OfS funding allocations, 2025-26

In operationalising the recent grant letter from the Department for Education the Office for Students is not given much space for creativity.

As the funding allocations for next year demonstrate.

Allocations and specifications from ministers have tightened year on year, and – coupling this with the apparently inviolate requirement that funding should follow student numbers – it is hard to find a rationale for a further level of decision making.

If OfS wants to play the “we’re a regulator, not a funding council” card again it doesn’t quite wash – we are talking about more than a billion pounds of public funds, and the government’s main strategic lever for non-research university activity.

The cut of £108m for the year has been so deep that (as Jim noted at the time) even the infamous “magic money twig” that is the student premium funding is affected (down -9.2 per cent): once used to support the academic needs of non-traditional students, it is now an utterly inadequate sticking plaster over our failing student maintenance system that not even ministers pretend does anything other than go into student hardship funds.

There was, once, talk of a more fundamental review of this spending: it may eventually appear alongside the government’s “strategic priorities letter” and the Post-16 White Paper now due in the autumn.

As I noted back in May, some of the decisions (notably the cancellation of programmes that you really think should be priorities, including support for level 4 and 5 provision and intensive delivery mode) mean that different providers will feel the pain differently. The other variable is the linking of the majority of allocations to student numbers – winners and losers on recruitment will win or lose again on other financial support.

Here’s how all that plays out:

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And here’s the detail of particular allocations at a provider level:

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Funds for national facilities (stuff like TASO, Jisc, the National Student Survey) remain the same as last year (£24.1m), and the regulator is prohibited from running any challenge competitions without a note from Bridget Phillipson.

At a subject level the big (23 per cent) cuts to C1.2 high cost funding – publishing and information services, basically – represent the majority of reductions. This operationalises the politically-inspired (and curiously old-fashioned) attack on “media studies” by former secretary of state Gavin Williamson. Everything else – outside of the killed programmes and the planned reduction of transitional funding for specialist providers not included in the “world class” bucket) is frozen in cash terms.

All this means that the unit of resource (the amount of funding allocated by fundable student FTE) has fallen below £1,000 for the first time since the OfS was established (using 2024-25 prices) – 30 per cent down on 2018-19 and the HEFCE legacy.

Another mechanism for government control over provider activities in funding council days was the conditions of grant – and the terms and conditions of OfS funding also get a refresh for next year.

There’s not much change, but it is notable that OfS has given itself the power to fund or determine eligibility for funding using estimates where data or information is not available (not provided, or if OfS reckons it is inaccurate, incomplete or poor quality).