Cuts in university funding could cause lasting damage to learning landscape, warns Chester vice-chancellor

Feb 25 2010 Chester Chronicle

UNIVERSITY cuts could cause long-term damage to the learning landscape, warns a church institution headed by Univrsity of Chester vice-chancellor Tim Wheeler.

A conference this weekend hear how university funding cuts threaten institutions with a distinctive Christian heritage and ethos.

The fear is this will limit students’ choices and jeopardise the training those institutions provide for vital public service roles.

This weekend (February 26-28), vice chancellors and principals of the 15 member institutions of the Council of Church Colleges and Universities (CCUC), known as the Cathedrals Group, will be meeting for their annual residential conference at Canterbury.

Originally church foundations, these universities and colleges offer a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, with a particular focus on professional training for the public sector, including teacher education, nursing and midwifery, social work, youth and community work, probation work and training for the health professions.

This year’s conference comes shortly after the announcement by the Higher Education Council for England (HEFCE) that public funding for universities and colleges will be reduced by almost 5% per annum, compounded over the three year period from 2010/11 to 2012/13, resulting in a total reduction of 17%.

Like other universities and colleges, the CCUC institutions depend on public funding support and members are concerned for their future.

The last time funding for universities and colleges was reduced so dramatically, during the economic recession of the 1980s, a number of the smaller CCUC institutions were forced to merge with larger universities and the distinctive character of their Christian foundation was eroded.

The institution leaders are therefore keen to hear what the Chief Executive of HEFCE, Sir Alan Langlands, will say about the longer-term future and public funding commitments in his keynote address to the conference, scheduled as the opening session on Friday afternoon.

The chair of CCUC and vice chancellor of the University of Chester, Professor Tim Wheeler, said: “We recognise that higher education, like all other areas of public spending, will need to take its share of the reductions needed to get us out of the current economic recession.

“But we are concerned that the landscape of the higher education sector should not become uniform.

“The loss of smaller, specialist colleges or those institutions, like ourselves, with a particular heritage and ethos, would reduce diversity and limit students’ choices about where and how they study.”

It is not just the loss of grant funding from HEFCE that concerns CCUC members.

“Reducing public spending overall means that other government departments will have less to spend on education and training for public sector professional staff and this forms a very important part of our core business,” said Professor Wheeler.

This will be a busy weekend in Canterbury with three separate but linked events taking place under the banner of the CCUC.

Alongside the conference for the Vice Chancellors and Principals are the annual CCUC chaplains’ conference and the Choir Festival, involving staff and student choirs from member institutions, held in Canterbury Cathedral on the Saturday evening and open to the public.