Scottish universities are calling for immediate stopgap financial support while politicians review how the sector is funded as the government prepares to deliver the nation’s final budget before Holyrood elections.

Finance secretary Shona Robison will set out the Scottish National Party’s (SNP) plans for the coming financial year on 13 January – four months before voters head to the polls to decide who will form the next government. 

With a £4.7 billion funding gap projected by the end of the decade, ministers have little room for manoeuvre. They will, however, benefit from uplifts to past tax estimates as well as £100 million extra from Westminster.

While universities are unlikely to benefit from a significant cash injection, with the extra funding expected to be mostly targeted at tackling child poverty, some believe the government may look to offer the struggling sector some support.

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“Although the Scottish government will privilege areas of spending like health and social care in a pre-election year, I do wonder whether they might try to provide some short-term relief to the higher education budget,” said Anton Muscatelli, former principal of the University of Glasgow and president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

While it won’t be “substantial given the fiscal pressures”, extra money from Westminster “might give them an opportunity to do something which allows them to say that they are paying attention to higher education financial pressures”, he said. 

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There is a growing sense that politicians in Scotland are finding the financial problems facing universities harder to ignore. 

Claire McPherson, director of Universities Scotland, said she believed the challenges have been “recognised widely across Parliament” over the past year.

This has culminated in the announcement of a cross-party review of university funding in Scotland, set to report in autumn this year.

In the meantime, however, McPherson said there is an “urgency to address the immediate fiscal challenges” facing universities and said she is “very keen to differentiate that from the longer-term discussion around sustainable funding for the sector”.

“We’ve been very clear on the need for an above inflationary uplift in our resource budget and for an increase in our capital budget, and that’s a fundamental ask for us,” she said, adding she was “hopeful” there would be positive news for universities in the budget.

Others were more sceptical. “I don’t think it’ll be as bad a settlement as it was two years ago, but I think it won’t be a significantly enhanced settlement,” said Des McNulty, a former Scottish minister and deputy director of Policy Scotland, referencing funding cuts made in 2024. 

“I suspect they will give a reasonable return to higher and further education [comparable] with last year,” he said. 

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Huw Morris, an education expert who recently co-authored a paper on reforming Scotland’s tertiary sector with McNulty, added that politicians will likely be reluctant to cut funding for higher education so close to elections.

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“Messing with university finances in advance of an election is potentially toxic because a lot of the activist base comes from those places,” he said. 

Stephen Boyd, director of independent thinktank IPPR Scotland, agreed the pre-election cuts would be politically dangerous. “I think there’s a very wide appreciation across all political parties of the importance of the sector so I think that they’ll be trying to avoid making any cuts in the run-up to the election,” he said.

However Boyd said announcements about further investments in higher education may have been “kicked into the long grass” by the funding review. 

The review has also been criticised for its limited scope, with Morris and McNulty arguing policymakers have missed an opportunity to look at the entirety of Scotland’s tertiary education sector.

Sai Shradda Suresh Viswanathan, president of the National Union of Students in Scotland, lamented the “stark absence” of student engagement with the review. “And with colleges out of scope as well, the true drivers of social change are being ignored,” she said. 

Responding to criticisms that the review will allow politicians to dodge difficult questions about university funding in the run-up to the election, McPherson said it was important there is time to explore the wider issues. 

Prior discussions have often been “tied up in annual budget cycles and there isn’t sufficient time and space to have an in-depth discussion, given the way that those cycles operate”, she said.

“There are here and now immediate issues that will continue to be at the forefront of our mind in terms of our engagement with government, and they don’t go away because this work’s happening, but we do need to carve out space to have that long-term discussion.”

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helen.packer@timeshighereducation.com