OfS capital allocations, 2025-26

There was a period in living memory where capital allocations from the government were one of the primary ways in which higher education providers could invest in estates or equipment.

Those days, as the OfS headline £88.5 million figure for the 2025-26 financial year eloquently demonstrates, not so much.

The bulk of this – £80.57m is allocated based on a competitive bidding round. Some 193 bids (for a total of £288m) came in – OfS funded sixty of them.

And the requirements were stringent. Funding needs to be spent within the 2025-26 financial year (so by March 2026), you could bid for a maximum of just £2.5m, and only where spending pertained to the needs of local employers (per your LSIP) or the Skills England national priorities (that’s advanced manufacturing, clean energy industries, creative industries, defence, digital and technologies, financial services, life sciences, professional and business services, construction, health and social care).

The timescale was the killer – it meant that, fundamentally, the provider had to be committed to the work whether or not the bit was successful.

If you chose to forego the expense of bid submission (or simply were unsuccessful in your bid) a parallel formula allocation offered all but the tiniest provider £30,000 – no strings attached other than the usual need to be accountable for public funds. So unless you had something suitable ready to break ground, avoiding the hassle and taking the allocation made a lot of sense.

Just three Russell Group providers had a funded project – out of just nine universities founded before 1992 – which given the usual talent by which such providers attract funding tells you something.

That’s not to say that this capital is a bad idea – a glance down the list of funded projects shows better ventilated biosciences labs at Aston, a dance studio refurbishment at the Northern School of Contemporary Dance, kit for a new school of pharmacy at Suffolk, and a better maritime simulation infrastructure at Liverpool John Moores. All this stuff benefits students and staff.

Likewise £30,000 is probably good news for your library (generally the best way to spend small capital allocations).

But it is easy to imagine the benefits of a more strategic multi-year programme, allowing for a greater range of transformative (and often badly overdue) campus upgrades. In a sector with few centralised planning levers, the rare chance to pull one of them has been missed.

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