has been able to entirely snuff out the fear of deportation inside the city’s schools, say students and educators. That may have contributed to a decline this October in the number of English language learner students enrolling; their numbers dropped by more than 2,000, or nearly 3.8 percent, across Connecticut between fall 2024 and fall 2025, and by hundreds — or 7.3 percent — in New Haven, with many immigrant families who were expected to return to school simply disappearing. 

    Chronic absenteeism rates fell in New Haven during the 2024-25 academic year. But after President Donald Trump took office, students said their families told them to skip extracurriculars or early college courses at a university campus in case immigration enforcement was around. For some, a college degree has started to feel more out of reach, as they adjust their dreams to fit within a new anti-immigrant reality. Teachers have seen kids stop participating in class after friends have been detained and they wonder if they could be next. 

    “I live with fear,” said Darwin, an 18-year-old student from Guatemala who has lived in New Haven for two years. His last name, like those of others in this story, is being withheld for safety reasons. “Sometimes I don’t even want to attend school because it makes me afraid to go out of the house.”

    In many school districts around the country, immigrant enrollment is down, as far fewer asylum seekers are able to reach the United States and some immigrants have chosen to self-deport to avoid the specter of detention. That said, the consequences of Trump’s mass deportation campaign on immigrants’ education vary greatly depending on the community, its demographics and the level of enforcement activity there, said Julie Sugarman, associate director for K-12 education research at the D.C.-based Migration Policy Institute’s National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy. 

    In the Minneapolis area, for instance, where a federal officer shot and killed Renee Good after she dropped off her 6-year-old child at school, districts are offering a virtual learning option for the many kids who are staying home in fear.  

    “We are definitely hearing anecdotally that there are kids not going to school,” Sugarman said. “Obviously, losing a whole year of education or however long they’re not in school, they are missing out on opportunities to develop their content knowledge, to learn literacy, to develop English, and also to develop academic skills in their native language.” 

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

    With seven institutions of higher learning in the area, New Haven is known as a college town. But it is also a city of immigrants: More than one in six New Haven residents are foreign-born, a statistic that underscores a point of pride for many who welcome the city’s diversity. Families in the public school system speak more than 70 languages. 

    At the Roberto Clemente Leadership Academy, a K-8 school with around 430 students, notices go home in English, Spanish, Pashto and Arabic. The school’s front doors have welcome signs posted in multiple languages. And on a bright red poster in the hallway, photos of beaming children surround a message: “We all smile in the same language.”  

    When Trump, who has argued that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” nixed guidance in January that had generally restricted U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from going into schools to arrest people, New Haven Public Schools Superintendent Madeline Negrón was prepared. Ahead of Trump’s inauguration, her team reviewed how the district had protected students during his first term and in what ways they could fortify their response. They developed a district-wide policy on how to act if ICE officers sought to enter their buildings. It involves a series of steps — including legal counsel’s verification of a valid warrant — before immigration agents would ever be allowed in. 

    “Without that, nobody, no one, is going to walk through my doors. Because my obligation is to keep every single one of my children safe,” said Negrón, who also shared the policy in a letter to parents. 

    Negrón led an effort to train all administrators in the protocol, and then those staff helped to train all 2,900 district employees — including custodians, cafeteria workers, teachers, security guards and secretaries.

    Some schools went even further, holding know-your-rights presentations for students and their families. “Things like a judicial versus administrative warrant — you know, I wish that no kid in New Haven needed to know that,” said Ben Scudder, a social studies teacher at High School in the Community. “But we live in a world where they do, and their families do, and so we’re gonna make sure that they get the training they need to do that.” 

    Related: Immigration enforcement is driving away early childhood educators 

    So far, ICE hasn’t tried to enter New Haven’s public schools. But outside of the classroom, arrests and family separations abound.

    In June, a mother and her two children — an 8-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl, both U.S. citizens — were in their car going to school when vehicles on the street surrounded them and men in ski masks approached. The kids watched, crying, as the immigration agents handcuffed their mom and led her away. 

    Staff members at the Roberto Clemente Leadership Academy, which the kids attend, fundraised for gift cards to grocery stores and delivery services to help their two students. They wrote support letters for the mother’s immigration case, asking for her release. But around a month later, she was deported to Mexico. 

    Now, whenever the younger sibling sees someone in uniform at school — a security guard, a police officer — he asks them why they took his mom, said Adela Jorge, Clemente’s principal. 

    “He’s not able to understand what happened,” Jorge said. “All he knows is that his mother was taken.”

    Soon after that, two Wilbur Cross students were nabbed one after the other. First was an 18-year-old named Esdras, arrested at his summer job, shuffled to detention facilities around the country, and almost put on a removal flight to Guatemala. 

    After more than a month — with the help of advocacy groups, his attorney, the teachers union, government officials and school employees who came together during summer break — Esdras was released. When he returned to Wilbur Cross, he told staff members all he wanted was to be normal, a request they have tried to honor by quietly reintegrating him into classes.

    Then, shortly after the start of the new academic year, another student — the one whose guardian had called Muñoz in a panic — was detained.

    “At first I thought she was mad at me or something,” said 17-year-old Melany, recalling when her friend suddenly stopped responding to phone messages. “But when she didn’t come to school, it really scared me. And I asked the teachers, but they couldn’t tell me anything.”

    Her friend was eventually freed, too. But teachers and administrators say they’re fed up that their students keep being targeted and treated so poorly.  

    “They’re our kids, and they’re being detained in these cages. And the day before, they were eating pizza in our cafeteria,” said Matt Brown, the Wilbur Cross principal. 

    Rumors and fears at times disrupt learning. One day in mid-October, around 10:20 a.m., immigration agents in tactical gear were seemingly staging in a park near a New Haven area college, setting off concerns that students were their targets. But about twenty minutes later, the agents instead hit a car wash in Hamden, Connecticut, arresting its workers. 

    “I don’t know what rights they had in those moments. It didn’t seem like they had any. There were no rights there,” said Laurie Sweet, a state representative whose district includes Hamden. “I think the intention is to cause chaos and make people feel destabilized, and that definitely is what happened.”

    ICE took eight people into custody that day, some of them parents of school-aged children. Tabitha Sookdeo, executive director of Connecticut Students for a Dream, said her organization searched school records for the kids, trying to ensure they were okay. But no one could find them.

    “We just hope and pray to God that they were able to have someone to pick them up from school,” Sookdeo said. 

    Related: What’s happened since Texas killed in-state tuition for undocumented students

    Teachers say all of this has made immigrant students quieter, more reserved, more observant — and more hopeless. Kids who used to exchange greetings with their teachers in the halls now trudge around like the walking dead, or ask for passes to leave the classroom more often. 

    “I’ve seen a lot more sadness, and I’ve seen a lot more students who are good students skipping classes. And it’s for no reason except that they just, you know, they have too much going on emotionally to make them go to their classes,” said Fatima Nouchkioui, a teacher of English as a second language at Wilbur Cross’ International Academy. 

    Sookdeo has noticed a drop in students at her organization’s college access program, as they question why they would try to get a college degree when they don’t know whether they’ll be in the U.S. tomorrow.

    “You’re sitting next to them,” she said of the high schoolers she works with. “And they’re literally shaking.”

    Many of the kids already have a pile of pressures to navigate. In some cases, they are living in the country by themselves, balancing school with jobs that allow them to send money home to parents and siblings. Darwin, for example, came to the U.S., leaving behind his mom and three younger siblings, and lives in New Haven alone — all to give his family members who remain abroad a better life. 

    And then there’s always the next arrest, constantly looming. 

    “Do we anticipate having kids detained again?” said Brown. “I haven’t seen anything that would make me think we shouldn’t.” 

    Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at [email protected].

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

    This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org/know-your-rights-new-haven-school-district-ice/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org”>The Hechinger Report</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cropped-favicon.jpg?fit=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>

    <img id=”republication-tracker-tool-source” src=”https://hechingerreport.org/?republication-pixel=true&post=114453&amp;ga4=G-03KPHXDF3H” style=”width:1px;height:1px;”><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: “https://hechingerreport.org/know-your-rights-new-haven-school-district-ice/”, urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id=”parsely-cfg” src=”//cdn.parsely.com/keys/hechingerreport.org/p.js”></script>

    Source link

  • MSI funding, institutional priorities, and the coming test of “social mobility” (Glen McGhee)

    MSI funding, institutional priorities, and the coming test of “social mobility” (Glen McGhee)

    A recent opinion from the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel declares that federal Minority-Serving Institution (MSI) programs are unlawful because they allocate funding based on the racial composition of enrolled students. The ruling immediately throws hundreds of campuses—and the students they serve—into uncertainty. But beyond the legal debate lies a more revealing institutional reckoning: if MSI grants disappear, will colleges actually fund these programs themselves?

    The short answer, based on decades of evidence, is no.

    For years, colleges and universities have framed MSI grants as proof of their commitment to access, equity, and social mobility. Yet those commitments have always been conditional. They have depended on external federal subsidies rather than first-principles institutional priorities. Now that the funding stream is threatened, the gap between rhetoric and reality is about to widen dramatically.

    The scale of what is being cut is not trivial. Discretionary MSI programs—serving Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs), Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander–Serving Institutions (AANAPISIs), Predominantly Black Institutions (PBIs), and others—have collectively provided hundreds of millions of dollars annually for tutoring, advising, counseling, faculty development, and basic academic infrastructure. These grants have often been the difference between persistence and attrition for low-income students, many of whom are first-generation and Pell-eligible.

    Yet MSI funding has also sustained something else: a sprawling administrative apparatus dedicated to grant writing, compliance, reporting, assessment, and “outcomes tracking.” Entire offices exist to chase, manage, and justify these funds. This is the professional-managerial class infrastructure that has come to dominate higher education—highly credentialed, compliance-oriented, and deeply invested in external funding streams.

    Follow the money, and a pattern becomes clear. When federal or state funding declines, colleges do not trim administrative overhead. They cut instruction. They cut tutoring. They cut advising. They cut student-facing programs that lack powerful internal constituencies. Administrative spending, by contrast, is remarkably durable. It rarely shrinks, even in moments of fiscal crisis.

    We have seen this movie before. When state appropriations fell over the past decade, public universities raised tuition and reduced instructional spending rather than dismantling administrative layers. When DEI offices were banned or defunded in several states, institutions eliminated student services and laid off staff, then quietly absorbed the savings into general operations. There was no surge in faculty hiring, no reinvestment in instruction, no serious attempt to replace lost support with institutional dollars.

    MSI grants will follow the same path. Colleges may offer short-term “bridge funding” to manage optics and morale, but that support will be temporary and partial. The language administrators use—“assessing impacts,” “exploring alternatives,” “seeking private donors”—is a familiar signal that programs are being triaged, not saved.

    Could institutions afford to self-fund these programs if they truly wanted to? In most cases, no—or at least not without making choices they refuse to make. Endowments are largely restricted and already used to paper over structural deficits. Tuition increases are politically and economically constrained at campuses serving low-income students. Federal aid flows through institutions but cannot be repurposed for operations. There is no hidden pool of fungible money waiting to be redirected.

    What would replacing MSI funding actually require? Cutting administrative spending. Reducing executive compensation. Scaling back amenities and non-instructional growth. Reprioritizing instruction and academic support over branding and “customer experience.” These are choices institutions have consistently shown they will not make.

    This is why the rhetoric of social mobility rings hollow. Colleges celebrate access and equity when the costs are externalized—when federal grants pay for the work and compliance offices manage the paperwork. But when that funding disappears, so does the institutional courage to sustain the mission.

    The contrast with historically Black colleges and tribal colleges is instructive. Their core federal funding survives precisely because it is tied to historical mission rather than contemporary enrollment metrics, and because these institutions have long-standing political champions. That distinction exposes the truth: what is preserved is not equity, but power.

    The coming months will bring program closures, staff layoffs, and diminished support for the students MSI grants were designed to serve. What we will not see, despite solemn statements and carefully worded emails, is a widespread commitment by colleges to fund these programs themselves.

    The test is simple and unforgiving. If social mobility were truly a foundational principle of higher education, institutions would treat MSI programs as essential—not optional, not grant-contingent, not expendable. They would pay for them out of their own budgets.

    They won’t.

    And in that refusal, the performance ends. The mission statements remain, but the money moves elsewhere.

    Sources

    Inside Higher Ed, “DOJ Report Declares Minority-Serving Institution Programs Unlawful,” December 22, 2025.

    U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Legal Counsel, Opinion on Minority-Serving Institution Grant Programs, 2025.

    U.S. Department of Education, Title III and Title V Program Data, Fiscal Years 2020–2025.

    Government Accountability Office, Higher Education: Trends in Administrative and Instructional Spending, various reports.

    Delta Cost Project / American Institutes for Research, Trends in College Spending, 2003–2021.

    State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO), State Higher Education Finance Reports, 2010–2024.

    University of California Office of the President, California State Auditor Reports on Administrative Spending and Reserves.

    Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board; Florida Board of Governors; UNC System Office, public records and budget documents on DEI office eliminations, 2024–2025.

    Bloomberg News and Associated Press reporting on DEI bans and campus program closures, 2024–2025.

    National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), IPEDS Finance and Enrollment Data.

    American Council on Education, Endowment Spending and Restrictions in Higher Education.

    IRS Form 990 filings and audited financial statements of selected public and private universities.

    Columbia University public statements on federal research funding disruptions, 2025.

    University of Hawaiʻi system communications on federal grant losses and bridge funding, 2025.

    Congressional Budget Justifications, U.S. Department of Education, FY2025–FY2026.

    Ehrenreich, Barbara and John, The Professional-Managerial Class, and subsequent scholarship on administrative growth in higher education.

    Student Borrower Protection Center, Student Debt and Institutional Finance, 2024–2025.

    Source link

  • Layoffs, Cuts and Closures Are Coming to LAUSD Schools As District Confronts Budget Shortfalls – The 74

    Layoffs, Cuts and Closures Are Coming to LAUSD Schools As District Confronts Budget Shortfalls – The 74


    Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

    Budget cuts, staffing reductions and school consolidations are coming to Los Angeles Unified as the cash-strapped district works to balance its shrinking budget, a top school official said. 

    LAUSD’s chief financial officer in an interview last week said declining enrollments and the end of pandemic relief funds have forced the district to take cost-cutting measures.  

    Schools have already been notified of how much they will have to cut from their budgets. The cuts will go into effect starting in August. 

    LAUSD officials in June had predicted a $1.6 billion deficit for the 2027-28 school year. But an updated version of the budget approved by the board last week eliminates the deficit by using reserve funds plus cost-cutting measures over the next two years. 

    The planned cuts to school budgets will begin in the 2026-27 school year, with school consolidations and staffing reductions planned for the following school year, said LAUSD Chief Financial Officer Saman Bravo-Karimi. 

    “We have fewer students each year, and in LAUSD that’s been the case for over two decades,” Bravo-Karimi said. “That has a profound impact on our funding levels. Also, we had the expiration of those one-time COVID relief funds that were very substantial.”  

    The district recently contracted with the consulting firm Ernst and Young to create models for closing and consolidating schools. While school officials wouldn’t say which schools or how many would be closed, the district has clearly been shrinking. 

    Enrollment last year fell to 408,083, from a peak of 746,831 in 2002. Nearly half of the district’s zoned elementary schools are half-full or less, and 56 have seen rosters fall by 70% or more. 

    Bravo-Karimi said in the current school year the district will spend about $2 billion more than it took in from state, local and federal funding. The trend of overspending is expected to continue next year and the year after that, he said.

    The district’s board in June approved a three-year budget plan that included a $18.8-billion budget for the current school year. The plan delayed layoffs until next year, and funded higher spending in part by reducing a fund for retirees’ health benefits. 

    According to the plan approved this month, the district will save:  

    • $425 million by clawing back funds that went unused by schools each year 
    • $300 million by reducing staffing and budgets at central offices 
    • $299 million by cutting special funding for schools with high-needs students
    • $120 million by cutting unfilled school staffing positions
    • $30 million by consolidating schools  
    • $16 million by cutting student transportation 

    Bravo-Karimi said the district gets virtually all of its money through per-pupil funding from the state. Since enrollment in the district has fallen steadily for decades, and then sharply since the pandemic, funding is down significantly, he said.

    Most zoned L.A. elementary schools are almost half empty, and many are operating at less than 25% capacity. Thirty-four schools have fewer than 200 students enrolled; a dozen of those schools once had enrollment over 400.     

    The drops have prompted LAUSD leaders to talk about closing or combining schools, a controversial step that other big U.S. cities are already doing or considering. 

    Bravo-Karimi said the district would assess the needs of communities and the conditions at local schools before it makes any decisions about school closings or consolidations. 

    “That process needs to play out before any decisions are made about potential consolidation of school facilities,” he said.

    Bravo-Karimi said other factors, including ongoing negotiations with labor unions, and changes to state funding, will further impact the district’s budget in the coming months. 

    Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab and Research Professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, said the cuts planned for LAUSD are “relatively mild” compared to overall size of the district’s budget and cuts being considered at other districts around California and the rest of the country. 

    “I don’t think the people in the schools are going to notice that there’s a shrinking of the central office or that they’re using reserves,” said Roza. “Unless you’re one of the people who loses their transportation or if you’re in one of the schools that gets closed.” 

    But, Roza said, many of the cuts taken by LAUSD can only be made once, and the district still faces profound changes as enrollments continue to fall and downsizing becomes more and more necessary. 

    “This really should be a signal to families,” said Roza of the planned cuts in the district’s latest budget. “After several years of really being flush with cash, this is not the financial position that LA Unified is going to be in moving forward.” 

    LAUSD Board Member Tanya Ortiz-Franklin, who represents LAUSD’s District Seven, which includes neighborhoods such as South L.A., Watts and San Pedro, said the district will work to shield kids from the impact of budget cuts. 

    But, Ortiz-Franklin said, the district hired permanent staffers with one-time COVID funding, and now some of those staffers will have to be let go. 

    Still, LA Unified has made strong gains since the pandemic, she said, and the district must work hard to preserve its upward trajectory despite financial headwinds. 

    “We would love to share good news, especially this time of year,” said Ortiz-Franklin. “But the reality is, it is really tough.” 

    School leaders across LAUSD received preliminary budgets for the next year over the last few weeks, said Ortiz-Franklin. Some schools in her district are facing cuts of up to 15%, forcing them to make tough decisions on which staffers to keep and who to let go. 

    Several hundred additional layoffs will be announced in February, she said, when the district makes another assessment of staffing needs. 

    “We don’t know the total number yet, and we don’t know which positions yet,” said Ortiz-Franklin.


    Did you use this article in your work?

    We’d love to hear how The 74’s reporting is helping educators, researchers, and policymakers. Tell us how

    Source link

  • Universities in England can’t ignore the curriculum (and students) that are coming

    Universities in England can’t ignore the curriculum (and students) that are coming

    What has schools policy got to do with higher education?

    The Westminster government has published Becky Francis’s Curriculum and Assessment Review, unveiling what Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson calls “landmark reforms” to the national curriculum.

    Interestingly, the revitalised curriculum is to be a “core part” of how the government will deliver the Prime Minister’s target of two-thirds of young people participating in higher-level learning by age 25.

    The review treats higher education as an explicit destination, not a distant afterthought.

    When it invents a new “third pathway” at level 3, it insists those V Levels must carry higher education credibility and be built so that young people can progress to degree-level study as well as work – hence Ofqual regulation and sector-standard-linked content. In other words, this isn’t a dead-end vocational cul-de-sac – it is designed to be read and trusted by admissions tutors.

    On T Levels, the panel recognises reality on the ground – many universities do already accept T Level learners – but says the acceptance landscape is messy, confusing and poorly signposted. Its answer is that government should keep working with providers and HEIs to promote understanding across the HE sector so applicants know which courses take T Levels and on what terms. The implication for universities is making recognition statements clearer, and aligning them with national guidance as it emerges.

    Why the anxiety about clarity? Because the authors kept bumping into learners who don’t grasp how subject and qualification choices at 16–19 play out later for university admission. That includes confusion introduced by new badge-sets like AAQs and TOQs. It turns out that if you design a landscape that looks like alphabet soup, you shouldn’t be surprised when applicants misread the signposts.

    Bacc to the future

    The EBacc gets a particular dressing-down. It’s true that taking an academic portfolio at GCSE correlates with applying to – and attending – university. But the review finds that EBacc combinations do not boost the chance of getting into the Russell Group, (although the only source for this is a paper from 2018, which doesn’t really come down conclusively against it), and that EBacc’s accountability pull has constrained subject choice in ways that squeeze arts and applied options. For HE, that means any lingering myth that EBacc equals elite-entry advantage gets killed off.

    There’s a financial edge to all this that the review politely doesn’t mention. When the previous government tried to defund BTECs, analysis showed the policy could strip £700 million in tuition fee income from the sector, with catastrophic effects for subjects like nursing, sport science, and computing – some facing 20 per cent recruitment losses. Those shortfalls would land heaviest on lower-tariff universities already wrestling with flat domestic recruitment and collapsing international numbers.

    The stakes for getting pathway reform right are existential for parts of the sector. If V Levels don’t recruit at scale, if T Level recognition remains patchy, and if the “simplification” just creates new barriers for disadvantaged students rather than removing old ones, some universities and programmes will struggle to recruit. The review’s optimism about legibility needs to meet reality – student choice is sticky, established qualifications have brand recognition, and centrally-planned qualification reform has a patchy track record. T Levels attracted just 6,750 students after £482 million of investment.

    As well as all of that, the panel seems super keen to stress the continuing strength of A levels as a pipeline, noting that in 2022/23 some eighty-two per cent of A level learners progressed to higher education by age 19. Whatever else changes, the academic route remains a robust feeder – and universities should expect the report’s other reforms to orbit around, not replace, that core.

    Crucially, the review refuses the tired binary that “vocational” equals “non-HE.” It records evidence that large applied or technical programmes can carry real weight with HE providers – precisely because they demonstrate breadth and depth in a way that can be benchmarked consistently across learners. If you run foundation years or applied degree routes, you are being invited to read these programmes seriously.

    It also acknowledges the contested evidence on outcomes for legacy qualifications like unreformed BTECs while still affirming their role in widening participation. The nuance matters – some qualifications have varied quality and mixed university performance data, yet for those who succeed in HE, BTECs and other AGQs have often been the bridge in. A credible vocational pathway that keeps that bridge open – while simplifying the current maze – is the intended fix.

    Are universities actually ready to make good on these promises? The sector has spent years documenting how BTEC students – despite “equivalent” tariff points – have systematically worse outcomes than A-level students. Arguably, the problem in some providers isn’t the qualification – it’s that first-year curricula and pedagogy remain stubbornly designed around A-level assumptions. Group projects, applied assessment, practical skills – the things BTEC students excel at – routinely get squeezed out in favour of essays and exams that privilege academic writing developed through A-levels.

    So when the review insists V Levels must “carry higher education credibility” and enable progression to degrees, the translation work required isn’t just clearer admissions statements – it’s a more fundamental rethink of how universities teach first-year students, assess them, and support their transition.

    Put together, the narrative runs something like this. Design V Levels to be legible to universities, clean up T Level recognition so applicants aren’t left guessing, stop pretending EBacc is a golden ticket to elite admission, and keep A levels stable, but value applied depth where it’s rigorous.

    And above all, help students understand how choices at 16–19 map to HE doors that open, or close, later.

    What (or who) is coming?

    There are some wider bits of note. The review has things to say about AI:

    …generative artificial intelligence has further heightened concerns around the authenticity of some forms of non-exam assessment… It is right, therefore, that exams remain the principal form of assessment.

    As such, it urges no expansion of written coursework and a subject-by-subject approach to non-exam assessment where it is the only valid way to assess what matters. It also tasks DfE and Ofqual to explore potential for innovation in on-screen assessment – particularly where this could further support accessibility for students with SEND – but cautions that evidence for wider rollout is thin and equity risks from the digital divide are real.

    Digital capability stops being taken-for-granted. Computing becomes the spine for digital literacy across all key stages, explicitly incorporating AI – what it is, what it can and can’t do – and broadening the GCSE so it reflects the full curriculum rather than a narrow slice of computer science. Other subjects are expected to reference digital application coherently, but the foundations live in Computing. Online safety and the social-emotional ethics of tech use sit in RSHE, while the “is this real?” critical discernment is anchored in Citizenship.

    The ambition is a cohort that can use technology safely and effectively, understands AI well enough to question it, and can interrogate digital content rather than drown in it.

    More broadly, English is recast so students study “the nature and expression of language” – including spoken language – and analyse multi-modal and so-called “ephemeral” texts. That builds media-literate readers and writers who can spot persuasion, evaluate sources, and switch register across platforms, backed by a Year 8 diagnostic to catch gaps early. Drama regains status as a vehicle for performance, confidence and talk.

    In parallel, an “oracy framework” is proposed to make speaking and listening progression explicit across primary and secondary – something schools say is currently fuzzy and inconsistently taught. The sector should expect clearer outcomes on expressing ideas, listening, turn-taking and audience awareness, with specific hooks in English and Citizenship.

    Citizenship is made statutory at primary with a defined core – financial literacy, democracy and government, law and rights, media literacy, climate and sustainability – and tightened at secondary for purpose, progression and specificity. The point is to guarantee exposure, not leave it to chance. If implemented properly, you’d expect clearer outcomes on budgeting and borrowing, evaluating claims and campaigns, understanding institutions and rights, and participating respectfully in debate.

    And climate education also steps out of the margins. Expect refreshed content in Geography and Science and an explicit sustainability lens in Design and Technology, with an eye on green skills and the realities of local, affordable fieldwork. The intent isn’t a new silo called “climate” – it’s to make the concepts visible, current and assessed where they logically belong.

    What’s next?

    If this all lands as intended – and that’s a big “if” given implementation timelines and school capacity – universities should expect a cohort that’s been taught to interrogate sources, question AI outputs, and articulate arguments aloud, not just on the page.

    Whether all of this survives contact with reality should be the sector’s real concern. The review’s timeline assumes schools can execute sweeping curriculum reform, embed new pathways, and deliver enhanced oracy and media literacy by 2028 – all while navigating funding pressures, teacher shortages, and the usual chaos of system change. That’s ambitious even in favourable conditions.

    And universities know from painful experience that when school reform stumbles, they inherit the mess. BTECs were supposed to be the accessible applied route, until differential outcomes data revealed the sector hadn’t actually adapted to teach those students effectively. The EBacc was positioned as the passport to elite universities, until evidence showed it just constrained subject choice without improving Russell Group entry. The Francis Review has laudable intentions – genuine pathways, informed choice, rigorous applied options – but intentions aren’t infrastructure.

    If the 2028 cohort arrives at university having been promised that V Levels are “trusted by admissions tutors” but finds patchy recognition, or discovers their oracy training doesn’t translate because seminars still privilege A-level-style discourse, the sector will be cleaning up another policy gap between aspiration and delivery. The review knows this risk exists – hence the repeated insistence on clarity, signposting, and sector cooperation.

    But cooperation requires capacity, and capacity requires resources neither schools nor universities currently have a box full of. Nevertheless, the intent is to send universities young people who can think critically, speak confidently, and navigate complexity.

    Source link

  • The Coming Federal Cuts – Part 3: ISED

    The Coming Federal Cuts – Part 3: ISED

    Monday, we looked at the country’s overall financial situation (dire), and yesterday we looked at how cuts of a magnitude of 15% might affect key programs like the Canada Education Savings Program and the Canada Student Financial Assistance Program. Today, we’re going to look at how a 15% cut might affect the Government of Canada’s research subsidies, which in the main are run through the Ministry of innovation, Science and Economic Development (ISED). 

    (I will be speaking about “the tri-councils” as a single funding line; I am aware that the Canadian Institute for Health Research (CIHR) is funded through Health Canada but for this exercise it is easier just to lump them together).

    Let’s start by acknowledging that ISED is a sprawling mess of a department with small programs with very little political protection littered all over the place. I wouldn’t bet the farm on the $12 million “Futurpreneur Canada” making it out of this budget round alive. I also doubt the Universal Broadband Fund is going to continue at $900 million per year. Computers for Schools (sounded great in the 90s, less so now) and Computers for Schools Interns would also be on my endangered list. I suspect that the various regional development funds might be in for an outsized hit as well. All of which is to say that it is possible that the research enterprise – that is, the tri-Councils, the National Research Council (NRC), the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) and all those organizations that get part or all their money through the Strategic Science Fund – might not get hit with a 15% cut. It’s quite possible all these other areas might take an outsized hit and allow the actual science stuff to get off with a lighter cut.

    That said, remember this key point: the budget exercise is not about cutting 15% of funding from where it should theoretically be in three years’ time (the government has a fiscal framework that extends out four or five years). It is about cutting expenditures from a 2024-25 baseline. That means that to get through any previously planned increase in spending, the cuts to existing programs must be more than 15%. 

    This matters for two reasons. First, it is because the government runs its subsidies to electric vehicles manufacturers through ISED. Those subsidies were worth $39M in 2024-25; they were planned to cost $2.1 billion this year and $4.2 billion in 2027-28 (i.e. it’s about half the department’s direct budget spend come two years from now, and about a third of total sci/tech spend if you include the tri-councils). To accommodate that increase while following the letter of the budget reduction request would basically mean requiring the entire department to shut down. That’s probably not happening (though one presumes that Carney’s announcement last week releasing Canadian auto manufacturers from their 20% EV sales target in 2026 might also lead to a reduction in EV subsidies to manufacturers). 

    Second, remember budget 2024? The one where the Liberals promised $1.8 billion in new spending on research and the whole sector cheered with relief? Yeah, well only $75 million went into the budget framework for 2024-25; 87% of that 1.8 billion is backloaded until after spring 2026. So, basically none of it is protected, and it’s all at risk. I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if they just cancelled the whole thing. And then, on top of that, we must worry about what happens to existing programs, and whether they take a 15% hit.

    CIHR transfers about $1.2 billion to Canadian post-secondary institutes each year, while the National Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) transfers about $1 billion, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) transfers about $440 million (although a fair bit of that last one includes combined tri-council projects which administratively run through SSHRC, including – if I am not mistaken – funding for the Canada First Research Excellence Fund). CFI is another $550 million a year or so. NRC is about $1.7 billion per year. The Strategic Science Fund is another $900 million or so, closer to a billion if you include base funding for Genome Canada. Canada Research Chairs are another $300 million. Call it $6.2 billion in total. Required savings to get to a 15% cut is therefore just under $1 billion.

    Where to start?

    Ask most researchers at universities what they would prefer, and the answer is likely that they would eliminate everything except the tri-council funding. Ditch CFI, significantly cut NRC, definitely obliterate the Strategic Science Fund – anything, anything, anything but touch tri-Council grants. I understand the preference, but as I noted last week, this is a monumentally detrimental position for the sector to take. Yes, basic research and the existing grant system are the basis of the existing tenure and promotion system, and as such is naturally dear to those in the system, but almost no one in Ottawa thinks that’s what these systems are for. If we’re going to keep research funding afloat, it’s probably going to be through more spending on things like the Strategic Science Fund.

    I have very little insight into the state of official Ottawa’s current thinking on the relative value of these various programs, but I could imagine three basic scenarios that get us to $1 billion in savings.

    Option 1 is a straight 15% cut across the board. Take out $400 million or so from the granting councils, $80 million from CFI, $250 million from NRC, cut the Strategic Science Fund and Genome Canada to the tune of $150 million or so, and lose about 350 Canada Research Chairs. 

    Option 2 would be the spare the professors approach. Now, you probably can’t spare them entirely, because they are such a big proportion of the overall expenditure, but if you jacked up the cuts to CFI, NRC and Strategic Science to say 25%, you could hold the losses to CRCs and the tri-councils to under $100M. I think this is unlikely, but it is a possible scenario.

    Option 3 would be the hammer the tri-councils approach. Because, as I said, I don’t think they are particularly well-liked at Finance/PMO. This is close to the inverse of option 2; zero cuts to NRC and Strategic Science, keep the CFI cut at 15% and take the rest of the necessary money out of the tri-councils. That would mean a cut of about $800 million or about 30% to council funding.

    And remember, all of this is on top of walking back the measures announced in the 2024 Budget. Ugly doesn’t even begin to cover it.

    To be clear: I suspect it is unlikely that the research area will get a cut of 15%, in part because officials will feel bad about doing serious damage to existing budgets after, I suspect, already taking away the Budget 2024 measures. If I had to guess, I would say that the department will probably come down hardest on regional development subsidies. Nevertheless, the scenarios above are possible even if not probable. Universities should start thinking about what they might mean and how they might cope. 

    Source link

  • The Coming Federal Cuts – Part 2: ESDC

    The Coming Federal Cuts – Part 2: ESDC

    Yesterday, I explained why the federal government now finds itself in a position where it has to cut program budgets by at least 15% just to keep the budget deficit to $50 billion by 2028. Today, I am going to explain how this will play out at Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC), which plays a major role in funding for skills and education in Canada, mainly through the Canada Education Savings Program (CESP) and the Canada Student Financial Assistance Program (CSFAP).

    Now, just a note at the start. It is vanishingly unlikely that the feds will actually look for 15% savings in every program. The 15% rule is for the Department as a whole, and ESDC is one big mother of a department. It includes all sorts of programs including EI (which in theory is exempt from cuts), and child care.

    So, let’s start with CESP, which delivers about a billion dollars a year via matching grants to parents saving for their kids’ education via Registered Education Savings Plans (RESPs). This program doesn’t allow for a lot of nuance in cutting. The program gives out about $1.1 billion a year in Canada Education Savings Grants (CESGs), roughly 85% of which goes on a basic 20 cent-to the dollar match rate and about 15% of which goes to “additional” (i.e. higher) matching rates for lower-income Canadians (A-CESGs). It also runs the Canada Learning Bond Program, which is another roughly $150 million per year which is a non-matching grant of up to $2000 to children from low-income backgrounds to start their educational savings.

    There are basically four options here:

    1) The government could cut program spending across the board by 15%. That is, it could lower the base CESG matching rate from 20% to 17%, and A-CESG payment rates for lower income contributors to 26.5% and 34% from the current 30% and 40%. That would save about $150 million/year. It could also reduce the CLB payout to $1700.  

    2) The government could eliminate the A-CESG pieces entirely and go with a flat 20% coverage. That’s a pretty quick way to a 15% reduction.

    3) The government could axe the CLB. Again, a very quick way to get close to 15% reduction.

    4) The government could hold the A-CESG and CLB harmless and reduce the CESG base rate even further, to about 15%.  

    Now, personally, I think CESG probably comes out of this unscathed – that is, a 0% cut – because it’s one of the most popular government programs in existence. But these options give you a sense of what cuts might be, if applied uniformly across the department.

    (Yes, there are also presumably some savings to be made on the personnel side, but it’s a pretty simple and lean program – if you could get savings equal to even 0.5% of total expenditures from that, I’d be shocked).

    Let’s now head over to CSFAP spending and see how that might fare. It’s a bit more complex than CESG so it’s worth looking at its basic cost-structure. Using data from the CSFAP’s 2023 Actuarial report, it’s possible to look at overall direct program costs, as shown below in Figure 1. Technically, this is not a full state of program costs because there’s another billion or so in “alternative payments” to jurisdictions that do not participate in the CSFAP (i.e. Quebec, Nunavut and the NWT). But since this sum is calculated as a fraction of direct programs, we can more or less ignore them here – a 15% cut of the direct costs automatically translates through to a 15% cut in alternative payments as well. And our target number – given that CSFAP direct expenses are about $4.2 billion – would be about $628 million.

    Figure 1: Major areas of CSFAP spending, in millions, 2023-24

    So where do you carve out that much money from CSLP? Well for starters we could and should get rid of the $429 million we spent eliminating interest on loans after graduation. These subsidies do nothing for access; rather, they boost the incomes of middle-class 20–30-year-olds who have already finished school. And it is not a long-standing program. It is, in fact, a quite recent thing, announced by then-finance minister Chrystia Freeland in 2023 when the Liberals were desperately trying to throw a bone to house-poor urban twenty-somethings who at the time were threatening to vote not-Liberal. Now cutting this wouldn’t be a straight $429 million savings – loss of that subsidy would likely lead to increases in bad debt and Repayment Assistance program (RAP) charges somewhat. So, let’s call that a $350M win.  

    Where to find the other $275 million? Not administration: most of the admin money is tied up in payments to provinces for running the front end of the program or to the National Student Loans Service Centre (an outsourced agency which resides over by Square One in Mississauga for running the back end), neither of which can easily be changed in the short term. Maybe you could lose a couple of million in staff costs but not much more. Very little you can do about bad debts either.  RAP and interest subsidies before consolidation could be made less generous. In particular, the income threshold for access to RAP could be brought back down from the current $45K (roughly – it depends on family size) to say $38K, and interest during school could be brought up from zero to the current inflation rate or the government rate of borrowing (i.e. somewhere between 2 and 2.5%). I don’t have access to detailed financial figures on this, but my guess is that the RAP measure might save $50M or so; in-school interest might get you $100M.

    That still doesn’t quite get us to the required $625 million, so the only option left here is to start hacking away at grants. A straight cut in the maximum grant would be the easiest way to cut costs; bringing that down from $4200/year to, say, $3500/year would reduce spending by something along the lines of $400M/year. Another and more likely option would be for the feds to copy what Doug Ford did when he wanted to contain student aid costs – change grant eligibility criteria in such a way as to make grants harder to obtain. The obvious way to do this, I think, would be to change the rules for dependent/independent student status (i.e. the point at which students are considered to no longer get money from their parents) so that it took students five years to reach such independent status instead of four. I am not exactly sure how much that would save, but I’d wager it would be a minimum of a quarter-billion. 

    So, your menu of cut options for cutting CSFAP is, essentially:

    Bring back interest after graduation $350 million
    Admin $3-5 million
    Reduce RAP threshold to $38K $50 million
    Introduce in-school interest of 2.5% $100 million
    Cut maximum grants by $700/year $400/million
    Change definition of independent student $250 million

    (To be clear here, I am guessing a bit on some of these numbers. Intelligently, I hope, but they are guesses. Don’t take the numbers here as gospel. And if any friends at CSLP want to correct me, please do!)

    If it were me, to get to (roughly) the required $625 million I’d bring back interest after graduation – or introduce an equal-to-government-rate-of-borrowing interest rate for the entire life of the loan, which probably ends up with similar savings – and change the definition of independent students. Neither are pleasant but these are the ones that would probably affect access the least.  

    (Again, the Liberals may choose not to cut anything in CSFAP, because hey this is an income security program of a sort, and if we’re obsessing about “affordability” – but that just means cuts elsewhere in the portfolio will be larger).

    Of course, ESDC is much more than these two programs. Take a gander at the full list of programs the programs the Ministry runs (I make it about fifty if you include everything). A lot of those are scattered skills initiatives like Youth Employment and Skills, Indigenous Skills and Employment Training, the Skills and Partnership Fund, Skills for Success Program, the Innovative Work-integrated Learning Initiative. I have no idea what most of these do exactly, nor is it easy to access any budget data about them. But let’s put it this way – few of these programs have a particularly large policy constituency to back them up. My guess is that cuts across these programs will be significantly higher than 15% and some of them may cease to exist altogether.  

    Enough for today.  Tomorrow we’ll do research funding.

    Source link

  • The Coming Federal Cuts – Part 1

    The Coming Federal Cuts – Part 1

    The biggest thing everyone is going to be talking about this year – barring another university doing a surprise Laurentian – is the set of federal cuts coming down the pike. They are big. And they are nasty. So, it’s worth understanding exactly the scale of what is heading in our direction. This is going to be a three-parter. Today, I will talk about the overall size of the cuts to come, and on Tuesday and Wednesday I will talk about how this will affect the two ministries that have the most to do with post-secondary education: Employment and Skills Development Canada (ESDC, tomorrow) and Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED, Wednesday).

    So: we don’t know the exact scope of the budget cuts the government is contemplating. What we do know is the following:

    Preliminary budget figures for Fiscal 2024-25 show that the government of Canada posted a budget deficit of $43.2 billion on revenues of $495B, program expenses of $480B, debt charges (that is, interest on existing debt) of $54B and actuarial losses of $4B. We didn’t have a budget this spring, but spending projections for 25-26 from the 2024-25 budget show a projected deficit of $39 billion on revenues of $515B, program expenses of $496B, debt charges of $55B and actuarial losses of $2B.

    The Liberal Manifesto for election 2025 planned deficits of $60 billion or so right through to 2028-29. Its fiscal plan was basically i) existing spending commitments, ii) 30-odd billion in new spending and tax cuts and iii) tiny revenue changes, plus $20 Billion or so in counter-tariffs for 2025-26. (Yes, they also promised “savings from increased productivity” – otherwise known as “frantic handwaving” – of $6B, $9B and $13B in fiscal years ’27, ’28 and ’29. I am excluding them here but will return to them in a sec).

    Figure 1: Government of Canada fiscal picture according to the Liberal manifesto, minus the handwaving, in Billions.

    (The foregoing might all sound strange to those of you who recall Carney making pledges about balanced budgets. But, of course, as I pointed out back here, he never actually promised that. He promised balanced operating budgets, that is budgets with an only vaguely defined “capital spending” netted out. By a complete coincidence, the Liberal platform claimed the government spent roughly $50 billion in capital, so basically the government is already basically in balance.  Neat trick, but not sure bondholders will see it that way. I digress.)

    Since the election, a few things have happened. Counter-tariffs are not collecting anything like the $20 billion forecast, we ditched the Digital Services Tax in a futile attempt to get the Americans to be nicer to us, and, most importantly of all, the prime minister promised to up defense spending by about $18 billion over the next four years in order to reach 2% of GDP by 2028. That means the actual fiscal picture, before any handwaving about savings, looks like this:

    Figure 2: Government of Canada fiscal picture, according to the Liberal Manifesto, minus the handwaving, including proposed spending and tariffs since April 28, in Billions.

    As you can see, we are a lot further away today from “operating balance” (i.e. a $50B deficit) than we were when Carney was elected. And this is where the handwaving/cuts come into play. So, let’s start thinking about how much money it would take to keep us at “operating balance”. In Figure 3, we see that by 2028-29, we are looking at about $32 Billion in cuts. The handwaving “efficiencies” in the Liberal manifesto were meant to cover just $13 billion of that, leaving another $19.2 billion or so to be made up, somewhere, somehow.

    Figure 3: Cuts Required Just to Keep the Government of Canada at Operating Balance (i.e. a $50B deficit), By Source, in Billions.

    I said “somewhere”, but there isn’t much mystery here. As Figure 4 shows, you divide government spending into four categories: debt charges (which the government has to pay regardless), transfers to provinces (which Carney has promised he won’t touch), transfers to individuals (ditto) and then “program spending”. As Figure 4 shows, the first three areas make up 58% of total spending. That means that the last area, program spending, is going to take up the entirety of these cuts. In 2025-26, program spending is estimated at $227 billion; a $32 billion cut to that equals an overall reduction in program spending of 14% by 2028. (Coincidentally, this was more or less exactly the size of the program cuts in the “savage” 1995 budget – $7 billion phased in over three years on a base budget of about $52 billion. Government grew back, as you can see.)  

    Figure 4: Government of Canada Expenditures by Category, 2025-26

    It’s worth being careful here. Overall program spending is $227 billion, but $46 billion of that is currently being spent on defense and housing, two areas that are almost certainly immune to cuts given the government’s overall priorities. Excluding these two fields from cuts means that the field of “cuttable” programs shrinks to $181 billion, and the size of the cuts required to meet the $50 billion target balloons to 17.7%.  

    This brings us to the program review that has been going on in Ottawa since July. Recall that Minsters were asked to bring forward scenarios that involved cuts of 7.5% for next year, 10% the year after that and 15% the year after that. Many thought initially that these numbers were deliberately overdone so that big cuts could be made in some departments so as to shield other departments from having to do the same. Now I am not so sure. That 15% target is awfully close to the 17% overall target the Liberals need to hit just to keep the deficit at $50 billion, and so I am starting to think that in fact the cuts might not be dispersed unequally between departments. They might really need 15% from everybody – and then some.

    There are a couple of alternatives of course that could lessen the blow. For instance, while Carney promised not to cut transfers to provinces, to my knowledge he never ruled out cutting the rate of growth of transfer payments (currently about 5% per year, across CHT, CST and equalization combined). Slash that in half and you’ve got yourself another $8 billion to play with by 2028, thereby reducing by a quarter the required amount of program cuts. Something similar could be achieved by de-indexing pensions for a couple of years. Or, unlikely as it seems, the Government could actually increase taxes (elbows up requires some sacrifices, no?). But, absent those measures, I think we need to seriously brace for impact. These cuts are real, they are huge, and even if they don’t hit this fall (it’s not impossible that the alleged fall budget might actually just be the usual fall economic statement under another name), they are for sure going to hit in early 2026.

    The question, really, is, what needs to be saved? What should the sectors’ priorities be? I’ll discuss that over the next two days.

    Source link

  • What’s coming up for HE policy in 2025–26

    What’s coming up for HE policy in 2025–26

    It was early November 2024 when Secretary of State for Education Bridget Philipson issued her edict to heads of institution in England, confirming the government’s plans to increase the undergraduate fee threshold to £9,535 from 2025–26, and setting out her five priorities for higher education.

    Ten months on and there remains not a great deal of additional flesh on those bones. The planned summer white paper on post-16 education and skills, incorporating HE reform, has been pushed to the autumn. In the interim, while the Office for Students (OfS) has stepped up its work on financial sustainability, it’s clear that the government is not minded to ride to the rescue of the sector at system level, whatever it might decide to do about financially challenged institutions.

    The Spending Review was accompanied by the announcement of a further squeeze on the Strategic Priorities Grant. The immigration white paper proposed a six per cent levy on international fees. The prospect of an ongoing annual inflationary fee threshold uplift remains unconfirmed. And the rollout of the Lifelong Learning Entitlement, while potentially paradigm-shifting in the long term, offers mostly short-term pain and expense for rather limited gains.

    This area is getting greyer

    Though ministers probably wouldn’t articulate it like this, at stake is the status of higher education as a “public realm” sector. It’s not currently politically or economically advantageous for government to be seen to take seriously the sector’s financial concerns even where there are signs of systemic weakness in the funding model. That pragmatic (or cynical, if you prefer) position is bolstered by a regulatory framework that views higher education providers primarily through the lens of service provision to students rather than as public institutions providing a range of public goods in places.

    Yet for a government that is politically and economically concerned with the provision of public goods in places, nor is it especially politically palatable to lean into the notion of independent higher education providers doing whatever they can to ensure their own success and sustainability rather than acting with reference to wider common purposes.

    There’s often a strong degree of overlap between institutional interests and the public interest – arguably one critical dimension of higher education leadership is being able to locate and occupy that common ground. Two things can be true: institutions can, and do, pursue both their own self-interest and the common good, simultaneously. And discussion of abstract concepts like public and private obviously ignores the actions and motivations of individual institutions, many of whom go to quite a lot of trouble and expense to work with and for the interests of their stakeholders.

    But at system level what you think an “HE reform package” should include depends very much on how much you think the private interests of HE institutions diverge from the wider public interest, in what areas of activity, and the extent to which you think the government can or should do something about it. And I don’t think those questions have yet been resolved in the corridors of power, where arguably the locus of responsibility for “higher education” as an object of policy remains scattered.

    It is relatively easy to point to examples of where the HE market model has created areas of concern – particularly when it comes to loss of subject diversity in particular regions or localities, or a lack of a subject offer in an area of known skills gaps, or to the rising costs to students and parents of sustaining full-time study, or to the risks to academic quality arising from particular modes of delivery or from instability in institutional finances. It’s much harder to articulate a policy settlement that articulates appropriate, measured, inexpensive and effective government intervention at system level to realign institutional and public interest where there appears to be divergence.

    In particular, when it comes to questions of “transformation” – in the sense of individual institutions changing their academic portfolio, or use of technology; in the sense of institutions joining together to create efficiencies or realise additional value from scale or coordination; and in the sense of the future overall size and shape of the sector – the role of government remains opaque. It may be possible that “transformation” will happen in response to market demand and financial pressure and be funded from private sources. It may also be possible that “transformation” will only occur with some active convening (and financing) from government. Whatever the claims made about what ought to be happening, nobody really has a firm view on how much transformation is really required, what it should look like, or whose responsibility it is to make it happen.

    It’s possibly not all that surprising, then, that what has emerged from government on higher education in the last academic year has been rather “bitty” – to use the appropriate technical term. A consultation on franchised provision here, a revision to free speech legislation there, a slide deck on preparing for the LLE over here, a cheeky new levy over there. Don’t expect a grandiose new vision for HE to emerge this year; instead turn your mind to deciding whether the sum total of all the things that will be occupying minds in the year ahead add up to something that equals a material change of state for the sector.

    It’s all coming up

    When the post-16 education and skills plus HE reform paper does show up, it will almost certainly hit some familiar notes: regional economic growth; skills; opportunity. We know there’s an appetite in government to think about “coordination” of post-16 providers in places and an aspiration to deploy a more coordinated approach to streamline everything from the regional skills offer to employer engagement.

    Policy architecture available includes the Devolution Bill, Skills England, the planned Growth and Skills Levy replacing the Apprenticeships Levy, and the Lifelong Learning Entitlement – as well as OfS’ signals on a shift to a more regional approach to widening access. There is significant support in principle for the notion of coordination for the benefit of places, but a glaring absence of ideas of how independent providers might be not only brought to the table but arrive at a consensus about who should offer what kind of education opportunity to whom.

    Also potentially in the mix for an “HE reform” package, if Bridget Phillipson’s priorities haven’t shifted in the last ten months, are academic quality, civic engagement, and efficiency. The Department for Education has not yet said what its plans are with regard to tightening up oversight of franchised provision, following its consultation earlier this year, so that may well appear also. OfS is already planning to consult on its planned new integrated quality framework in the autumn, so assuming there is effective coordination between government and the regulator there should be alignment between what the government proposes and what OfS consults on.

    One wild card to look out for is institutional governance – OfS has signalled in the past year that it has concerns about the ability of boards of governors to effectively manage financial sustainability challenges, whether that is in securing academic quality under pressure or retaining effective oversight of new partnerships and income streams, and that concern has been reinforced in communications from DfE. While it would be surprising to see government take a view on the constitution of boards or on the codes of practice they are encouraged to adhere to, it would not be entirely unexpected to see a request for OfS to further extend or strengthen regulatory oversight in this area. Elsewhere on the site, incoming Advance HE chief executive Alistair Jarvis has signalled some key priorities for development in governance within weeks of taking up the role.

    A further wild card would be something on graduate employability – previously ministers have suggested that institutions whose graduates do less well in the labour market by the current measures should cut the pay of their heads of institution. While that’s a proposal that obviously plays well for media, it doesn’t amount to a serious policy. But with (probably wildly overstated) concerns doing the rounds about graduate jobs and AI, and (much more sensible) questions about the value of graduate skills in different parts of the country feeding directly into ideas about equity of opportunity, government may well feel this is an area it wants to make a target for policymaking.

    Doing more with less

    The future of research funding seems increasingly lashed to the mast of economic growth. It is the golden thread that runs through UKRI’s latest plans, the basis of the industrial strategy, and UKRI rates financial sustainability within the research system as high risk and high likelihood.

    2025–26 is going to be about who gets paid, on what basis, and how the impact of the resulting research activity will be measured. Everyone’s favourite forever debate, the future of REF, fits neatly within this financial triangle. 2025–26 should bring certainty, if not consensus, on the shape of the next REF, even if the overall sum up for grabs is a fraction of the overall R&D budget. Given the timescales involved in REF it is likely that there will be some kind of announcement in the next few weeks on its future.

    Place is going to continue to be the primary lens through which economic growth is discussed. The Local Innovation Partnership will launch this academic year with at least £30 million for each of ten regions across the UK, including one in each of the devolved nations. The success of the industrial strategy is entirely reliant on improving productivity across the country so expect to see new funds, tweaks to existing funds, debates on devolutions deals, and a raft of place based initiatives coming from the sector.

    Once UKRI’s new mission leads are in post, along with UKRI’s new chief executive who is now in his role, the sector should have a clearer sense of how their work will align with the government’s missions. It would be refreshing if the new personnel also usher in a new era of stability across the research ecosystem. The evolving work into research evaluation may prove a useful tool in this mission.

    Of course economic growth is limited by the financial reality universities find themselves in. There is lots of concern about full economic costing (FEC) but very little action on reducing the financial burden of research. There are clear signals of reduced capital spending and following UKRI’s outgoing chief executives statement on the possibility of research consolidation it looks like frugality will continue to be a reality for many.

    Away from home this version of Horizon Europe enters its penultimate year with the UK’s entrance to the new scheme the government’s preferred option. The ongoing trampling of academic norms in America will continue to shape UK-US partnerships while the future of UK-China research partnerships will once again be at the mercy of global politics.

    At a more institutional level an outcome on the publishers agreements negotiations between the sector and five of the major publishers looks to be coming to a head. The sector currently spends £112 million annually on Jisc negotiated agreements with the five largest publishers. A decision on whether to accept or reject the publishers proposals is due imminently. If the offer is rejected there will be significant pressure to find agreement or an alternative before the end of the current deals in 2026.

    Source link

  • Lauren Greenfield’s “Social Studies” & Coming of Age in a Social Media World (Daily Show)

    Lauren Greenfield’s “Social Studies” & Coming of Age in a Social Media World (Daily Show)







    Higher Education Inquirer : Lauren Greenfield’s “Social Studies” & Coming of Age in a Social Media World (Daily Show)




    Source link

  • What’s coming for higher education in the spending review?

    What’s coming for higher education in the spending review?

    The breadth of what we expect from the public sector is such that expertise needs to be distributed around the civil service.

    There are numerous costly initiatives, allocations, and activities fueled by state spending – all of them have advocates and skeptics, and hidden pitfalls and tensions.

    Even if there was a single brain that had a grasp of everything, how would that person weigh up the costs and benefits of spending on lifesaving drugs against maintaining housing benefits? Or expanding school breakfast clubs against meaningful support for public libraries? Or properly maintaining research infrastructure against properly maintaining flood defences?

    A spending review is an exercise in compromise – a search for the least worst answer – that almost by design disappoints nearly everyone. If there’s good news in one area of spending, there is pain coming elsewhere.

    Where did spending reviews come from?

    The idea of taking the time every few years to gather together all current public sector spending demands and assess the possibilities for savings feels like it has been around for ever.

    In fact, the first multi-year spending review took place as recently as 1998.

    Before this, UK spending and taxation was decided based on prevailing economic conditions – leading to accusations of short-termism in government thinking. After all it is difficult to plan sustainable programmes of spending with only one year of funding confirmed.

    The first multi-year comprehensive spending review was a Gordon Brown innovation – coming off the back of two years with public sector finance (politically) constrained by the previous government’s last year of allocations, it represented (in the language of the time) an opportunity for a newish Labour government to demonstrate ongoing “prudence”.

    As Brown put it:

    By looking not just at what government spends but at what government does, the review has identified the modernisation and savings that are essential. The first innovation of the Comprehensive Spending Review is to move from the short-termism of the annual cycle and to draw up public expenditure plans not on a one year basis but on a three year basis. And the review‘s second conclusion is that all new resources should be conditional on the implementation of essential reforms, money but only in return for modernisation

    Labour stuck a pattern of three year reviews throughout their last period of office – including another comprehensive spending review in 2007. Under Conservative-led administrations the pattern became more irregular (largely for reasons of political expediency, but also to respond to one off events like the Covid-19 pandemic). The last spending review was in 2021 – three governments (and three Prime Ministers) ago.

    How a spending review works

    The specifics may vary, but the review is a series of conversations conducted by the treasury (usually under the auspices of the Chief Secretary to the Treasury) and each department. Starting with officials modelling the impact of broad-brush cuts at various levels and arguing about what constitutes the work their department is required to do (the ambit) and what (for non-zero based spending reviews) the baseline funding should be, the process ends with ministers taking the argument directly to the treasury – or overhead to the prime minister and via carefully placed stories in the press.

    Eventually – the key date this year was as recent as late May – ministers and the Chancellor will come to a final agreement over what will be allocated and what, in broad terms, it will be spent on.

    Those who have been closely involved tend not to be enamoured of the process – former DfE adviser Sam Freedman recently described it as “demented” and “not a good or strategic way to make decisions about government spending”.

    In 2024

    The current iteration kicked off straight after the 2024 election, with the first part of it announced by Rachel Reeves alongside the autumn budget. Alongside some punchy political lines (that “£22bn black hole” for one) she confirmed the overall envelope for the spending review:

    Day to day spending from 2024-25 onwards will grow by 1.5 per cent in real terms, and total departmental spending, including capital spending, will grow by 1.7 per cent in real terms.

    We also got some broad promises on education spending – an extra £300m for further education, a £2.3bn increase in the schools core budget and a reform of special educational needs provision. However, the Institute for Fiscal Studies is warning that given other promises, most notably on defence and health, “unprotected” DfE recurrent spending (which would include spending on higher education) is likely to fall by around 3 per cent over the three years the review covers – and significant schools and FE spending (which the government is likely to want to protect) also appears within that bucket.

    Higher education is by no means alone in facing a very tight multi-year settlement – but it suffers in terms of public salience. While, thanks to the efforts of universities and trade unions, there is a general consensus that the sector is struggling it is neither as totemic (NHS, schools, defence) or visible (local services, adult skills, social care) as the recipients of other public spending. There’s been a lot of work done in making the arguments for investment, but these arguments are never going to be as strong as they need to be.

    That’s (flat) capital

    What Reeves appears to be promoting in the run up to the review is the availability of capital. Traditionally, spending reviews have only addressed departmental expenditure limits (DEL) – recurrent funding that can reasonably be controlled by the department in question – involving capital spending only really started in 2020 and 2021. Changes to, for example, eligibility rules for benefits can also have an impact on recurrent annual managed expenditure (AME) and spending reviews have moved further in that direction in recent times.

    Capital is more traditionally allocated and spent in fiscal events – it makes for big numbers and eyecatching infrastructure investments and doesn’t usually form a part of the spending reviews, but it was always in scope for 2024 to set capital budgets for at least five years.

    And the big sector-focused news has been about research and development funding. While by no means all R&D funding goes to universities, a substantial proportion will end up there – and the news that the overall allocation for R&D will keep pace with inflation until 2029-30 is undoubtedly good in the context of a very tight overall recurrent settlement. As my colleague James Coe sets out elsewhere on Wonkhe, there are other calls on R&D beyond the traditional UKRI allocations (though we know UKRI allocations will be broadly stable this year): there are calls for increased spending in defence research, there will be small (£30m to each current mayoral strategic authority) regional allocations, and there will likely be funding streams attached to each of the government’s missions.

    Recall also, the manifesto promise of ten-year funding settlements for some research activity. Five years of flat (inflation-compensated) funding represents exactly the kind of stable and predictable income that some parts of the sector have been asking for – if there are people unhappy with that, promising stability for ten years isn’t going to feel much different.

    Teaching funding

    Fans of the national accounts will know that the majority of funding allocated to teaching in higher education (the student loan outlay) is, in fact, AME capital. There has been some initial hope that the portion that isn’t (the recurrent DEL that is allocated via the grant letter to the Office for Students) would form a part of the long promised review of funding – but this looks less likely than a commitment to continue inflationary fee-cap uplifts alongside measures to improve efficiency in spending (rooting out fraudulent applications and suchlike, promoting shared services).

    The parallel is with funding for 16-19 students – an extra £190m will push per-student funding up an inflation-busting 5.9 per cent next year, to £5,105. The recurrent funding simply isn’t there to do anything like that for direct higher education funding, but using an increase in capital spending offers a release valve via the tuition fee loan mechanisms.

    Fee increases would be unpopular (a tax on aspiration, if you like) with young people and their parents. The temptation would be to favourably tweak the conditions of repayment, and there may be some headroom here – if you recall last year’s earnest and sporadically understood talk around PSNFL in the fiscal rules, one of the upshots was that loans count as assets, and the more loans we have the more (in the short-to-medium term at least) assets we have. While this could fuel a further expansion of the sector, the current policy weather suggests that this flexibility could instead be used to offer young people a better loan deal.

    On the day

    While a multi-year spending review is an exercise in demonstrating the long term planning capacity of a government, the event itself has to interface with the short-term news cycles. There needs to be some good news in there – and the pre-announced transport capital, R&D capital, and above-inflation settlement for health are part of that.

    Good news could also take the form of announcing popular savings. Very few people will be disappointed in cuts to bureaucracy (at least in the short term, people do tend to become very upset when waiting times rise and services become less effective) and measures to address fraud. Here we’ve already heard a lot of mood music around fraud within the higher education funding system – the very high profile case of Oxford Business College suggests that ministers see the opportunity to better manage the current allocations of funding, and there is a consultation response ready to drop. We’d assumed this would come alongside the promised white paper, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see at least headline proposals sneak out earlier.

    Finally we have the broader favourite that is “efficiency” savings. Universities have been very engaged with this agenda ever since the HE Reform letter – the conjunction of the Universities UK report, the release of TRAC data (slightly delayed over last year), and the spending review may not be entirely coincidental.

    Source link