Higher Education: Affordability and Quality

Earl of Clancarty Excerpts

Thursday 2nd July 2026 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Clancarty (CB)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Deech for the opportunity to speak in this debate. I wish to make one single point, which is to draw attention to the threat to arts and humanities courses at universities, which is a long-term concern but one that appears to be getting worse. As the noble Lord, Lord Isaac, said, the latest victim of this is the faculty of humanities, arts and social sciences at the University of Exeter, a Russell group university, with over 110 academic roles proposed to be cut, affecting subjects including the visual arts, history, English and languages. But Exeter is not alone. The universities of Hertfordshire, Leicester, Nottingham, Cardiff, and Bristol, Goldsmiths, University of London, and others have all recently either closed courses or threatened closures in music, creative writing, film studies, theatre, English, theology and modern languages.

My worry is not just this trend, which has deep-seated roots—I will come back to that—but the Government’s attitude towards this trend, which is more than worrying. The DfE’s announcement in the press release last week of a new deal for young people says:

“Ministers will unveil plans to crack down on poor-quality university courses”.


On Tuesday, in an Oral Question, I asked the Minister for the criteria that would be used to define “poor-quality courses”. In reply she said that it is, in part,

“the ability to determine what the returns are from individual courses. It is for that reason that we will take action to prevent the expansion of those courses that are not providing the returns … that students have the right to expect”.—[Official Report, 30/6/26; col. 944.]

When pressed further by the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, the Minister referred to last week’s report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which identifies courses which effect the greatest financial return for students in terms of salary and those which do not, as the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, pointed out. In the graph which the IFS supplies in that report, courses such as philosophy, performing arts, other creative subjects, English and history lie to one degree or another on the low side of that equation. It is precisely those courses which are already suffering, while the Government seem to wish to discriminate against them further.

Also, the Minister said in reply to my question that, if necessary, they will legislate to do this. I dread to think what that might be in legislation. We are not hearing the language the Conservatives used of “Mickey Mouse courses” from this Government, but the effect will be the same. The Opposition do not now talk about Mickey Mouse courses. The noble Baroness, Lady Cash, in an Oral Question on 22 June, suggested, precisely because of the returns we are talking about, that creative courses should be the first to be cut. This way of thinking, from both the Opposition and the Government, of education in this narrow, crude transactionalist sense is deeply wrong, because it is narrow, short-term thinking concerned primarily with the economic effect on the individual.

There is no thought here of the sum total of a diversity of knowledge and experience, of their total value towards society, of the social value of subjects. Arts and humanities subjects, perhaps more than others, stimulate and engender the critical thinking so necessary in our society, and they are therefore entirely worthy subjects to be studied in universities. We know that many starting salaries can be low, but that should not invalidate the study of such subjects since it ignores, among other things, the larger-scale economic effect. In that respect, the creative industries are hugely important—in their profound social value and the acknowledged wider application of these studies for different kinds of work. In defence of these subjects, Vivienne Stern of Universities UK has said that

“in an age of AI, we’ll value the understanding of how human beings think and act more, not less, in the future”.

In terms of the pipeline, the Government are being inconsistent because the policy works so much against the intended encouragement of arts subjects in secondary schools through changes being brought in through the Curriculum and Assessment Review, particularly with the removal of the EBacc. It is, of course, those 14 years of arts subjects being squeezed in schools, and the knock-on effect that this had on higher education, which have, in part, left higher education in the precarious state it is in with respect to the arts, as the GuildHE report The Value of Creative Graduates pointed out in 2024. The British Academy has also pointed out that if we believe these subjects to be worth while, their further reduction at universities will create cold spots across the country. Of course, those cold spots will become more prevalent in the regions outside London.

I am confused about what the Government are trying to achieve. Are they trying to remove vocational subjects from universities and boost apprenticeships that way? If so, this is misguided, as not all vocational subjects are about apprenticeships. Whatever we may think of the long-term developments in higher education—I regret that art colleges are not the stand-alone institutions they once were back in the 1960s—that is nevertheless water under the bridge. These subjects have, or ought to have, a settled place in our universities. The University of the Arts London, and many of our arts and humanities departments, do a great job. To be fair, that is not what the Government appear to be criticising with this strange label of “poor-quality” courses.

I said at the beginning that these concerns had deep-seated roots. Many of these roots lie in the introduction of the loan system back in the 1990s, with the commercialisation, in effect, of our higher education system. The Government really need to look at how complicit they are now, alongside some university management, in deepening that culture, because it is bad for education and bad for society.