Civic mission renewal is currently a strategic priority for universities in the UK. A key driver for this work has been a recognition that universities need to re-establish relevance and build public trust and backing.
To secure increased public support, universities are seeking to explicitly demonstrate to local communities how they directly improve the prospects and living standards of those living immediately within their constituency.
Rethinking communication with local stakeholders is evidently going to be critical to civic renewal. To restore local support, universities need high impact and clear messages that resonate with their communities. Such messages must work for all, regardless of political affiliation.
I propose that one such message could involve a coordinated sector effort to evidence the critical contributions that universities make to training key workers across their respective regions. This would include nurses, midwives, allied health professionals (such as paramedics and radiographers), doctors, surgeons, teachers and social workers. Along with engineers who design and manage transport, energy and utility infrastructures. Associated messaging could highlight key worker successes, such as graduate outcomes statistics (including how many stay local to work) and alumni profiles.
A time bomb hidden in plain sight
The unprecedented financial distress being experienced by the UK higher education sector has been widely reported. To date, efforts to make savings have largely been left to individual institutions to decide rather than coordinated centrally. Left unchecked, this creates a possibility of higher education cold spots’emerging erratically and possibly with very limited warning.
This presents an existential risk to key worker training systems and significantly undermines the ability to plan for the long-term. Local community awareness of potential future disruption to keyworker pipelines would directly impact support for their local university. However, this issue does not even seem to be on the radar of mass media channels.
Let’s consider nursing as an example. There is already a major recruitment crisis for nurses the UK. The Royal College of Nursing has pointed out that there are currently 29,000 registered nursing vacancies in the NHS alone. This can be attributed to multiple factors including employment conditions (such as working hours, pay concerns and job pressures), an ageing workforce and capacity to train new starters. To address this, it is imperative to develop a long-term plan related to increasing training and recruitment of nurses across the UK.
There are approximately 90 UK universities that offer courses and UCAS reported that in 2025, there were 26,315 applicants accepted on to corresponding courses. Given than 4 out of 10 universities reported a deficit in 2025–26 it is reasonable to anticipate that multiple institutions delivering nursing courses are experiencing financial challenges.
The loss of any provider would be damaging in terms of nurse numbers – and in the case of multiple providers, potentially catastrophic.
Furthermore, there are regions in the UK where a reduction in providers would be felt even more heavily. For instance, in rural parts of the UK there are single universities which serve large catchment areas. For example, the Southwest Peninsula (Devon/Cornwall), the North West (Cumbria) and the East of England (Norfolk / Suffolk). Accordingly, any disruption to corresponding nursing training pathways would be far reaching.
Equally, disruption in an urban region where there are multiple universities could be similarly damaging. For instance, in London there are over 30 universities of which around 20 teach nursing. However, there are over 80 NHS hospitals and therefore are significant nurse turnover and recruitment demands that need to be serviced.
Time for honest conversation
Few in the UK would argue with the need to sustain (and potentially expand) the number of key workers. Hence, regardless of whatever an individual considers to be the “optimum” number of universities in the UK, a continued need for regional key worker training facilities is hard to debate.
It is therefore critical that there are pre-emptive and transparent conversations regarding the extent to which existing key worker training could be negatively impacted by future changes to universities. Equally, there should be widely accessible public information around the extent to which safeguarding and mitigation for key worker training would be possible in the event of multiple universities downsizing or even leaving the market.
It is my view that sharing such implications with the public now may have a fundamental impact on how higher education contraction is perceived and associated action that is expected from the government. Providing answers to such questions after the event is going to be too late. Given the absence of mass media coverage related to these risks, I suggest that there is an imperative for universities themselves to spell this out.
