A major reform of England’s post-16 education system published in October attracted little public attention, yet buried in this lengthy, technocratic document are proposals that could quietly reshape the country’s universities, shifting influence over research priorities towards national funding bodies and institutional management, while shrinking the space available for “curiosity-driven” inquiry.
So far, the government’s Post-16 Education and Skills White Paper has been received primarily as a reform of fees, skills and apprenticeships. Look more closely at its proposals on research and institutional “specialisation”, however, and a different picture emerges. Framed as an effort to “streamline” the sector and improve the “impact” of public investment, it urges universities to narrow their focus to a smaller range of institutional “strengths” and to draw much firmer distinctions between teaching and research.
The clearest sign of this shift comes in its outline of future institutional roles, which quietly abandons the traditional Humboldtian ideal of research-informed teaching as a universal model. “Over time,” the document states, “there will be fewer broad generalist providers and more specialists”, including “specialists in teaching only”, research-focused institutions, and universities combining teaching with “applied research in specific disciplines”.
That direction of travel is reinforced by proposals for a more “strategic distribution of research activity across the sector”, with the government noting that this “may mean a more focused volume of research… and stronger alignment to short- and long-term national priorities”.
Although ministers insist they are “protecting and promoting curiosity-driven research”, the paper focuses far more heavily on two other priorities: “supporting the delivery of government priorities, missions and the Industrial Strategy”; and “providing targeted innovation, commercialisation and scale-up support to drive growth”. Indeed, at times the language of curiosity-driven work is simply absorbed into a wider economic mission, as in the following breathless sentence listing all the ways the government will strengthen public research, which begins with all the right intentions but ends up displaying about as much respect for intellectual value as you’d find in an accountant’s spreadsheet: “protecting curiosity-driven research and applied research and development, supporting priority sectors, driving knowledge exchange, start-ups, spinouts and research-intensive industries, and creating a highly skilled workforce”. For disciplines whose value is not easily expressed in terms of commercial potential, productivity growth or the latest set of unemployment figures from the ONS, such phrasing offers little reassurance that curiosity-driven work will remain distinct from — or protected alongside — applied research.
Can curiosity-driven research really remain insulated in a system that places increasing weight on strategic alignment and economic relevance?
It’s true that elsewhere the White Paper promises to “pivot some of UK Research and Innovation’s funding to align to areas of strategic importance as described in the Industrial Strategy sector plans”. “Outside of the protected curiosity-driven research”, it explains, this move will “leverage the strength of our university research, postgraduate training and business partnerships to support areas with the greatest potential for economic growth”. On the face of it, that sounds like a guarantee. In practice, it places curiosity-driven work in a small, notional “protected” box, while explicitly hitching the rest of the system to the wagon of national economic strategy. Can curiosity-driven research really remain insulated in a system that places increasing weight on strategic alignment and economic relevance? I wonder — or at least, I would, were it likely to foster a start-up company or help create a highly skilled workforce.
For research-intensive universities, the emerging picture is one of closer alignment with UKRI’s strategic direction. Speaking to Times Higher Education, John Womersley, former executive chair of the Science and Technology Facilities Council, said there was “a definite edge” to the document. “It was saying, ‘We are going to make life harder for certain universities to continue what they’re doing’.” He added that the same message had been echoed in recent speeches by the science minister, Patrick Vallance, and in talks by UKRI chief executive Ian Chapman. “UKRI funding is the lever that will be used to push through these changes,” he said, pointing to Chapman’s recent call for universities to do “fewer things but doing them really well” and his acceptance that the “nature of this shift” will have major consequences “for some people”.
In such an environment, the risk is that institutional autonomy gives way to more assertive internal steering. As UKRI places greater emphasis on areas of “strategic importance” and on a more “focused volume of research”, university administrators will be under pressure to exert stronger influence over which research areas are developed or prioritised. That Chapman himself has spoken of a more “strategic relationship” between funders and universities, in which both sides agree on the areas of institutional strength to be supported, suggests this risk is far from speculative. The White Paper likewise promises that universities will be “recognised and rewarded for demonstrating alignment with government priorities”, reinforcing expectations that institutional research strategies will track national missions closely. In this context, university research “clusters” and “centres” may become increasingly tied to specific funding streams, leaving individual academics with less scope to pursue “curiosities” outside them.
By contrast, institutions encouraged to specialise in teaching face a different set of pressures. Over time, they are likely to come to resemble further-education or skills providers, with more central oversight of curriculum content and a greater emphasis on employability metrics and student satisfaction scores. At the same time, academics in teaching-only environments may find themselves treated less as originators of knowledge and more as deliverers of a predefined curriculum, with fewer structural protections to pursue controversial or experimental lines of inquiry.
In such settings, the influence of EDI teams will inevitably increase — not that even under the current system they could exactly be accused of hiding their virtuous light under a putrefying colonial bushel. Multiple recent investigations by the Committee for Academic Freedom (CAF) — at Leeds, Durham and UCL, for example — have documented cases in which EDI teams sought to embed their initiatives in module content, reading lists, teaching approaches and even recruitment, mandating “decolonised” curricula, promoting gender identity theory, and encouraging staff to adopt pronoun use. These interventions already sit uneasily with the principle of academic autonomy, and are likely to become more prominent in institutions where academics are no longer research-active and much of what passes for scholarship is filtered through managerially approved EDI agendas.
There is a certain grim irony here in that this twin movement — towards UKRI-aligned research in some universities and towards EDI-driven priorities in others — echoes a broader cultural drift recently identified by Professor Arif Ahmed, the Office for Students’ Director for Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom. Speaking at CAF’s annual conference in October, Ahmed invoked the philosopher Michael Oakeshott to trace the rise of the modern managerial university, in which corporate concerns increasingly eclipse intellectual autonomy.
In Oakeshott’s terms, a civil association is not a partnership in pursuit of some collective goal but a community governed by non-instrumental rules of conduct. The law sets parameters as to how we may act, not what ends we must serve. An enterprise association, by contrast, unites its members around a common goal and requires them to subordinate personal judgement and inclination to collective purpose.
For Ahmed, the remedy for this dismal reconfiguration lies in recovering the older, civil conception of the academy, where the protection of freedom of expression is not a managerial courtesy but a constitutional principle. In part, that is the function the recently commenced Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act is meant to serve — supporting academic freedom, and with it the conditions for “curiosity-driven research”, rather than dictating how and about what scholars must be curious. The law as a handrail, if you will, rather than a fully automated, strap-in Stannah stairlift decked out in Progress Pride colours.
Whether the recovery Ahmed hopes to see will be possible in a system reshaped along the lines envisaged by the government’s White Paper remains uncertain.
