UK Post-16 White Paper – implications for research

Some quick thoughts.

Government finally published its Post-16 Education and Skills white paper this week. There are a considerable number of references to research (216 on a quick Ctrl-F search).

Most of the paper refers to England, as education and skills are devolved. But since UKRI’s remit is UK-wide, all universities in the UK should pay attention.

Overall

Like many white papers, this one is opinionated – and, in being so, it makes a few political moves very adroitly. But it’s not clear that all of those opinions agree with each other.

And, crucially, opinions ≠ policy. The government might have expressed a view on what shape the sector should take once it has dragged itself out of its current financial mire, but it hasn’t really set out where and how it plans to throw the sector some rope.

After 70 pages, the cumulative effect is that the paper commissions a great deal while reforming almost nothing. Repeatedly, one finds government waving the baton in expectation of music – but the score is blank, and the orchestra isn’t sure it’s being paid.

Positively, the white paper appears to have been a genuine joint effort between DSIT and DfE officials. This is not the Montagues-versus-Capulets of previous attempts to marry higher education and research policy. Whether this reflects genuine collaboration or simply the blitz mentality of joint case-management in a financial crisis, officials deserve credit for joining the dots.

Differentiation and specialisation

The white paper has a lot to say about how institutions need to accept that they can’t be good at everything – and that this extends to research.

“We will incentivise this specialisation and collaboration through research funding reform… Ultimately, we anticipate that over time there will be fewer broad generalist providers and more specialists. This will include specialists in teaching only, specialists in research, and some institutions which specialise in teaching with applied research in specific disciplines.”

“By incentivising a more strategic distribution of research activity across the sector, we can ensure that funding is used effectively and that institutions are empowered to build deep expertise in areas where they can lead. This may mean a more focused volume of research, delivered with higher quality, better cost recovery and stronger alignment to national priorities.”

A sectoral reshaping is already happening in response to the funding crisis. When ministers say they want fewer broad, generalist universities and more distinct institutional missions, they are leaning into the crisis, not trying to resolve it. Government has accepted that the sector cannot return to a “great-at-everything” model.

During a funding crunch, it makes sense to argue for specialisation. Broad-based institutions that try to protect everything risk failure – which is precisely what government fears. What gets lost is system breadth, but that is happening anyway.

What’s new is that government now says it will use research funding to guide where the axe falls. There is no detail on what that will look like, beyond calls for joint research grants and shared equipment (operationally difficult and not transformative). That leaves a great deal of uncertainty – and potential for heat rather than light.

For universities and funders in the devolved nations, this may grate. UKRI appears to be handed a latent mandate to reform funding in support of an England-only agenda, with no clear constitutional mechanism for doing so.

REF reset

Will the REF “reset” be part of this reshaping? Probably not.

“We will reform the research assessment system to better incentivise excellence and support the government’s vision for the sector. We will review the weightings for the three elements of the framework to ensure we retain and sustain our focus on excellence… The timetable for REF 2029 remains on track, following a pause of no more than three months.”

The pause is not new, but the white paper makes a performance of it. I read this as groundwork for tweaks already expected: adjustments to weightings, a small-provider route, and probably a quiet retreat from the People-Culture-Environment elements that have caused friction and reputational damage.

A three-month “reset” cannot deliver genuine reform. Expect a tidied-up REF and a quick return to business as usual. The wider research-assessment ambitions – recognising outputs beyond publications, using better data, and building a longer-term model – remain distant. DSIT will likely continue to explore alternatives in the background, focusing on improved visibility of the research base as it stands today rather than in 2029.

Costs and sustainability

If part of the agenda is to ensure research is better supported, that cannot rely on government funding alone. Here the white paper points toward the charity sector.

“We will work with charities to improve cost recovery and ensure the sustainability of charity-funded research. We will also work with other funders to improve use of the Transparent Approach to Costing system for annual reporting and assurance.”

Everything here is gestural. “Working with charities” on full economic costing is a well-worn line that solves nothing. Charities will, with good reason, continue to fund as many projects as they can – it looks good in annual reports to have funded 500 projects rather than 400. And almost nobody in HE has the appetite to tell an academic to reject a grant on cost-recovery grounds.

Charities will continue to push for increases to the charity-indexed stream of QR (“Charity Research Support Fund”, as they like to call it). But without a stick – for example, linking Charity QR to actual recovery rates – the subsidy cycle will continue. Situations like these contribute to the sense of unreality that surrounds the whole sustainability issue.

AI for Science and digital infrastructure

“We will publish an Artificial Intelligence for Science plan this autumn and continue investment in Isambard-AI and the new Edinburgh supercomputer.”

AI for Science is the one genuinely live initiative. If it builds on the TBI report’s proposals around dark data and better software tooling, it could have real substance.

Knowledge exchange and commercialisation

“We will review Higher Education Innovation Funding (HEIF) to ensure it supports growth priorities and aligns with the new Local Innovation Partnerships Fund, which will invest up to £500 million to grow high-potential innovation clusters.”

This is the first time HEIF, the Local Innovation Partnerships Fund and cluster support have been tied together into a single narrative sweep. But without reform of the HE-BCI dataset, this linkage cannot be operationalised. And, again, the devolution wrinkle has been ignored.

Direction of travel

Overall, there is plenty here that sets the government’s direction and makes its position on HE reform clear. But it’s a finger pointed toward the horizon, not a detailed map.

The real action may be inside UKRI. DSIT’s three funding “buckets” – curiosity, missions, commercialisation – are becoming the organising doctrine, and the direction of travel is toward a smaller, simpler, more legible funding system aligned to explicit outcomes. The white paper should be read as a political overture to that process rather than a plan in its own right.