The Office for Students (OfS) have announced a 50% cut to the funding they allocate higher education providers for creative arts and media studies courses. As your students’ union, we felt it important to affirm our disappointment with this news and express our commitment to working to fight the intended results. This is a devastating attack on creative arts higher education, and will affect arts courses and universities in England, including UAL, in many ways. 

Based on modeling by the OfS, UAL is likely to receive £3,892,155 less in funding next year compared to last year. These proposed cuts will affect working class students, regardless of fee status or nationality, and will exclude many from arts higher education. We firmly believe that creative arts education should not only be accessible to the elite class. Higher education funding itself has decreased drastically over the years. These cuts serve to pit students, subjects, and academics against each other for meager slices of the funding pie. All of us within higher education need to work together to pushback against these cuts and any future attacks. The Arts has been a tool for community building and organising, and a space for resistance. University has become marketised, and we need to reimagine what arts higher education can look like. 

At Arts SU, your Sabbatical Officers are working together with other students’ unions, universities and creative sector workers to plan a national response. We invite you to join us in organising and the resistance against this attack on our creative arts higher education. 

If you want to get involved, get in touch with your Campaigns Officer, Syahadah Shahril - campaigns@su.arts.ac.uk

Read More:

OfS Announcement

OfS Funding Modelling