Description of the contract
The Higher Education Funding Council for Wales (HEFCW) is a Welsh Government Sponsored Body, established under the Further and Higher Education Act 1992. We regulate fee levels at higher education providers, ensure a framework is in place for assessing the quality of higher education and scrutinise the performance of universities and other designated providers. We provide funding for higher education teaching, research and innovation, and apply our influence and expertise to help deliver Welsh Government priorities for higher education that also have wider societal and economic benefits. A copy of our most recent annual report is available on our website as well as information on our Corporate Strategy.
HEFCW provides funding to higher education providers in Wales to support the delivery of higher education provision, as well as to support specific groups of students to be able to access higher education study and research. HEFCW’s teaching funding is provided in the form of an annual block grant to institutions. HEFCW’s funding allocations for the academic year 2022/23 were published via circular W22/27HE in July 2022.
Institutions in Wales receive income from student tuition fees, as well as funding from HEFCW and other sources such as research grants and industry collaborations. Any institution that wishes for its full-time undergraduate courses to be automatically designated for student support is required to submit a fee and access plan to HEFCW. If that fee and access plan is accepted the institution will be permitted to charge up to the maximum annual fee limit, of £9,000, and students studying those courses at that institution will be able to receive tuition fee support up to that amount.
Future arrangements for the funding of higher education will change, subject to the establishment of the Commission for Tertiary Education and Research (CTER). This body will be responsible for the funding, oversight and regulation of tertiary education and research in Wales and is expected to become operational on 1 April 2024.
HEFCW have recently completed a review of teaching funding . Part of the purpose of the review was to provide HEFCW with an opportunity to evaluate whether its teaching funding methodologies were appropriate and fit for purpose, given that the core credit-based method was established more than twenty years ago. There have been sizeable changes to the HE funding landscape in that period, including as a result of the outcomes of the UK government reviews of higher education (Dearing, Browne and Augar) and the Diamond Review in Wales.
The outcomes of the funding review are available in circular W23/10HE. HEFCW had originally intended to implement a new, consultation-informed, credit-based method in teaching funding allocations for the 2023/24 academic year. The new method would seek to provide a more equitable credit-based funding methodology for full-time and part-time provision. The new method also incorporated a new set of cost groups which would replace HEFCW’s existing academic subject categories.
HEFCW took the decision not to implement the model in the 2023/24 funding allocations on the basis that the expected available budget would not be sufficient to implement the model in full without significant disruption to the HE sector or potential destabilisation of some funded provision. HEFCW will instead provide the updated model to CTER, along with the data analysis and consultation responses, to use in developing and implementing a funding method for post-16 provision.
Taking account of that decision and recognising some of the issues raised as part of the review, for example challenges in the approach to the sustainable funding of increasingly diverse provision, HEFCW want to commission an investigative study looking at higher education delivery in Wales. The traditional modes of delivery have been subject to extensive pedagogical scrutiny in recent years and more recently there have been significant changes in delivery methods due to the Covid-19 pandemic which have been embedded to different extents.
The study and its outcomes will be provided to the Commission for Tertiary Education and Research as further evidence to inform its funding methods as it discharges its strategic duties to promote life-long learning, encourage participation in tertiary education and promote collaboration and coherence in tertiary education and research. The study will build on the review of part-time provision undertaken in 2019/20, as well as our published analysis of part-time HE data covering the period of 2008/09 to 2017/18.
The study will involve a collection of data and insights from HE providers in Wales. There are nine funded HE institutions, three funded FE institutions, as well as eight further education institutions and three alternative providers which are based in Wales and provide higher education courses, but who are not funded or regulated by HEFCW. The institutions are located across Wales and deliver a variety of higher education provision, either directly, or through sub-contractual and collaborative arrangements.
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