General election manifestos 2024: The Conservative and Unionist Party

The initial weeks of the Conservative campaign have been marked by what felt like an unending torrent of new policy ideas.

As such, the manifesto reads like a summary of what has already been announced – there is very little that is new or surprising. It doesn’t real like the game changer Sunak was hoping for, but there is some stuff about higher education tucked away in there.

Students and skills

The big offer is course closures. The conservatives feel like they have developed a means to identify courses that have “excessive drop-out rates” or “leave students worse off than had they not gone to university”. Courses in these loosely sketched buckets would be prevented from recruiting students (using powers the regulator has had since 2017, has used four times, and were last announced in 2023).

The costings here are very interesting – the suggestion is that £204m could be saved in 2025-26, a first slice of the £910m promised by 2029-30. If you think back to the Wonkhe model from when this was first announced the total (standard fee) outlay for that bottom 13 per cent is a little over £720m – suggesting that course restrictions would be phased in but would eventually extend beyond the 13 per cent.

The funding this is designed to save would be used to invest in “100,000 more apprenticeships every year”, though we get no information as to what level these apprenticeships would be at.

The Lifelong Learning Entitlement will go ahead from 2025 – in a nice bit of wording “adults will be able to apply for loans to cover new qualifications”, though as we already know these courses will not start until January 2026 and will constitute only a very small number of higher technical qualifications.

We also get a single line pledge on working with universities to ensure students get the contact hours they are promised (which could mean improvements in applicant information, too) and that their exams get marked (sounds like the minimum service levels thing). Work on the Advanced British Standard would also continue, and there’s been more than enough written about the mandatory national service proposal.

If you are thinking that regulators will have their work cut out in managing all this, you should be aware that “quangos” (by which, we assume, is meant “all government bodies”) are also looking at cuts rising to £1.2bn in 2029-30.

International, research, development

For international students, visa fees will rise, and the student discount to the immigration health surcharge will go, putting up the cost to students – and, for postgraduate research students, their dependants – by 30 per cent. This latter measure is projected to generate an impressive £200m of additional government income a year, suggesting that there would be no cuts to international student numbers (something that rather goes against prevailing trends and existing policies).

There is a parallel promise to continue to attract the “brightest and best” students – perhaps that will move the dial.

Under the Conservatives, public spending on research and development would rise to £22bn a year (up from £20bn) this year. Within this most of the action is to sustain (or, at best, build on) existing plans (large scale compute clusters, catapults). However, an expansion of defence R&D would be largely covered from existing R&D budgets.