Universities need to be more ambitious and not just rely on cutting jobs as a way to balance the books, former education secretary David Blunkett has said.
The English sector also needs “much greater amalgamation”, the Labour peer said, with struggling institutions subsumed into others that have “a vision of the future”.
Speaking to Times Higher Education at the Duolingo English Test conference, Blunkett also called for universities to be more enterprising about “winning people over in the public”, including by offering more evening classes for local residents.
“Mass redundancies and retrenchment are the order of the day…I’d like them to be much more ambitious about how they do manage their finances,” he said.
“Instead of retrench, retrench, retrench, why not look, as a business would do, at new opportunities? It’s just as though, in the DNA at the moment of most universities, their way of balancing the books is to cut.”
