Author: Sean Wallis

A Crisis in the Making

The Market Experiment in UK Higher Education visibly began to collapse in 2024-25, with a series of universities reporting shortfalls and deficits of the order of tens of millions of pounds amid reports from forecasting bodies identifying evidence of sector-wide structural deficits.^[i] Reports of tens of thousands of job cuts taking place in 2024-25 and 2025-26 were forecast by activists, and the danger of universities becoming insolvent and destabilising the whole sector was widely recognised.^[ii]

The crisis within UK HE is rooted in the ending of opportunities for expansion underpinned by student tuition fees from home and international students. The experiment began in 1998 with the first introduction of £1,000 undergraduate tuition fees, extended in 2006 to £3,000 and then turbocharged, first with the rise of English tuition fees to £9,000 in 2011 and finally, the lifting of the cap on home student recruitment in 2014. Differences across UK nations for home tuition fees did not lead to alternative HE funding models, instead, the tendency was towards intensified competition for student fees in what was referred to as ‘unregulated markets’, i.e. taught postgraduate programmes and overseas student fees.^[iii]

The UK Higher Education system adopted an ideology of free market competition and its accompanying language. Universities were now ‘higher education providers’, they ‘competed’, students were ‘customers’, and quality was associated with fee levels. Of course, as with free market ideology itself, internal contradictions were obvious from the beginning. UK Higher Education was a price-fixing cartel in which student fees were set by employers’ organisations at the maximum available, international fees were benchmarked to providers with similar international rankings, and prices for student services, most obviously accommodation, were set by the maximum loans students could access through the living costs component of student loans.

The race was on to expand to maximise surpluses and market share for individual providers, and this required the rapid growth of major capital projects, new campuses, and buildings springing up across university campuses throughout the UK.

As with other markets in capitalism, this proved to be a major source of the crisis emerging in 2024. Capital expansion and interest payments funded by ever-rising surpluses in the sector unravelled when tuition fee income fell. The unwillingness of government to increase student tuition fee loans in line with inflation resulted in a declining profitability in the UK student tuition fee market. Racist immigration policies pursued by UK governments, coupled with financial crises in developing economies responsible for the largest numbers of international students and the growth of domestic alternatives led to a downturn in overseas student applications, and a squeeze on the international tuition fee market. Mainstream economists would call this a crisis of profitability. Marxists would recognise this as an example of the tendency of the average rate of profit to fall.

The Employers’ Response to the Crisis

Employers turned to a uniform set of explanations as a focus for the crisis. Contingent explanations were provided, such as the fall in international student numbers across the UK, government National Insurance increases and rising staff costs. Solutions identified were also uniform across the sector: job cuts were supposed to be a means to address the fall in surpluses.

The University UK’s September 2024 report, Opportunity, Growth and Partnership: A Blueprint for Change from the UK’s Universities is their response to the crisis of HE funding and the return of a Labour government. UUK is advocating shared services, outsourcing and joint ventures as a means to ‘reform’ HE. The authors are a who’s-who of the architects of the crisis! David Willetts, villain of the 2011 hike in tuition fees, is a contributor who opines about ‘global reach, reputation and impact.’ Another author, Peter Mandelson, who has been active in the press on this matter, uses the analogy of the academy chain in the school system as a model for shared services. 

UUK has followed up on their Blueprint with the establishment of a ‘Transformation and Efficiency Taskforce’ in January 2025, with restructuring of professional services at the heart of its remit. The head of this Taskforce is a merger-and-acquisitions lawyer and VC of the University of the Arts London, Sir Nigel Carrington, producing a report on 2 June, Towards a New Era of Collaboration.

While a general crisis of profitability in the sector erupted in 2024, not all institutions felt the crisis in the same form. Many of those most successful in expanding student numbers saw a fall in their surpluses, while a smaller number that had been less successful in sustaining their expansion were unable to maintain sufficient surpluses to remain solvent. In these cases, real deficits are appearing which have the potential to force institutions into insolvency.

Class and Conflict in the Crisis

Newcastle and Dundee Universities are examples of these two types of institutions. Newcastle University, a university that reported a £190m cash surplus for the financial year 2023-24, declared a £35m budget shortfall (i.e. a surplus below its budget target) in October 2024, and demanded 300 job cuts. The University of Dundee, which failed to publish its Financial Statement for 2023-24 due to its cashflow crisis and impending insolvency, declared a £35m deficit in November 2024 and demanded 632.4 full time equivalent job losses.^[iv]

The two universities also shared similarities, which are the focus of the remaining sections of this piece, namely the response of the UCU branches and their members in building campaigns against the job cuts which proved successful in defeating their employers.

We offer our summaries of what happened to encourage colleagues across the union to discuss them and consider what they can apply to their own situations. We will have to learn from these important examples in the coming months. Hopefully this will be in the context of UK-wide industrial action, so branches won’t always be striking alone as we found ourselves.

The membership of our union branches rejected the managed decline of the sector promoted by employers, policy analysts and even some within its own union leadership. The branches launched immediate mass mobilisations of members, moving speedily to industrial action, leading to sustained strike action. This was combined with broad mass political campaigns to win hearts and minds in the wider population. These highlighted the governance crisis at the heart of the sector, identified sector-wide political solutions required to prevent collapse, and built broad-based solidarity campaigns involving students, communities, political parties, national demonstrations and lobbies.

The two campaigns were not identical, but both identified key areas of weakness in their employer’s approach and responded to the specific timescales of the redundancies being imposed on staff. Newcastle UCU successfully mobilised mass picketing, taking strike days during marking season, and exploited the pressure a national demonstration could bring to bear on their employer. Dundee UCU managed to mobilise political pressure on the devolved Scottish Government, as its university management collapsed in disarray, as a focus for campaigning. Most importantly, however, despite these differences, both were underpinned by recognising the need for extensive strike action from the start, mass mobilisation of the union membership which built the union, and a general militancy in approach.

How to Win

Both branches sought to maximize industrial leverage on the employer by getting ahead of timelines of balloting and redundancy consultation through declaring a dispute at an early stage. They rejected the traditional UCU ‘long haul’ approach of small-scale strike action and waiting for a management response. They recognised that this simply did not measure up to the scale of the crisis, and that without a clear lead, staff would be demoralised and leave.

Hard-hitting industrial action created the capacity within the branches for — and amplified — a wide repertoire of campaigning in the political lobbying sphere, within the academic and governance spheres, and in the press. In Newcastle’s case, four weeks of action were initially notified, while Dundee’s three weeks took them to the end of the semester (Scottish Universities timetables are significantly earlier than most English universities). These were not the end, but were followed by further periods of strikes to increase pressure on employers.

Crucial to taking militant industrial action was the involvement of the membership at every step of the way. Dundee initiated a series of ‘Townhall’ meetings open to all staff, not just those of UCU or UNITE and UNISON. These typically involved over 1,000 staff, the largest meetings ever held at the University. Weekly branch meetings and member involvement meant that decisions were not the prerogative of the branch leadership but were in the hands of members, who regularly opted for a stronger response to the employers.

Rejection of redundancies also required an intellectual argument. In both universities, UCU members voted to reject all redundancies and not limit themselves to compulsory redundancies. Members drafted reports highlighting the expansion of capital expenditure and increases in other operating costs rather than staff costs, that were at the core of the university’s failed strategies.

Two further important initiatives were developed in the branches which acted to expand recognition of the disputes beyond their local branches and raise solidarity. In the case of Newcastle, the branch coined the phrase ‘Spreading the Resistance’.  It was clear that what was occurring in Newcastle would spread across the sector, so encouraging other branches to adopt a similar militant approach, combined with raising financial support for the strikes, had the potential to spread the local campaign into a sector-wide campaign. This was not purely altruistic: it increased pressure on the Newcastle VC to concede.

In Dundee’s case, the financial crisis was deepened by the collapse of the University Executive Group. Of the eight senior managers in post at the beginning of the year, all bar two resigned over the following weeks and months. Initiated by the Finance Director’s early departure, the Principal, Vice Principals and University Secretary all left in rapid succession. The resignations spread beyond the UEG into the Court governing body. Currently, Dundee University remains a university without a functioning UEG and Court.

The UCU’s campaign, led by Dundee UCU and backed by UCU Scotland, forced the Scottish Government into a very public commitment to financially underpin the University. To-date, £22m has been awarded to stabilise the university’s liquidity crisis, and two further years of funding, estimated at around £20m per annum, has been identified.

This approach also ensured that the dispute could go beyond that of the original declared trade dispute. Other staff at risk of redundancy, not the focus of the original 632.4FTE staff cuts, including casual staff on zero-hour contracts in the Medical School, research funded staff and those running online modules in the School of Engineering all saw their jobs saved as the branch linked their job cuts to a wider demand of no redundancies.

The approach taken provides a blueprint of how to halt the employers’ offensive in institutions in very different circumstances. This approach is forcing Higher Education onto the political agenda, so that governments are forced to intervene and the HE funding model itself is put up for public debate. Crucially it also means that the voices of university staff and not just the employers are heard.

Organising to Win

The role of activists in both branches and branch leaderships proved crucial to the successful development of the two strikes. Mass meetings and weekly branch meetings encouraged the existing branch leaderships to broaden the base and leaderships of the strikes. Initiatives came from new and older reps.

We will give three important examples to illustrate this point.

First a positive example: the push to move to early balloting. Within UCU there is a general conservativism which has a tendency to delay balloting, often imposing extensive informal ‘further consultation’ and extended ballot timetables. But all of these restrict the window for strike action during the teaching period. UCU’s current ‘Building to Win’ strategy document, written by paid officials, does not even include industrial action in its approach, and centres negotiation, within a ‘credible prospect of a positive outcome’ (sic), as the most desirable outcome.^[v]

The confidence of members would be completely undermined had the local branches not fought for a much more urgent campaign and ballot timetable. Wider networks of reps and activists, including in the UCU Solidarity Movement, also proved crucial in listening to, and offering advice, in this process. In both cases, branches succeeded in dramatically reducing proposed timescales from declaring disputes to their first day of strike action, putting the branches in a much stronger position.

But not all examples are positive. The second example was negative: the overturning of branch decisions to campaign against all redundancies. UCU only balloted against compulsory redundancies, against the express desire of repeated branch meetings. This is a mistake that weakened branch campaigning, not least for the simple reason that everyone understands that accepting voluntary redundancy leaves those remaining with unmanageable workloads.

The final example, a failure to include an explicit reference to a Marking and Assessment Boycott (MAB) in the Newcastle ballot, further restricted the extent to which branches could initiate action after the teaching semesters had finished. Newcastle UCU’s initiative of ‘MAB strike days’ was explicitly designed to overcome this limitation.

Activists, new and old, had to learn quickly that not only were they fighting their employer, but overcoming inertia within UCU itself was necessary to maximise our leverage.

Lessons Learned: Power Lies in the Rank and File

The experiences of Newcastle and Dundee UCU branches, rooted in divergent experiences of the crisis in Higher Education, show that UCU does not simply have to accept the management of decline in the sector or limit itself to so-called ‘credible’ demands. Job cuts can be stopped, management can be challenged, and new funding can be won for the sector. Confidence in our strength provides the opportunity to move beyond the limits of a trade dispute and develop new forms of industrial action or expand our demands to cover other vulnerable staff groups, such as grant-funded researchers.

The ability to do so comes from the militancy of members and branches leading a broad fight, underpinned by extensive strike action. Balloting promptly, mobilising the membership quickly and promoting their decision-making through branch meetings, taking bold action and building a wider campaign of solidarity all increase the likelihood of victory against employer attacks.

We would encourage all UCU activists and branches facing redundancy to look closely at the methods adopted by Newcastle and Dundee UCU. These provide just two examples of success branches can learn from. We would encourage you to invite speakers from these branches to your branch meetings.

— Carlo Morelli (Dundee) and Matt Perry (Newcastle)

Notes

[i] Financial Times, (2023), The looming financial crisis at UK universities, 18^th July 2023.  Available at The looming financial crisis at UK universities. London Economics, (2024), Examination of higher education fees and funding in England Policy note, February 2024. Available at PowerPoint Presentation, accessed 19^th July 2025.

[ii] Queen Mary University UCU (2025), UK HE Shrinking, Available at  UK HE shrinking, Accessed 19^th July 2025.

 Times Higher Education (2024), UK University funding ‘at a crossroads’ ahead of general election, 6^th February 2024. Available at UK university funding ‘at a crossroads’ | Times Higher Education (THE), accessed 19^th July 2025.

[iii] For a history of the introduction of the market to higher education see A. McGettigan, (2013), The Great University Gamble: Money, markets and the future of Higher Education, Pluto Press: London.

[iv] University of Newcastle (2024), Integrated Annual Report 2023-24, p.65. Available at IAR-23-24-compressed.pdf, accessed 20^th July 2025. The Courier (2025), Newcastle University responds to job losses and the UCU’s strike action. Available at Newcastle University responds to job losses and the UCU’s strike action – The Courier Online accessed 20^th July 2025. Financial Times, (2025), How a cash crisis pushed Dundee university to brink of collapse. Available at How a cash crisis pushed Dundee university to brink of collapse accessed 20^th July 2025.

[v] UCU, Building local bargaining project paper: BUILDING TO WIN: available at 20240930_Building_to_Win_Local_bargaining_project.pdf, accessed 23^rd July 2025.