Dr Brooke Storer-Church emphasised the necessity of oversight to ensure student access and opportunity is preserved, specialisms are maintained and the government's own growth ambitions can be delivered.

The Times Higher Education article ‘Universities risk ‘creeping death’ from unsupervised mergers: specialist institutions could be subsumed without high-level oversight of sector consolidation, MPs warned’, 

In our submission to the Education Committee inquiry into university finances – formally published on 16 September – GuildHE warned that while “mergers can deliver benefits”, without “a body with oversight of the whole system, the UK could sleepwalk into a homogenised sector which would not serve our country well”.

“Systems leadership and oversight is required to ensure that a variety of institutional types are preserved because this has been key to ensuring sector health and resilience in systems elsewhere around the world,” Dr Brooke Storer-Church told Times Higher Education.

“We have put faith in [the DfE] to produce a systems-level vision for the sector but we have yet to see it.”

GuildHE and Universities UK, in partnership with others like Advance HE, Association of Heads of University Administration (AHUA), Jisc and more, are stepping in and up to support institutions across the country to find creative solutions to their deteriorating financial conditions, but this is not sufficient to preserve a globally-leading and locally-impactful education system. 

In the Higher Education and Funding – Threat of Insolvency and International Students inquiry the Education Committee had requested to hear from stakeholders in the sector on the impact of government policy on international students, higher education insolvency protections, and the ramifications of institutional insolvency and regional impact.