Plaid Cymru would launch an HE review in its first 100 days

Plaid’s spring conference saw the launch of New Leadership for Wales: the First 100 Days, a list of priorities from the party currently most likely to be leading a new Welsh government from May. The overall tone is very much to reassure the electorate that the party is ready for government.

Plaid has previously said it would commission a full review of higher education funding if it came to power, and this makes the cut for one of its (many) commitments for those first few months in office:

Commission a cross-party and comprehensive review of how universities in Wales are funded, with clear terms of reference that includes ensuring that more of the value of Welsh Government investment in Higher Education stays in Wales, and that more Welsh students are supported to study in Wales.

The review’s focus is very much in keeping with what the party has been saying about its HE priorities, both in the Senedd and concretely in its New Economic Plan last spring. In that (much more developed) document, we hear that a review would be part of a wider-ranging and “re-localising” set of broader reforms, focused on incentivising more Welsh students to stay in Wales but more broadly on keeping investment in Wales too, including in areas like the amount of research “being conducted in Wales on issues of direct and specific relevance for Wales.”

The student finance aspects of the review have caught most attention so far. London Economics has just released some modelling on the effects of possible changes to loans and grants which were floated in the New Economic Plan, but equally the plan sketches out other potential incentives for students to remain within Wales, such as “priority subject incentives, loan write-offs or repayment holidays.”

Elsewhere in its first 100 days, Plaid would “examine options” for reforming Seren – the idea that the outreach programme is “sending students over the border” is well-established in the party’s thinking – as well as launching a Wales-wide skills audit (another idea that the New Economic Plan fleshes out in more detail) and “prepare to convene” a future skills summit at which a vision for the future of Wales’ skills system will be developed.

Plans to start setting up a new national development agency make the cut, and the New Economic Plan suggested that this could “play host to, or otherwise work in concert with” a newly-formed Innovation Agency for Wales. Such an agency would be a “vehicle for ensuring better coordination and integration of R&D activities” and allow for the creation of a “new and protected institutional space for creativity, collaboration and networking.” There’s no actual mention of the innovation agency itself in the first 100 days, however, or anything further on research and innovation (though as above, it would be a mistake to think that the HE review would be purely about student finance, as it’s clear that the party has aspirations, at least in principle, to try to make Welsh research work better for Wales, in ways that will inevitably need to be much further refined).

Probably the key thing to be looking at in terms of Plaid’s plans for Wales, should it take office, is not what an HE review would look like or what quangos might be set up, but rather what spending commitments it is making elsewhere that could potentially preclude much further investment in higher education coming from government.

One of Plaid’s key policies – a central plank of its plans for education – is to commit to a further rollout of free childcare (the “most ambitious and generous childcare offer in the history of devolution”), and it’s not clear at the moment how it will pay for it. As journalist Will Hayward has set out elsewhere this weekend, the intention seems to be to use “increases in the Welsh Government budget that will happen due to the planned extra money that will come to Wales in the coming years through the Barnett formula,” meaning that money that could have been used to cover inflationary costs elsewhere in the system are unlikely to be available.

So while it’s notable that Plaid is committing to launching a review of HE funding in its first 100 days in office, this could well take place in a wider fiscal context where there is little if any further government spending available for higher education, at least when taken as a whole. In such a context, finding ways to ensure that “more of the value of Welsh government investment in higher education stays in Wales” would therefore be leaned on even further, and would need to actually work.