Financial improvements
We have been talking about how we need to organise ourselves so that we can lower our costs, while also taking the opportunity to learn about how we can do things differently to improve our student experience.
We need a combination of new income and cost savings, with some examples below of our plans:
Income-generating initiatives
- Continue to attract international students and work with in-country recruitment agents to showcase all that York has to offer
- Grow undergraduate home student numbers
- Maximise new commercial opportunities and research income
- Develop new and significant routes for student education: through transnational educational partnerships (TNE), growth in online education, and building international partnerships which connect us to high-quality universities worldwide.
We will see initial impacts from these activities in the coming financial year, and they will increase significantly in the following years.
Identifying further cost savings
We are always reviewing the costs to run the University and have identified core areas where we can change.
Key to this is always ensuring that we protect the most important aspects of our student experience, and help students to access services in more simple and straightforward ways.
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.
It’s important to know that we are not considering the closure of any academic or professional service departments.
With this in mind, we are opening a ring-fenced voluntary exit scheme in specific areas in May 2025, and other voluntary measures that can help reduce staff costs, such as flexible retirement.
The scheme is open to staff in specific areas of the University to express an interest in voluntary severance. For transparency, the areas that are included in the scheme are:
- Academic: Archaeology; Arts & Creative Technologies; Business and Society; Education; English; Environment and Geography; Health Sciences; History of Art; Language and Linguistic Science; Physics, Engineering and Technology; and Politics and International Relations
- Professional Services: Estates; External Relations; Library, Learning, Archives and Wellbeing; and Student Education and Experience.
Please note: it may only be parts of these areas that are in-scope for the scheme.
We listen and respond to feedback to inform any decisions, and we’ll also continue to work closely with our Student Union representatives on any changes impacting students.
Next steps
Universities across the UK are announcing cost cutting measures, including restructures, reorganisations and redundancies.
How we go about this is really important. We remain determined not only to protect the student experience and high-quality research, but we will face these difficulties with integrity, compassion and respect. No matter how challenging the situation, we are committed to managing our actions with care and sensitivity.
We’ll keep our plans under review as we measure how successful we have been in returning the University to a financial surplus. It’s really important we don’t take too long to get out of our current deficit.
York is one of only four universities to have won the top Gold Teaching Excellence Framework award and be in the top ten in the Research Excellence Framework (matched only by Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial), and we are acting now to preserve and protect the quality and impact of this teaching and research.