Hefce plays down closures

There is no need for a "great moral panic" if university courses close in future, funding chiefs declared this week as they ruled out creating a "central command-and-control" system to protect strategically important academic subjects.

As The Times Higher reported last week, the Higher Education Funding Council for England played down talk of subjects in crisis in its advice to the Government about course closures in the sciences, maths, languages and area studies.

Launching the Hefce report, Strategically Important and Vulnerable Subjects , Sir Howard Newby, its chief executive, who also writes in this week's Times Higher , said that course closures might represent "natural adjustments" in the higher education market and were in some cases "a quite sensible rationalisation of provision".

He said there were different "mismatches" between supply and demand in each subject - meaning that a "bespoke" response was needed from the funding council.

"One or two" national centres of excellence in area studies and minority languages could be created, rather than trying to sustain "small pockets of provision" around the country," he said.

Hefce might also take a "more proactive change management role". It could encourage collaboration between institutions or "broker" the transfer of departments from one university to another - such as the move of the physics department at the University of East Anglia to Bath University or the move of chemistry students from Exeter University to Bath and Bristol universities.

Sir Howard stressed that encouraging greater student demand was a job for other agencies as well as for Hefce.

He added that there was evidence that students were being "turned off" science at the age of 12 or 13.

Publication of Hefce's advice coincided with Newcastle University's announcement that it planned to reintroduce physics. Last year it withdrew the subject to new entrants, admitting the last cohort in September.

Now, it plans to offer a natural sciences course in 2006 that will allow students to study three subjects selected from physics, chemistry, mathematics, molecular biology and computing science.

But in response to Hefce's announcement, the Campaign for Science and Engineering (Case) warned that "unless disastrous funding decisions were reversed, serious problems (of course closures) would remain".

"Increasing student demand is important, and it's all very well publishing a report about trying to improve communication between the Government and struggling university departments, but the fact remains that university science is underfunded," Peter Cotgreave, director of Case, said.

Robert Kirby-Harris, chief executive of the Institute of Physics, agreed:

"Currently, the amount of money allocated for physics doesn't actually cover the real cost of teaching the subject, so departments are constantly losing money."

The Royal Society of Chemistry said that the underfunding of the subject "distorts the market" and was "at the heart of recent closures".

In its report to ministers, Hefce has added three additional broad subject areas to the list of "strategically important but vulnerable": modern languages; land-based studies such as agriculture; and quantitative social sciences such as econometrics.

paul.hill@thes.co.uk