Overshadowed by news that university fees will rise in line with inflation from 2026, the radical new vision for English higher education outlined in the could hardly have received a more tepid reception. Even sketchily-drawn plans for “V-levels” (replacing level 3 BTECs at further education colleges) enjoyed more coverage from a media preoccupied with the daring days earlier – not to mention .

But the collective shrug that greeted the White Paper’s section on research should not disguise its huge potential importance, many believe. If enacted, plans for a “more focused volume of research, delivered with higher-quality, better cost recovery, and stronger alignment to short- and long-term national priorities” will have massive implications for how some £20 billion of public research funding is doled out across UK universities.

More fundamentally, moving to a system with “fewer broad generalist providers and more specialists”, with some institutions becoming “teaching-only” specialists or focusing on “teaching with applied research in specific disciplines”, could tear up long-held notions of what a British university is, rolling back the Humboldtian model of research-informed higher education.

However drily and technocratically it might have been phrased, then, the White Paper was a bold statement of intent, according to John Womersley, former executive chair at the Science and Technology Facilities Council, and now an advisor to the University of Edinburgh.

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“There was a definite edge – it was saying, ‘We are going to make life harder for certain universities to continue what they’re doing,’” he said. “It’s a message that has come through various routes – speeches by [science minister] Patrick Vallance, talks by [UK Research and Innovation chief executive] Ian Chapman – but they are now shouting it from the rooftops to make sure university managers listen. They’re telling universities to sort themselves out – and there won’t be any more money to help with this.”

Nor – unlike for previous overhauls of UK higher education – will there be a lengthy commission overseen by a senior civil servant or industry heavyweight in the mould of John Browne, whose 2010 review paved the way for £9,000 tuition fees. “UKRI funding is the lever that will be used to push through these changes,” said Womersley, noting Chapman’s statements that he wants to see UK universities do “fewer things but doing them really well” and that he accepts the “nature of this shift” will have major consequences “for some people”.

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But how exactly will UKRI “actively encourage each provider to be clear about the role they are playing [and] their unique strengths” and persuade them “to … focus on one or two [disciplines] where they are strongest”? Why would a university choose to forgo even modest research revenues and reputation boosts from the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and other sources to “specialise in teaching”?

“As a governor, you don’t want to close doors for your institution – particularly a lucrative one, given that research…can be a very important source of funding,” reflected Diana Beech, director of the Finsbury Institute at City St George’s, University of London, who has served on the University of Worcester’s governing body for nine years.

“If you could credibly argue that teaching specialisation would help you become more distinctive to students and increase enrolments, then maybe you could make that case,” she added. “But the bigger risk is reputational – no university wants to get put in the polytechnic box by abandoning the breadth of provision that you associate with a university. And if certain academic areas cease to do research, you also risk losing that interdisciplinary magic that happens within a comprehensive university.”

With vice-chancellors cognisant that the reputational consequences of scaling back their research – such as a potential slide down university rankings – could hit international enrolments, new mechanisms to encourage a retreat from research will surely be needed.

For Womersley, the REF – currently paused until late December for a methodological rethink – is the obvious way to incentivise research specialisation given its central role in distributing £2 billion a year of “quality -related” research funding in England alone. “Changing the rules or even just the funding formula would allow you to sharpen the gradient in how you fund institutions: those with higher scores would be given much more and those with lower scores much less,” he predicted.

Given that the lion’s share of UKRI’s £9 billion a year research funding (rising to £10 billion by the end of the decade) is awarded by its various research councils, tighter criteria on who could apply might also be introduced to reshape the research landscape, he continued. Currently, “it is understood…[that] these grants fund ‘excellence wherever it is found’, and this is done by independent peer review. Certain calls for funding can be limited depending on institution, so this would need to be dialled up to make it harder to bid,” he said.

Directly preventing certain departments from even applying for grants, however, would raise some contentious issues of fairness, which would risk dragging UKRI into heated debates about institutional course closures, said Womersley. “At the moment it’s easy to blame universities for the decisions they make – that blame for redundancies would fall directly on UKRI if closures stemmed from decisions made behind closed doors by a research council panel in Swindon,” he said.

The same goal could be achieved more quietly, he continued, by setting a minimum level of grant – for instance, no more small grants under £500,000 or £1 million. This would effectively bar most smaller universities from applying.

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But even that is not likely to go down at all well with those affected. An example of the level of pushback that such moves can provoke is provided by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council’s attempts to “shape capability” across its disciplines more than a decade ago. The policy, announced in 2011, saw the organisation announcing decisions on whether to grow, shrink or maintain funding in each discipline based on its perception of national capacity and need – including industrial need. The policy drew loud and sustained heckles from researchers, both about the quality of the decisions themselves and the alleged lack of consultation with which they were made. “Shaping capability” was ultimately renamed “balancing capabilities” to reassure researchers that the EPSRC was merely engaged in “gentle steering” (often through targeted fellowship calls), rather than revolutionary diktat.

To smooth the White Paper’s shaping process, Chapman – the former chief executive of the UK Atomic Energy Authority, who took up the reins at UKRI in July – has suggested having a more “strategic relationship” between funders and universities, in which both parties agree upon areas of university strength to be supported. But how easy that agreement will be to reach remains to be seen – particularly when UKRI’s conclusion is that the university in question has no areas of research worthy of being funded.

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Even from a more dispassionate standpoint, concentrating research funding into fewer departments deemed excellent has risks as well as benefits, according to Robert Van de Noort, vice-chancellor of the University of Reading, reflecting on his native Netherlands’ system of more specialised research universities.

“In that smaller system, you have technical universities and more academic research-driven institutions with noted specialisms. Delft is known for its engineering, for example,” explained Van de Noort, who moved to the UK in the 1990s.

“In the short-term, this concentration undoubtedly delivers efficiency benefits, but, in the longer-term, you don’t get the sector strength or innovation that you gain when institutions are competing against each other. Initially, it creates great departments, but it is easy for groupthink to set in as you don’t have other institutions challenging the dominant paradigm. You might have a professor appointed in his – and it’s usually his – 40s who sets a direction for a department for 20 years…So the system becomes more stable, but you lack the agility and external challenge that the research system needs.”

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Others worry that the growing emphasis on applied science might make it harder for departments to do basic research, despite ministerial assurances that this element of the system will be protected.

“The White Paper says it will ‘protect curiosity-driven research’ at a number of points but gives absolutely no indication of just how they’ll do this,” said Philip Moriarty, professor of physics at the University of Nottingham, who was previously an outspoken opponent of the EPSRC’s shaping capability programme. “This claim is [stated] right beside – often in the same sentence – objectives such as ‘align research with needs of the economy’, ‘stronger alignment to short-term and long-term national priorities’”, he says, noting the promise that universities will be “recognised and rewarded for demonstrating alignment with government priorities”.

Already, “curiosity-driven research is often only done through the back door”, said Moriarty, whose own research specialises in nanoscience. Securing funding for it typically requires the applicant to “make a link, however small, to one of the priorities of the EPSRC”. And while the research council keeps its grant calls “broad enough to allow for this”, making that case is “becoming more difficult, and will become harder still, it seems”.

 Moriarty is less concerned about the suggestion that universities should do more to share research grants, facilities and equipment given that “this kind of sharing has been happening for years. Any bid for strategic equipment over £1 million requires detailed explanations about how it will be made accessible and basically become a national resource. Grant programmes will routinely pull together numerous universities so it’s difficult to see what’s new here.”

But the physicist opposes the breaking of the link between teaching and research – and noted that even the White Paper itself appears ambivalent about it, recognising the “high quality of teaching, research and student experience found right across our diverse sector” and the benefits of student access to the “most advanced research-based academic knowledge”.

For City St George’s Beech, teaching specialisation also raises an equity issue. “If this government truly believes in equality of opportunity, this should mean giving students the chance to access research-informed university courses, not pulling up the drawbridge on newer universities who are told to specialise in teaching.”

With the reforms potentially leading to the closure of university departments if their activities are not deemed institutional priorities, Labour MPs in university towns and cities risk being dragged into politically damaging rows over job losses, continued Beech – the last thing they need given the peril their seats in Parliament already face from Keir Starmer’s dismal poll ratings.

“Labour’s decline in the polls has been startling: no local MP will want the backlash from reforms imposed from on high,” Beech said. “That raises the question of who is going to sell this vision of higher education to the public,” she added, noting that science minister Patrick Vallance has been quiet on the skills White Paper since it was published on 21 October.

She also noted that Liz Kendall has only been secretary of state for science, innovation and technology for a few weeks, having replaced Peter Kyle in . “So will she really want to go out and sell this idea? To do so would mean opening yourself up to attack on a new flank – criticism on higher education has been mainly around raising tuition fees, but if you bring research funding into the equation then you risk being the bad guy here, too,” concluded Beech, a former advisor to three Conservative science ministers.

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However, the White Paper’s distinct lack of detail on its proposals has led some to wonder how much will actually change in practice. The report’s final page on “how we will measure success” is, for some, the most instructive; while there are five targets relating to skills, apprenticeships and teacher recruitment numbers, there is no target or measure covering research.

“While it’s very encouraging to see a skills White Paper co-authored by three government departments that have such a big stake in the skills agenda, it is surprising there are no measures for success for the research and innovation component,” said Graeme Reid, professor of research policy at UCL and formerly head of research funding in Whitehall.

Indeed, the lack of concrete plans to implement the more efficient, collaborative and specialised higher education sector it envisages has led some observers to suggest that the White Paper’s research section amounts to little more than Green Paper-style policy aspiration, with even the promised – and long sought – improvement to research cost recovery unlikely to transpire in practice. One professor even told THE that the research section seemed like a “ChatGPT digest” of ministerial speeches and previous skills announcements. “Line by line it reads OK, but step back and there are so many contradictions that you can’t ignore.”

Nonetheless, the lack of any need for legislation to redirect research funding means that major change could come sooner than many expect. Under the prompting of Vallance, UKRI is already being more explicit that it will increasingly focus on research outcomes, preferably aligned to government missions, and that will mean concentration of resources and institutional change, explained Womersley.

Yet, although important, research outcomes are just one of UKRI’s strategic missions, he added.

“If we were just focused on research excellence alone, UKRI could send its money to MIT or Harvard: they’d arguably produce better outcomes,” he said. “But it is implicit that UKRI’s job is also about underwriting the UK’s broader research ecosystem by helping institutions remain what could be classed as ‘universities’.

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“That can’t be ignored – even if it is clear that outcomes and excellence are going to be much more important.”