Universities 'artfully' make wrong funding claims

by Katarzyna Janiak

Several universities have been forced to repay their Government funding claims of up to £86 million after wrongly reporting student drop-out rates.

According to Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), more than half of universities checked by the audit wrongly reported the drop-out rates.

The most prominent were institutions that only became universities in the 1990s.

However, according to Sonia Roberts, Knowledge Centre Manager at HEFCE, University of the Arts London (UAL) was not among the guilty party: “I can confirm that the UAL is not one of the institutions that we have asked to repay funding following data audit work.”

London Met overclaimed £50m

One of the universities being forced to repay the money is London Metropolitan University, who claimed £50 million.

This has proved to be a serious blow to the budget of a university already struggling to stay afloat, as at least 330 members of their staff will be made redundant in a few months time.

HEFCE says that the situation at London Met is an extreme case: “We give out around £7.5 billion a year, so we have to put it in that context."

They also accuse the universities of “artfully misconstruing data” in a “co-ordinated approach” to receive higher grants.

Roberts also says that the problem was not only solely based on drop-out rates being inaccurate: “The changes to grants also covered both teaching and research data.”

'Too rigid'

In an email published by a Sunday paper, an official for the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) wrote: “HEFCE have told us privately that there may be dislike among some institutions of the definition used for non-completion.”

Pam Tatlow, chief executive of Million+, a company that represents the new universities, claims the fault is on HEFCE’s side: “Their interpretation of non-completion was far too rigid,” she claims.

In addition to this, Tatlow described the suggestion that institutions were collaborating to over-claim as “nonsense” and “outrageous”.

Currently, up to 20 per cent of students fail to complete their courses, according to the annual Student Retention and Progression Conference.