Recent announcements of cuts and campus closures in Wales have loomed large in the nation’s headlines in recent weeks – and to be fair, the Senedd has done an excellent job in keeping the issues live and pursuing ministerial scrutiny.

Cardiff University’s proposals for redundancies and changes to provision have been first and foremost here, and in Welsh ministers’ responses there are signs of an emerging policy agenda.

First up, higher education minister Vikki Howells said she is planning to instruct new regulator Medr to “begin an overview of the demand, provision and distribution of subject areas in HE in Wales” and to “consider what might be required to ensure strategically important subject areas can continue.”

Her follow-up comments were somewhat telling here:

I’d just like to turn to our other universities in Wales in the context of the courses that Cardiff is proposing to close. Nursing is offered at Bangor, Swansea, the University of South Wales, Wrexham and the Open University. Music is offered by Bangor, the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, the Open University and, most significantly, of course, the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. Ancient history is offered by the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, modern foreign languages by Aberystwyth, Bangor, Swansea, the University of Wales Trinity Saint David and the Open University, and religion and theology by Bangor, the University of Wales Trinity Saint David and the OU. It is vital that we focus on the variety of courses across our institutions in Wales.

The emerging Welsh government line looks to be that it is interested in maintaining the overall mix of provision offered by the nation’s universities, with some thinking about geographical coverage.

The potential closure of nursing provision has particularly captured attention – health secretary Jeremy Miles was striking a similar note to Howells in his remarks to the Seneed on Tuesday (these came in a pretty poorly timed announcement of the measures that Wales would take to recruit more of its NHS workforce from overseas):

HEIW [Health Education and Improvement Wales] have been engaged with us as a Government, with the university [Cardiff] and with other universities who have commissioning contracts with HEIW. These run over many years and have quite a level of flexibility within them, so it does allow a situation where those nursing numbers can be reallocated. Those discussions are happening at the moment. Obviously, Cardiff University hasn’t yet taken a final decision, so there is a limit in that sense, in a final sense, but I have a good level of confidence that we will be able to make sure that the number of training places available through Cardiff University are made available elsewhere.

Thinking “strategically” about where provision is offered and by which institutions sounds like a sensible approach on paper – indeed, there are parallels with what Labour has been hinting at in Westminster, and Welsh ministers have been keen to stress that they are in conversation with Jacqui Smith about English HE reform. But it’s also a convenient route to take in the absence of the possibility of much more funding.

Indeed, Howells’ other comments on government investment into higher education contained more than a suggestion that the Welsh government sees its relatively generous approach to student funding as a potential area to save some money:

Despite its many merits, it is still right and proper that we ensure we are getting the best value for Wales from our student funding system. That is why we have commenced an evaluation of the Diamond student funding reforms, and that will publish initial findings in the autumn.

This is reference to these ongoing work packages – indeed, even since they were drawn up the Welsh government has already moved away from the Diamond-informed anchor between student maintenance and the minimum wage, due to its arrangements with the Westminster Treasury on the overall amount of borrowing no longer being sustainable.

The danger in that work is that to the extent to which student finance policy can ever be seen as directly causal, the main plan is to look at different types of participation rather than the quality of that participation. A decent hypothesis would be that a significant tightening of, say, maintenance entitlements in Wales would not hit enrolment much. But the extent to which students are forced into full-time work, or unable to make the most of their experience both within and outside of the curriculum, is harder to measure – and isn’t being attempted.

For Medr itself, we should get the new strategic plan shortly following the draft version published in September – speaking to the Senedd education committee, Medr representatives suggested the finished version would have more to say about additional learning needs, social partnership, Welsh language and Welsh medium education, and global outlook, following more than 100 consultation responses. But it’s always been a bit tricky to see how Medr would work strategically given a funding squeeze.

And we also learned at the committee that relatively new chief executive Simon Pirotte will be stepping down – he started in September 2023 – with plans for a recruitment process to commence shortly to identify a replacement.

Medr provided the committee with its initial funding assumptions for the coming academic year, showing how it’s provisionally planning to disperse its largely non-hypotecated budget of almost a billion pounds (it also told the committee the budget could well be fully unhypothecated in future).

The core higher education research and innovation budget is suggested as around £97m for both academic year 2024–25 and 2025–26 (the budget covers the financial year, so applies to both) – HEFCW had assigned £103.7m for research and innovation in academic year 2024–25. Capital funding for HE is frozen at £10m for both academic years, the same as HEFCW’s allocation. And higher education teaching funding is put at £69.7m for 2024–25 and £69.4m for 2025–26, having been around £78m in HEFCW’s final circular.

For all these budget lines a direct comparison is tricky, given various other pots for strategic funding, many of which are a little higher this year, and general differences between how HEFCW set out its spending and how Medr has presented it. We’ll likely need to wait for the final institutional allocations later in the year to see how things really compare. But it appears to be another difficult settlement for the sector.