Has devolution gone too far?

This week, HEPI is marking the 25th anniversary of devolution. Here, HEPI Director Nick Hillman asks if the advantages have been overcooked when it comes to higher education.

***Tomorrow, HEPI will be hosting a webinar on the LSBU / HEPI Social Mobility Index and, on 10 December we will be hosting an in-person event with Unipol on student accommodation in London.***

The devolution of higher education policy beyond Westminster seems here to stay. But has it succeeded?

Higher education is arguably the one area where the devolved institutions have flexed their muscles the most. As confirmed in work by London Economics for the Nuffield Foundation, each part of the UK now has a significantly different funding model for undergraduates – and for both teaching and living costs. There are also big differences in the regulation of higher education institutions across the UK. In comparison, devolved powers in other areas – such as raising income tax – have not been used to anything like their full extent, as shown in Paul Johnson’s excellent Follow the Money: How Much Does Britain Cost?

Given the different educational traditions in the four parts of the UK – for example, four of the six ancient universities are based in Scotland – it has seemingly made sense for devolution and higher education policy to proceed hand-in-hand. England has gone its own way – adopting, for example, its own student finance system and new regulatory arrangements – and each other part of the UK does things its own way too.

Scotland

Higher education policy has been a totemic issue in elections to the Scottish Parliament. The Scottish National Party’s long-standing commitment to ‘free’ higher education for Scottish students studying at Scottish institutions, combined with the perceived popularity of this policy, has influenced Scotland’s other political parties. In the run-up to the 2021 elections for the Scottish Parliament, Times Higher Education noted, ‘All the main parties are committed to the higher education funding status quo in Scotland, of tuition-free education funded by the Government’.

It is not only funding that is different in Scotland. For example, maintaining student number caps after England abolished them around a decade ago also guaranteed greater differences between these two parts of the UK.

Wales

Wales has a population that is only 58 per cent the size of Scotland’s and somewhat less power has been devolved to Cardiff than Edinburgh. This may explain why Wales has more closely tracked the largest political region in the UK, England, regarding higher education policy.

While the Labour Party at Westminster was led by Jeremy Corbyn, who fiercely opposes tuition fees, the Labour administration in Wales in conjunction with the Welsh Liberal Democrats chose to introduce a fee cap of £9,000 for full-time undergraduate courses, the same as was then in place in England. For 2024/25, the fee cap in Wales rose to match England’s current level of £9,250.

However, there is still a distinctly Welsh approach to higher education funding. Maintenance support is more generous, as all home undergraduates are entitled to grants and loans. Wales has also opted not to remove the real interest rate on student loans, which disappeared in England for new students in 2023/24, thereby ensuring higher repayments from better-paid Welsh graduates.

Students from Wales can take their funding package with them should they go to university elsewhere in the UK, encouraging student mobility. However, some Welsh nationalists regard this as educational resources leading from Wales, producing a brain drain. 

Northern Ireland

There has been less change in Northern Ireland than elsewhere, perhaps unsurprisingly given the lengthy periods when the Stormont Assembly has been in abeyance. As a result, the main funding model for undergraduates still closely resembles the pre-2012 Blairite model in England, including the existence of student number caps – pushing a quarter of students from Northern Ireland to study in Britain instead.

So devolution in Northern Ireland has mainly meant exercising the right not to make changes that are as significant as those that have been implemented in the other three parts of the UK. The constrained funding environment, which is made worse by the freedom of movement within the island of Ireland (meaning students from the Republic are treated in the same way as students from Northern Ireland), has severely limited the number of places available for local students. None of these limitations, however, stopped Ulster University being declared the Times Higher Education University of the Year last week. (I declare an interest here, as I was one of the many judges for these Awards.)

Current challenges

Given the constant divergence, it would be logical to conclude that devolution has worked especially well in higher education and should not be questioned. Each part of the UK has democratically opted for a different system that reflects its traditions and is suitable for its own needs.

However, while direct comparisons are only sometimes possible, not least because devolution has also meant less good comparable data, I am not convinced devolving power has been as big a success for higher education as is often supposed. The current arrangements have several challenges.

First, despite the different policies in place, all four parts of the UK still face the same problems, whether it is the underfunding of undergraduate teaching, student poverty or a myriad of other issues (like protecting academic freedom). Meanwhile, there are surprisingly limited material differences in the student experience. Oddly, terms and conditions for staff have not been devolved and national pay bargaining (largely) persists, meaning there are fewer differences than might be expected for staff as well as for students.

Secondly, the current arrangements create regulatory and policy friction that does not work well for any part of the UK.

• Most notably, it has been harder for people from Scotland to find a place at a Scottish university than it has been for people from elsewhere in the UK.
• When the administration in Wales introduced £9,000 tuition fees, it claimed it was only doing so because its hands were bound by decisions made in England: ‘Welsh Labour has always been clear that education should be free and if funding allowed, there should be no tuition fees. We recognise that higher education operates within a UK context.’
• The shortage of places in Northern Ireland has encouraged a brain drain, which has benefitted the rest of the United Kingdom.
• The fact that the Quality Assurance Agency is no longer the Designated Quality Body for England is causing fresh difficulties, as it means there is no UK-wide quality body that aligns with European Higher Education Area standards.

Because of its relative size, decisions in England have clear knock-on consequences for the rest of the UK. This can lead even the most fervent defenders of devolution into strange and hypocritical stances. For example, despite backing student number caps and devolution for Scotland, when England sought to introduce its own temporary student number caps for English-domiciled people to mitigate the impact of the COVID pandemic, the SNP complained this was ‘a plan which neither the Scottish Government nor Universities Scotland have agreed to’.

Thirdly, devolution has made it harder to convey the concept of a single UK higher education sector on the world stage. This matters when it comes to appealing to international students (or designing schemes for outward mobility). It also matters when it comes to portraying the UK positively to secure new trade and investment policies and building partnerships for international research projects. Science and research policy is not entirely devolved, with spending set centrally and overseen by UKRI. Yet it is still often unclear to people in other countries how they can best engage with those with policy responsibility for UK university-based research.

So it is quite easy to argue that higher education policymaking has been sub-par since the wave of devolution began a quarter of a century ago.

• Northern Ireland has been stuck with an outdated system and insufficient student places due to repeated episodes of political stasis.
• Wales has felt forced to copy England.
• Scotland has gone its own way, but so-called free higher education has become caught up in the independence campaign, with institutions and students now pawns in a wider debate – with one recent suggestion that the SNP’s higher education policy should be enshrined within the written constitution of an independent Scotland.
• England has ended up in a regulatory mess with, for example, UK Research and Investment overseeing the more parochial Research England, which – despite its name – nonetheless fulfils some tasks on behalf of the devolved nations.

Rowing back on devolution would be quite unpopular. Policymakers in England will not make the case for it, and policymakers in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are even less likely to do so. However, if the concept of variable geography is to be meaningful, we should constantly question its benefits.

Devolution is understood to be an evolving phenomenon, with various additional powers being passed from Westminster since the devolution arrangements were first adopted in the late 1990s. Some people now argue for further changes, such as independence for Scotland or more devolution of power for other parts of the UK (including the English regions). But if the benefits of devolving higher education policy have been oversold and if the disadvantages have outweighed the advantages, as increasingly seems to be the case, then reversing devolved powers should remain on the table too.

In short, it should not be unreasonable to ask whether, in some areas at least, devolution may just have gone too far.