Higher Education Funding

Lord Bishop of Sheffield Excerpts

Thursday 12th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Sheffield]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, for focusing the attention of the House on the HE crisis and for the opportunity to contribute to this debate. I look forward to the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Tarassenko.

As the Bishop of Sheffield I have close ties with both universities in the city, the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University. I am told that those two institutions support more than 19,500 jobs and generate more than £1 billion annually for the local economy. I know at first hand that they bring a rich cultural diversity to our city. What is true in Sheffield is true across the country: universities are generally hugely beneficial to the communities within which they are situated.

The Church of England believes that higher education should be in the service of the common good—that is to say, not merely the private good of personal enhancement but the public good of benefit to the community and society that it derives from the education of its citizens. For example, working together, Sheffield University and Sheffield Hallam University support communities across South Yorkshire in a variety of ways, and I would like to celebrate just three. First, they have partnered with local and national government to create the South Yorkshire investment zone, bringing jobs and billions of pounds in private investment to the area. Secondly, their students volunteer and work on placement years across health, education, social care, law and other areas, directly impacting the experience of local people of these essential public services. Thirdly, their HeppSY partnership supports those at risk of missing out on HE to make informed and inspired choices about their future.

Civic activities such as these are seriously threatened by the financial crisis in HE and the perfect storm currently battering the sector. In the past few years, as noble Lords have mentioned, there has been a drastic drop in EU students while international students from further afield are facing visa restrictions. UK students have been poorly placed to cope with the cost of living crisis, and I gather that a lower birth rate in the early 2000s means that there are reduced numbers of young people in the cohort currently in sixth-form and FE colleges. As a result, there has been increased competition between institutions for the same smaller pool of students, and the pinch has been felt most keenly by the smallest of our HE institutions.

Among these are the universities that belong to the Cathedrals Group, 14 church-founded universities committed to higher education for the common good. These 14 institutions make higher education disproportionately available to underserved communities, such as rural and coastal areas. They typically have a higher proportion of students who progress to university when they are older and who are the first in their family to make that step. I mention the Cathedrals Group simply by way of illustration. Our HE sector as a whole is under threat, and what is at risk is not just the private good of students and potential students, whose opportunities to study and to enhance their prospects have been eroded, but the common good that universities bring to the communities in which they are set.