- Conference
- 2026 National Higher Education Conference
- Date
- 8 October 2025
- Decision
- Carried as Amended
The Higher Education (HE) sector has a funding crisis with a reported 40% of Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) being in financial deficit. Universities have responded in a number of ways to the detriment of our members. As budgets are cut HEIs are undertaking drastic cost-cutting measures, cutting courses, consolidating departments, delaying maintenance, increasing class sizes, and instigating job losses, many as compulsory redundancies. This coupled with vacancies going unfilled and natural staff turnover not being replaced those staff who do remain are subject to increasing workload demands, job insecurity and an unfavourable work life balance.
There are many reasons / excuses that are offered by University management as to why their particular institution is financially stressed including but not limited to, COVID, Brexit, and an immigration policy increasingly being driven by Far-Right ideology making UK HEI’s less attractive to international students. In the case of the latter, this is a grave issue as many Vice Chancellors (VC) were basing expenditure decisions on continuous uninterrupted overseas recruitment.
However, there is a more fundamental reason why the HE sector is in danger of catastrophic change; the funding model for HE in the UK is broken and is no longer fit for purpose. Student fees have recently been increased but best estimates conclude that they have fallen to approximately 60 percent of their real-world value due to inflationary pressures. We have seen the first instance of a creation of a “super university”; few will conclude that this was not done for no other reason than a financial necessity to stave off bankruptcy.
Within our own West Midlands Region, we have already seen devastating and ongoing cuts to professional and support roles at Coventry University, University of Staffordshire, University of Warwick and University of Wolverhampton, to name only some. Keele University is facing financial challenges, whilst University of Birmingham continues to not share its successes more widely with its hardworking staff.
UNISON’s submission to the Parliamentary Education Committee on Higher Education Funding is to be welcomed, but more needs to be done to challenge the media’s acceptance of only one union being the voice of HE staff.
Conference calls on the Higher Education Service Group Executive to :
1)Lobby the Government for a proper funding regime for HE that is both fair and sustainable and offers prospective students the opportunity to study at university dependant only on their ability to understand and comprehend their respective discipline and not their ability to pay;
2)Investigate ways to boost UNISON’s media profile in the HE Sector;
3)Work with Labour Link to campaign to bring about changes to immigration policy, so that HE students are not included – as supported by polling in this area.