Burman Bulletin: Week of 24 August

Every so often a report lands that says the quiet part out loud. This month it was HEPI's New Choices: Revisiting Futures for Higher Education in England, written by Sir Chris Husbands, and the headline finding isn't subtle: English higher education is drifting towards what he calls an "unstable hybrid" future, with no one really steering.

The numbers behind it are stark. The Office for Students projects 45% of providers will be in deficit this financial year, with 45 holding fewer than 30 days of liquidity, genuinely not much of a cushion. Severance costs across the sector jumped 71% year-on-year to £303 million, and the academic workforce actually shrank for the first time in over a decade. Even last year's fee cap rise barely moved the needle once increased employer National Insurance costs were factored in, netting the whole sector only around £18 million.

Husbands' picture of where this leads is a sector splitting into tiers: a smaller group of globally competitive research universities, a bigger tier of regionally focused institutions, some local providers partnering with private companies, and a handful of specialists built around a particular niche. Not a redesign anyone chose, more a drift that's already happening, just without a plan attached to it.

Here's the PS-relevant bit: Husbands is explicit that this can't just be left to individual universities to muddle through. He's calling on government for clearer policy on teaching funding, the Lifelong Learning Entitlement, international recruitment, and, tellingly, a proper framework for managed mergers and institutional exits. That last one matters. If mergers and closures are going to keep happening (and recent months suggest they will), having an actual framework for it beats the current ad hoc scramble, both for the institutions involved and the staff caught in the middle.

If you've sat through a restructure this year, none of this will feel like news. What's useful here is seeing the pattern named clearly, rather than experiencing it institution by institution as if each one were a one-off.

References:

• HEPI, New Choices: Revisiting Futures for Higher Education in England (23 July 2026)

• The PIE News, English universities face "unstable hybrid" future, warns HEPI report