That’s All, Folks? Five points of note about higher education in 2025

Nick Hillman, HEPI’s Director, takes a look at some of the changes affecting higher education in 2025. (These remarks were originally delivered to the Executive Advisory Council of HEPI Partner Ellucian on the evening of 15 December 2025.)

Room at the top

The higher education sector continued to see huge churn in those who oversee it during 2025. In the middle of last year, we had a change of Government; in the middle of this year, we saw a new Chief Executive at UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) when Professor Sir Ian Chapman succeeded Professor Dame Ottoline Leyser, and a new Chair in the Office for Students (OfS), when Professor Edward Peck replaced the interim Chair, Sir David Behan.

Then last month, we heard that John Blake, the Director for Fair Access and Participation, one of the three really big executive jobs at the OfS, had stood down with pretty much immediate effect – with John’s predecessor, Professor Chris Millward, taking back the reins.

And we end the year with the news that the hardest job in the whole of English higher education is soon to fall vacant, as the Chief Executive of the OfS, Susan Lapworth, will stand down at the end of her four-year term in charge. So one thing seems certain: 2026 will see a continuing shift in the OfS’s priorities.

There are other personnel changes I could mention too, such as the incoming CEO of the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), Kathleen Fisher, who will take over early in the new year. 

It feels like we have had a new broom in other respects too. While our two main Ministers in Whitehall, Baroness Smith (Minister for Skills) and Lord Vallance (Minister for Science), remain in place, their jobs have changed significantly as a result of the reshuffle forced on the Prime Minister when Angela Rayner resigned.

Jacqui Smith is no longer just a Minister in the Department for Education as she was at the beginning of the year; she is now also a Minister in the Department for Work and Pensions. Meanwhile, Patrick Vallance is not just a Minister in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology; he is also now a Minister in the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero.

If, like me, you thought it was all a bit of a mess before – with the teaching functions of higher education separated from the research functions of universities at a ministerial, departmental and quango level – it is undeniably even more of a mess now.

And who knows what the 2026 elections in Scotland and Wales will mean for oversight of higher education, not to mention the local elections in England? (Look out for some HEPI output on Wales early in 2026.)

Incoherence?

Perhaps the biggest higher education news in 2025 was the Post-16 Education and Skills white paper. Certainly, Ministers had seemingly spent the previous 12 months and more responding to every tricky higher education and skills question by telling people to wait for this all-important document. Yet when it appeared, many felt it was a bit of a damp squib.

The clue to the problem lies in the Foreword to the white paper, which is signed by three different Secretaries of State: the Rt Hon. Bridget Phillipson MP, Secretary of State for Education; the Rt Hon. Pat McFadden MP, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions; and the Rt Hon. Liz Kendall MP, the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology. On reading the document, it seemed a bit too obvious who had overseen which bits with some frustrating cracks between the different sections. Together, the ideas seemed to be less than the sum of their parts, as they did not really add up to a truly coherent new plan in the way white papers are meant to.

For example, the white paper urged institutions to change direction, for example by doing less (labelled ‘specialisation’) and also, perhaps contradictorily, collaborating more. But the white paper lacked the clear incentives necessary for institutions to overcome countervailing pressures, such as those that come from market competition, institutions’ own statutory charitable responsibilities, a shortage of resources, a highly unionised workforce and the priorities of league table compilers.

In the cold light of day, the top line of the white paper seemed to be ‘we want you to use your autonomy to do what we want you to do’, but with little in the way of policy levers or new funding to persuade institutions to do something radically different from what they have been doing.

As I noted in one blog before the white paper came out, this is the same challenge that Lionel Robbins wrestled with over 60 years ago, for the Robbins report concluded:

it is not reasonable to expect that the Government, which is the source of finance, should be content with an absence of co-ordination or should be without influence thereon. … where free discussion is not sufficient to elicit the desired result in the desired time, it is still possible, and may often be expedient, to attempt to secure it by special incentives. … in emphasising the claims of academic freedom, we stipulate that they must be consistent with the maintenance of coherence throughout the system as a whole.

It is not only me who sees these sorts of problems with the white paper by the way. For example, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, has said:

the proposals do not always add up to a coherent overall strategy. There is insufficient indication of how the different reforms connect, or strategic vision for how key trade-offs in the system will be resolved.

Thinking about this whole issue more parochially, it strikes me that there is an analogy with think-tank land. HEPI is an autonomous independent charity, just as most universities are. If Ministers were suddenly to declare that think tanks should specialise and collaborate, I suspect it would only happen if this were in line with each organisation’s charitable objectives and strategy, if each organisation’s Trustees agreed and if there were sufficient resources to make it feasible. It certainly would not happen just because Ministers say it should.

Resources

Yet to be fair to the Government, they did use the Post-16 white paper to do something important and overdue that the previous Government repeatedly chickened out of doing: raising tuition fees in line with inflation. This will protect the unit-of-resource spent on students to some degree and is aligned with the sector’s lobbying, so the representative bodies and mission groups have generally felt obliged to welcome the news.

But in truth, the extra money is chicken feed because it merely beds in the real terms cuts that have occurred since 2012 and takes no account of rising costs, including those imposed on the sector by the current Government, such as higher National Insurance payments. Any university on the cusp of discussing a breach of convenant with their main lender is unlikely to feel in a much more secure position now than before the tuition fee rises were announced.

And this year, we also had the announcement and then fleshing out of another new cost in England’s new International Student Levy, to be set at a little under £1,000 per student. When this was first announced, many people I know seemed to think it was such a mad idea it could never be implemented. But never underestimate the disdain for universities among some policymakers, especially when they are under pressure from a resurgent populist right. While it continues to seem mad to most of us that we would voluntarily self-impose a big new tariff on one of the most successful export sectors of our whole economy, it does tell us something about current political realities and also reminds us we live in a world of ever higher borders in which global conflict sadly no longer looks so unlikely.

When it comes to the other big resource issue of student living costs and maintenance support, 2025 saw no change to the way that we deal with rising living costs among students, with the only clear commitment to continued increases in line with forecast inflation, which tends to run far behind real inflation and is anyway a continuation of the status quo dressed up as something new.

Our research from August of this year suggests students need around £20k a year, twice as much as the standard maximum maintenance loan, to take part fully in university life. Our numbers are used by the Foreign Office for international scholars but not (yet) by the Department for Education for home students. So no wonder, as the HEPI / Advance HE 2025 Student Academic Experience Survey as well as our more recent work with a diverse group of four universities led by the University of Lancashire shows, two-thirds of today’s undergraduates now take part in paid employment during term time.

Personally, I would like to see a modern version of the Anderson Committee, which sat from 1958 until 1960 and which considered student living costs in detail, leading to the first set of national rules on maintenance support. However, we should not kid ourselves on the likelihood of this happening: the same arguments that are used against increases to the benefits bill will likely continue to be used against changes to students’ maintenance costs at a time when there is such a big deficit and when we are spending so much on debt interest as a country.

In the absence of better maintenance and at a time of rising unemployment, my best guess is people will still choose to go to higher education but may look for cheaper ways to live as a student, such as living at home. It had been said that, ‘You can see the commuter student everywhere—except in the student data‘ but it now appears as if the data might be catching up too. Last week, UCAS noted:

31% of UK 18-year-old accepted applicants indicated in their UCAS application that they intended to live at home this year – a record high and a slight increase on 30% in 2024. This compares to 22% a decade ago, with the number of young people planning to live at home climbing steadily since 2016.

Young people from the most disadvantaged backgrounds are also more likely to live at home. In total, 52% of UK 18-year-olds in IMD Quintile 1 indicated they planned to live at home compared to 17.9% of UK 18-year-olds in IMD Quintile 5. By nation, this means IMD Quintile 1 in England are 3.5 times more likely to live at home, SIMD Quintile 1 in Scotland are 1.7 times more likely and WIMD Quintile 1 in Wales 2.3 times more likely. There is no difference between NIMDM Quintiles 1 and 5 in Northern Ireland.

The pipeline

Another big event in higher education in 2025 was Keir Starmer’s ‘bold new target’, made at the Labour Party Conference, to get ‘two-thirds of young people participating in higher-level learning – academic, technical or apprenticeships – by age 25’.

Personally, I welcome this, though it is important to note it is not actually that ambitious but rather a continuation of the direction of travel of the last few decades. Oddly, the new target was dressed up as an attack on Blair’s 50% target, long since surpassed. Either we have to wonder whether the Government’s heart is really in it or, more likely, whether they thought they were performing some clever-clever political trick in announcing a progressive target in a regressive way.

Either way, to hit the target we need to make further strides in widening participation. And one disappointment this year was a continuing failure to grip the educational underperformance of boys, a long-term interest of HEPI and the theme of a report we published in March of this year.

When Ministers want positive headlines in right-of-centre media, they tend to speak out about the educational underachievements of white working-class boys, including in August of this year during exam results season. So I was presumably not the only person to be disappointed that October’s Post-16 white paper or November’s Government-commissioned Curriculum and Assessment Review and associated Government response did not include clear measures aimed at addressing the issue.

Sadly, this fight needs to go on – and that is one reason why, last week, we published a blog by the author of some vitally important new research from the Netherlands proving the achievement gap between boys and girls is ‘larger in favour of girls in countries where women are more strongly overrepresented among secondary-school teachers’.

Technology

Given my audience, I touch upon my fifth and final topic of technology, including AI, a little trepidatiously. But I do not want to leave it out because the appetite for discussing it is huge: HEPI has been going nearly 25 years and our most well-read piece of output ever is the 2025 wave of our annual survey on students’ use of generative AI, which came out in February of this year. Similarly, our most well-read full-length HEPI Report of 2025 was our collection with the University of Southampton on AI and the Future of Universities, which looked at how AI could change everything from strategic planning, through teaching, to university research.

So the march of AI continues at pace, but it still feels as if no one has fully worked out what it all means yet, including for education. Alongside all those hits on our AI work, for me 2025 will also partly be remembered for some pretty embarrassing AI cock ups, including:

• the US newspapers that ran a syndicated list of summer book recommendations that included 10 made-up books and only five real ones, putting a new spin on the idea of reading ‘fiction’;
• the coding module at one British university where there was such an overreliance on AI that a voiceover accompanying the teaching materials suddenly morphed into a Spanish accent before flipping back to a British one; and
• the use of AI to inject erroneous claims in the Sandie Peggie employment tribunal outcome in Scotland as well as in other legal cases.

One of the more interesting books I read this year, and one which I reviewed for the HEPI website, was More Than Words: How to Think about Writing in the Age of AI by John Warner.

In this book, the author upends one traditional approach to AI by arguing that it is wrong for students to think generative AI is good for creating an initial draft. Instead, he argues the first draft is the most important draft ‘as it establishes the intention behind the expression.’ In other words, just as we might expect a musician to use technology to hone a song they have written; we would probably approach a song that was entirely created by AI from the ground up with a little more scepticism about its originality or authenticity. 

You may or may not think I am right about this but you can come to your own judgement later this week when our last publication of the year (and one of the biggest we have ever done) appears. This gathers together 30 of my book reviews about higher education that have appeared on the HEPI website and other outlets over the past 13[ years, since 2012/13 when those higher tuition fees first began. After all, our goal as a think tank is to make people think; it is not to tell people what to think. So do look out for this new publication on Thursday.

Finally, let me end by thanking everyone who has supported our work in whatever way in 2025 and wishing all our readers the very best for the Christmas and New Year break.