Universities to share services in a bid to cut costs

In recent months, financial pressure on universities and the Department for Education (DfE) have reached new heights, but a report has found that institutions could be making substantial savings through “smarter use of shared services”.

Amid several major UK universities facing bankruptcy, Secretary for Education, Bridget Phillipson, has made it clear that universities will be expected to be “significantly more transparent” concerning their spending and resource management.

Phillipson has criticised universities for their financial practices and demanded that they work together to “curb” irresponsible spending.

Phillipson expects universities to ‘tighten their belts’

Phillipson has been unsympathetic to the financial troubles faced by UK universities and has made it clear that the Government expects them to deliver more to British students.

In her statement in November last year, she laid out her “five priorities for reform of the higher education system”.

The first, and most important, of these priorities was “collaboration across the sector to drive efficiency”.

In this statement, it is made clear that Phillipson expects universities to “tighten their belts”, rather than have the Government bail out the struggling higher education sector.

[Shared services] cannot save the higher education sector from its current financial troubles

In response, a report was commissioned by Universities UK (UUK) and conducted by Jisc, which suggested methods for universities to improve spending by sharing services.

There are already some services shared by universities throughout the UK, such as the application platform UCAS and job recruitment site Unitemps, operated by the University of Warwick.

However, the report by Jisc suggests that universities should increase their sharing of services to include everything ranging from IT and finance to human resources.

The report claims that, while shared services may be a significant help to struggling institutions, they cannot save the higher education sector from its current financial troubles.