You didn’t miss much for higher education in this year’s spending review.

The big news – the rise in research and development capital spending from £20.4bn in 2025-26 up to £22.6bn in 2029-30 – was already known before Rachel Reeves stood up to speak.

There’s a little more detail in the documentation – the Science Innovation and Technology (DSIT) component of this capital allocation will rise from £13.9bn next year to £15.2bn at the end of the spending review period. There’s a commitment to associating with Horizon Europe and its successor – £500m will go to the R&D missions accelerator programme, at least £1bn to the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) and that £750m for a new supercomputer at the University of Edinburgh. So far, so James Coe.

Again, we were aware of the move towards regional research allocations – which were confirmed in today’s release.

Many of us were expecting an update on the Lifelong Learning Entitlement (not least because we were told to expect one) and ears pricked up when Reeves briefly mentioned lifelong learning in setting up a not-great dig at Kemi Badenoch.

The list was familiar. There will be £1.2bn of additional skills investment per year by 2028-29 – which we are told will include support for 16-19 year olds to access training (including eight youth guarantee trailblazers), and £625m for training in construction. Some £2bn will go to artificial intelligence, including the AI talent scholarships. For the rest, we are encouraged to wait for the Post-16 Education and Skills White Paper, now due “later in the year” rather than “this summer”.

There’s also a need to wait for the “Modern” Industrial Strategy and a Ten Year Infrastructure Strategy – both due in the coming weeks. And the details on the proposed international tuition fee levy are coming “in due course”.

If there are to be measures to address the funding problems in the university sector, these documents would be the places to look for clues – there were none here.

Like most departments DfE will see a 15 per cent cut in administration budgets over the spending review period. Measures to save money via digitisation (and even the use of generative AI tools) were heavily trailed, as were the expansion of shared services – what’s new is (another) review of arm’s length bodies (ALBs) that “will identify further opportunities for closures, mergers, and consolidations”.