Million Plus

MillionPlus, The Association for Modern Universities, welcomes the opportunity to contribute a written representation with practical policy suggestions that would support the Government in delivering on their missions.

The sector currently faces a challenging financial environment with funding per student in England having fallen over the last decade. While the solutions MillionPlus are suggesting in this submission will be shorter-term solutions, a sustainable funding model is imperative for the higher education sector, and MillionPlus calls on the Government to urgently establish a Taskforce to support this.

Modern universities are directly responsible for training thousands of the backbone public service staff that keep Britain working. Some 70% of nursing students were at modern universities in 2021-22, as well as 70% of midwifery students. While these institutions accounted for 63% of all initial teacher training students in the university sector, and 75% of those were studying the undergraduate pathway in the same period.

There is an ongoing crisis in the retention and recruitment of public service staff.MillionPlus welcomed this Government’s pledge to recruit 6,500 more teachers and commit to creating 7,500 more medical school places and 10,000 more nursing and midwifery clinical placements per year, but to meet these targets, appropriate incentives and policy must be implemented.

The MillionPlus submission outlines a number of options that the Government could implement which would go some way to alleviate the crisis, including a fee loan forgiveness scheme, with modelling by London Economics, and the introduction of a social mobility premium.

Read more below:

Download Budget submission 2024 »