As financial pressures deepen, governing bodies will have to make difficult decisions.
The test is not whether they can find savings. It is whether they can tell the difference between reducing institutional cost and weakening a place’s educational future.
A campus closure is never only a campus closure
The financial crisis in higher education is increasingly becoming a governance crisis. The planned closure of the University of Essex’s Southend campus is a useful way into that wider issue, not because it should be read as a failure of one institution, but because it shows the difficult trade-offs now facing many universities.
The university has presented the decision as part of concentrating research and education on two campuses, aligning provision with a lower student population and supporting long-term sustainability. That is a legitimate institutional rationale. But such decisions raise a wider question: what happens to students and communities when local higher education provision is withdrawn?
For some students, moving from Southend to Colchester may be manageable. For others, those with work, caring responsibilities, disability, family commitments or limited transport options, the issue may not be a preference between campuses, but whether continuing in higher education remains possible.
This is why the financial crisis is also a governance crisis. The challenge is not only to make financially necessary decisions, but to ensure they are also educationally defensible and place-aware.
Boards need to know what they are cutting
The Office for Students has warned that, without mitigation, 119 English providers could report deficits in 2025–26. The House of Commons Education Committee has warned that government lacks a clear plan for university insolvency and student protection.
The obvious response is to cut costs, close courses, rationalise estates, seek mergers, reduce staffing and grow income. Some of this is unavoidable. But an institution-only reading is too narrow. In regional and place-based universities, cuts fall on local access routes, health and education pipelines, technical skills systems, civic partnerships, student support infrastructures and regional labour markets.
A board may see a low-margin nursing route; the local NHS trust may see its future workforce. A university may see a costly foundation year; a commuting student may see the only realistic bridge into higher education. A finance paper may identify a small campus as inefficient; a town may see one of the few remaining institutions connecting young people, adult learners and employers to opportunity.
Boards will need to cut. But they need to know what they are cutting.
From civic mission to governance trade-offs
The case that universities matter to place has already been made. The Civic University Commission has argued for civic strategies grounded in local need, partnership and public accountability. The OECD has shown how higher education can support regional development, innovation and social outcomes. The British Academy’s work on place-sensitive policy makes a related point: policy fails when it treats places as interchangeable.
The governance literature adds another piece. The Committee of University Chairs’ code asks governing bodies to ensure accountability, sustainability, institutional effectiveness and public confidence. That gives governors stewardship responsibility.
But these literatures do not fully answer the question now facing many institutions: what should governors do when civic mission and financial stress collide? Civic university research explains why universities matter to place; governance codes stress sustainability and accountability. What is missing is a practical language for board-level trade-offs: what to close, protect, merge, share or redesign.
What place-literate governance means
Place-literate governance is not a call to protect every existing activity. Universities cannot sustain civic missions if they are financially unsustainable. Nor is it a softer alternative to financial discipline. It is a harder version of it.
It starts from an uncomfortable fact: much of the local value created by universities is real but not always funded. A course may support a public-service workforce, sustain access for commuting students, or anchor a fragile educational pathway, while still losing money. Naming its civic value does not make the deficit disappear.
That is why governing bodies face a double duty. They must steward a viable institution whilst ensuring that the university maintains its educational, research and civic purposes.
A place-literate board would ask different questions. If a social work programme is financially weak, what happens to local authority recruitment if it closes? If a foundation year is expensive, how many local students lose their route into degree-level study? If a small campus is consolidated, which students can realistically travel, and which are being designed out of the system? If a humanities course has falling demand, is the university only losing a course, or also weakening the civic and cultural capacity of its region?
It would also ask who pays for that civic value: can the university carry it alone, or should partners, funders, employers or public bodies share responsibility for provision they depend on? These are not reasons to avoid change. They are reasons to govern change properly.
A coastal civic university may be tied to marine industries, defence, health, tourism, sustainability, rurality and regeneration. A post-industrial technical university may sit within applied education, manufacturing, health innovation, digital skills, social mobility and town-based renewal. A metropolitan access university may serve mature, commuting, working, care-experienced, disabled and minoritised students who depend on local, flexible provision. In each case, a conventional viability paper may miss what a course, campus, timetable or support service means within its place.
Three questions for governing bodies
The first question is realism. Are governors seeing plausible downside scenarios early enough to act, or being reassured by projections that assume recruitment, international demand, partnership growth and cost control all move in the right direction? Good governance is not comfort. It is disciplined challenge.
The second is civic value. Before major cuts are approved, has the board identified provision with local or regional significance? The point is not to make such provision untouchable, but to make both its value and cost visible before it is lost. If the provision matters locally but is financially unsustainable, can it be redesigned, shared, externally supported or replaced without cutting away the function it performs?
The third is partnership. Has the university explored serious place-based options before irreversible decisions are made? Collaboration is often invoked too late, when cash, trust and time have already run down. FE colleges, local authorities, NHS trusts, employers, combined authorities, civic organisations and neighbouring universities should be part of anticipatory planning, not late-stage consultees.
But partnership is not a substitute for money. A regional responsibility that is everyone’s priority, but no one’s budget line will eventually fall back on the university. Place-literate governance must ask not only who benefits, but who pays, who shares risk, and who can act before emergency narrows the options.
The next governance test
Universities will need to shrink, specialise, merge, share infrastructure, redesign delivery, or exit activities with no credible future. Sometimes ending provision is more responsible than allowing the erosion of quality, student experience and staff morale. But place is not a soft issue. It is part of the risk environment: shaping who studies, who travels, who teaches, who employs graduates, which public services are staffed, and which communities retain a route into higher education.
The next governance test is not whether boards can find savings. It is whether they can make those savings while being honest about the civic costs, the funding gaps, and the responsibilities that cannot be carried by universities alone.
