The Starmer era in English higher education

I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that Keir Starmer was a prime minister who had a substantial influence on higher education.

We’re looking back to Theresa May or David Cameron to see a comparable impact on the sector– and while in those cases you may argue about how good an idea the £9,000 student fee loan model or the OfS actually turned out to be, these were seismic changes that have led to lasting change.

Starmer has made some similarly bold interventions – although it is too soon to think about a lasting legacy the potential is there.

Expansion

We need to start with last year’s conference speech – which saw Starmer define a new participation target for learning at level four and above. He proposed that two thirds of young people should experience some form of higher learning, to include apprenticeships and other job-focused qualifications alongside the traditional higher education undergraduate degrees.

Most politicians attempt a version of this – garnering “pledges to abolish Blair’s 50 per cent target” headlines along that way – but what Starmer did was a little more subtle. Other prominent voices were arguing for cuts to student numbers in favour of vocational routes, while he chose to emphasise the variety of higher learning routes. Given that universities are largely responsible for delivering or supporting most of these, it could be argued that this was actually a commitment to increase enrollment.

We should add to this the progress made with the lifelong learning entitlement. It was Starmer’s government that took the plans from Johnsonian whim to deliverable plan, although there are still important questions about demand for fee loan backed short courses. I’m not convinced the LLE was a good idea, but it was another area where Starmer’s government actively sought to expand higher education participation in a strategic (linked to the Industrial Strategy) way.

Finance

Previous eras of higher education expansion have come alongside cuts to what we used to call the unit of resource. But it was also the Starmer administration that returned the undergraduate fee limit to the initially proposed trajectory of inflationary increases. To be clear, this barely covered increases to employer national insurance contributions, but it was the first increase in the government’s funding for undergraduate tuition since 2017. The announcement covering the next two academic years, came alongside a promise to legislate to ensure future governments continue to increase fees by inflation – though it was proposed that these increases would be linked to revised Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) judgements of quality. Both the ongoing fee cap increases and – apparently – the TEF links await a suitable legislative vehicle. But the intention is clear.

In giving, early on, the Office for Students a specific role regarding the financial health of universities, Starmer and his team put to bed the troubling assumption that “market failure” was a welcome sign of a healthy system. This was not the bailout or support regime that the sector asked for – and there remain questions about the capacity of the regulator – but for the first time since 2016 there was a strategic component to thinking about the preferred size and shape of the sector.

All this has come at a cost – and the gentle expansion of higher education will happen on the backs of graduate loan repayments. The 2025 budget decision to freeze the repayment threshold for Plan 2 loans for three years has an impact on the very lowest earners; the freeze in the interest rate thresholds hit middle earners. This came to a head in January of 2026, with media coverage of millennial graduates with loan balances rising faster than their repayments could bring them down kicking off a wider national conversation about the fairness of the system. To be fair the 2012 settlement has been looking flawed for some time, and this decision could be said to have brought the underlying problems into sharper relief.

Quality and regulation

Starmer’s government also grasped the nettle on franchise and partnership provision. His government brought in a requirement for large providers of partnership delivery to register with the Office for Students, and caused the OfS to put tough new quality requirements on providers who franchise out courses. This was in response to work by the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee which also resulted in closer working relationships between OfS, the Department for Education and the Student Loans Company to combat fraud. Pronouncements about driving out “low quality courses” are ten a penny in politics – but here was action that actually addressed the core problem.

Whatever you think about the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, it is clear that the legislation was badly drafted and had the potential to put additional burden and risk on both providers themselves and students’ unions. One of skills minister Jacqui Smith’s first acts was to pause implementation – taking forward some of the more sensible measures (the clear statutory duty on providers, the centralised complaints scheme) in thoughtful ways, while judiciously pruning the wilder excesses such as regulating SUs and bringing a statutory tort ripe for abuse.

The Skills White Paper set out a preferred direction of travel for the sector – around specialisation and collaboration – rather than providing the detail that many were hoping for. Much of it remains as unimplemented aspirations rather than enacted as policy (although I note we are overdue an OfS ministerial advisory letter) but within these it is possible to discern plans to remove some of the barriers that prevent universities and others from collaborating: regionally, within subject domains, or on non-teaching services.

We also need to mention the plight of the OfS – the judicial review of the way decisions were made around the decision to fine the University of Sussex on freedom of speech issues highlighted serious cultural and procedural problems within the regulator. A newish chair and a new chief executive team will have their work cut out to regain the trust of the sector and of government – with DfE being conspicuously silent on the issues of integrity and fairness that have been raised.

International

The Starmer administration has done a lot to make international recruitment harder and less remunerative. The International Student Levy takes a flat fee from international tuition income – and we have yet to learn how this income will be redistributed around the wider skills sector. And the visa approval process has become more onerous for students and providers – we’ve even seen pauses in visa issuance for four countries of concern, with the implication that this could easily happen elsewhere with limited notice.

International student fees have become a core source of income and growth for universities – and while it is difficult to argue that balancing critical national infrastructure on students from India and China is a sustainable way to do things, any cooling of this market will have a serious impact on the financial stability of the sector. What’s missing is measures to ameliorate this loss.

Research, innovation, and growth

We used to hear a lot about a mission led government, and an industrial strategy. This saw the government attempt to invest strategically in key areas that would have an impact on economic growth, both in broader terms of government activity and in a return to “picking winners”.

The decision to dedicate more research funding to areas where the government has an interest in growing and sustaining capacity is not unprecedented, but it has led to widespread concerns around who might be the winners and losers. To be clear, there’s no sense in which the dual support system is at risk (though even quite broad details and decision on how the next REF will work are becoming dangerously overdue), but we have seen concerns in many parts of the sector about the implications of what is seen as further research specialisation.

One of the government’s flagship interventions in the skills sector has been the genesis of Skills England – a body that took on the development of apprenticeships, higher technical qualifications, and T levels, alongside an expanded skills planning remit. It produces an annual assessment of skills needs across nine key industrial strategy sectors. However, the decision to move it into the Department of Work and Pension was a curious one – and has served to increase the distance between it and the sectors responsible for higher level skills provision.

Too soon to say

Keir Starmer has resigned but he is still Prime Minister – with a timetable indicating that he will last until the summer recess. Andy Burnham, as his most likely successor, has said little about higher education beyond the now standard calls for parity of esteem between higher education and vocational routes.

The interventions Starmer has made have been, in their own way, decisive. They have made small but significant corrections to an alarming policy drift that characterised the last years of Conservative government. He has not been radical, at a time that higher education needed radical policymaking, but he has endeavored to balance the interests of the sector, the wider country, and the public purse in sensible ways.

The sector isn’t in a great state right now, but it is in a better state than it was under Sunak. Which is, granted, a small win and a low bar.