Core information
What you need to know: the background, context, what we’ve done so far and plans for the future
Background
UK funding for higher education continues to be very challenging and, like many other universities, we continue to face increasing costs.
UK universities do not make a profit and any income is spent on running the university or reinvesting for the future. You can see how we spend your fees, but even though tuition fees play a significant role in university finances, it's now widely reported that universities across the country lose £1 billion each year on teaching domestic students and £5 billion on undertaking research.
We are also still facing cost of living and inflationary pressures, with more expensive fuel, energy, maintenance and equipment. For example, a microscope that used to cost £100 at the beginning of 2021, now costs more than £120. We are having to absorb these increased costs.
All of this means we need to find different ways to manage our finances so that we can reinvest in teaching and learning, our student experience and in our research.
The need for change
Charlie Jeffery, our Vice-Chancellor, wrote a comment piece for the media about why universities need to act now to manage their finances and the need to rethink how the UK helps fund its universities.
He stressed how we must protect high quality teaching and research, and set out a ten-point plan for a more resilient sector.
On the national scene, we are playing our part in discussions with the UK government on how to address the challenges facing the sector. Through lobbying Labour, one key objective is to position universities in general - York in particular - as vital players in both regional and national economic strategies, working alongside elected Mayors. Another is to promote the long-term benefits the UK gets from attracting talented international students to study here.
But while the UK government is talking about universities in much more positive ways, we are yet to see substantive policy changes and there is no significant financial boost on the horizon. As such, we remain ‘on our own’ and we need to find our own ways to the more sustainable finances that will enable us to protect our strengths.
What York is doing about it
York has moved quickly to put in place a series of measures to maximise income and manage our costs, while protecting our student experience. You can read a summary of our actions below.
As well as finding new ways to increase our income, we also need to lower how much it costs to run the University.
We worked hard to reduce costs in 2023/24, lowering our deficit significantly, but we now face new and additional challenges across the sector, which means we need to make more financial improvements.
Find out more about what may change as we address this challenge.
Changing our estate
A big part of this is looking at our estate costs. We want to focus on using our buildings more effectively, by spending time in the better buildings and moving out of our older ones that are expensive to maintain and run.
We have a limited physical campus footprint within the University, and yet our need for certain types of buildings - such as increased student residences - continues to grow.
We continue to see high demand from both staff and students to work and study online, in a hybrid fashion. Footfall patterns on our campus are significantly different to what they were just a few years ago.
These factors, coupled with ageing and inaccessible buildings, and growing pressures on costs and carbon usage, mean it’s vital we take an active approach to managing our campus development.
This will mean repurposing buildings, and closing or mothballing old ones, and flexibly utilising buildings with shared spaces, as part of our plans for our campus of the future.
We have also paused or delayed some of our big investments, like building a new Student Centre. We will keep investing in our student experience - especially mental health and wellbeing, and study skills and support - but carefully managing our estates costs is a big focus.
We continue this important work, while focusing on increasing our conferencing and events income across our estate.
Managing with fewer staff
As well as reducing money spent on our operational costs - like our estate - we need to run the University with fewer people and we want our staff to focus on what matters most for high quality teaching and support.
For our staff, we need to reduce costs by removing duplication and we want to protect our staff's time on the activities that bring the most benefit for our students and our research.
In 2024, we ran a big, University-wide voluntary exit scheme, to return us to staffing levels that we had back in September 2022. It’s really important to us that any decisions staff make about leaving the University are voluntary, wherever possible.
For 2025, we are understanding where and how we might make further reductions, considering a wide range of factors, including teaching priorities, staff student ratios, research portfolios and priorities, and departmental/service financial performance. We are opening a ring-fenced voluntary severance scheme in specific areas of the University in May 2025, for colleagues who have expressed an interest in leaving the University or who wish to retire early.
We understand that this has been an unsettling time for staff and students, and we will continue to provide regular updates.
Adapting our support services
We are always responding to the changing behaviours and patterns of usage of our support services to ensure we are meeting people’s needs, while balancing the use of our spaces as efficiently and effectively as possible.
We used these insights to identify where to evolve and combine some of our student support services across our Colleges, Receptions, the Library and Campus Safety.
Combining some of our services will make it simpler to access all of the support on offer in the future.
However, we have also had to take the difficult decision to close or alter the opening hours for some underutilised services.
Modules and assessment changes
We have reviewed the number of optional modules available to students, in particular modules with very small numbers. We want to support future modules that attract a lot of interest and provide more consistency for those students on combined programmes or taking electives. We have also introduced interdisciplinary optional modules to enable students to try new things.
We have reviewed the number of assessments and their word count, in order to reduce the assessment burden on students and eliminate areas we were over-assessing; we know this was a concern for some. Where we have proposed significant programme change, we have always consulted with, and listened and responded to feedback from students to inform any decisions. We have also worked closely with our Student Union representatives.