This week the government’s Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, announced the return of maintenance grants for students in greatest need. While we welcome recognition of the financial pressures and impediments many student face, it’s clear that this is a policy with nothing for the arts and humanities, including history.
However, as Lucy Noakes, President of the Royal Historical Society, explains here, these pressures are equally acute for students in the arts and humanities. Moreover, as a new British Academy report on ‘Cold Spots’ shows, choice—in subjects including history—is being further eroded for many as the provision of higher education contorts to the financial crisis facing UK higher education.
If the government is serious about choice, social mobility and access to education it needs to appreciate that provision of many degree subjects is now at considerable risk in a growing number of regions across the UK.
For students to have greater choice and access we need the environments in which choices are made to be fair, balanced and accurate. For this we require political leadership to help us address structural failings and false narratives.
In recent weeks, we have seen two announcements that address the subject of access to higher education. Both are relevant and important for the university sector in the round. At the same time, the implications of both are felt particularly acutely by students and teachers in the arts and the humanities, and in subjects like our own: history. Neither announcement makes for easy reading by members of the Royal Historical Society, and both cast the challenges facing the discipline, and that we confront daily, into stark relief.
Most recent is this week’s announcement by the Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, that the government intends to bring back maintenance grants for the least well-off students. This is a welcome recognition of the financial pressures that many students face and the negative impact of this on their studies. It’s promised that the policy, which partly reverses the scrapping of grants in 2016, will be in place by the end of this parliament.
With this limited return of maintenance grants the Education Secretary seeks to ensure that, for students in need, ‘their time at college or university should be spent learning or training. Not working every hour God sends.’ Grants will hopefully enable selected students not only to focus on their courses but enable those in greatest need—many from backgrounds underrepresented in higher education—to go to university in the first place.
Beyond this, details remain scarce—not least what those ‘priority courses’ will be. Certainly, no one is expecting this to extend to the arts, humanities, or indeed the wider social sciences.
However, the proposal is limited to a very small number of subject areas, described as ‘priority courses aligned with the government’s missions’. Beyond this, details remain scarce—not least what those ‘priority courses’ will be. But if grants follow the trajectory of Labour’s Lifelong Learning Entitlement, students in subjects such as maths, engineering, computing, economics, chemistry and healthcare are set to benefit. Certainly, no one is expecting this list to extend to the arts, humanities, or indeed the wider social sciences.
As we all know, impediments to study extend far beyond those subjects the government identifies as the ‘priority courses’ and degrees of the future. It’s for this very reason that the Royal Historical Society has run its own annual Masters Scholarships programme since 2022. Scholarships provide disadvantaged history students with financial support that reduces the need for paid work or makes graduate study of any kind a viable option. However, our resources are limited, so our programme, though significant for the individual, is a drop in the ocean given the challenges many history students face. The number of applications we receive each year is testimony to this.
The second announcement of recent weeks is the publication of ‘Cold spots: mapping inequality in SHAPE provision in UK higher education’ by the British Academy. This is a clear and sobering summary, discipline by discipline, of how ‘cuts to university courses and departments are exacerbating inequality in access to SHAPE subjects (Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts for People and the Economy).’
More than 50% of students now study at institutions no more than 90km from home while just under a third are within 30km of their place of residence. In each case it’s students ‘from disadvantaged backgrounds [who are] particularly likely to study close to home.’
A key prompt for this report is an increase in the number of UK university students who study locally, with many continuing to live in the parental home. More than 50% of students now study at institutions no more than 90km from home while just under a third are within 30km of their place of residence. In each case it’s students ‘from disadvantaged backgrounds [who are] particularly likely to study close to home.’ As the BA’s briefing shows, in many UK regions students have reduced access to degrees in the arts and humanities while loss of regional provision—especially at lower tariff institutions—limits ‘student choice and deepens barriers to opportunity, especially for the most disadvantaged students.’
The situation for history as a university subject, if not yet critical, is nonetheless serious and requires close attention. Between 2011/12 and 2023/24, four universities ended their provision of history as a degree. Many more (also evidenced by the Royal Historical Society’s advocacy work with individual departments) have and are being forced to significantly reduce the chronological and subject range of the degree programmes they offer. As the British Academy report states, access to the arts and humanities ‘is highly unequal and becoming more so’. History, along with English, ‘is at risk if trends continue.’
Underlying this are shifts in the scale and distribution of student numbers. Between 2019/20 and 2023/24 (the latest academic year for which we have data), total enrolments for all history degrees in UK higher education have declined by 13.8% from 45,000 to just under 38,000 students. We see marginally higher rates of decline over this 5-year span for history undergraduate and taught postgraduate degrees, while research degree enrolments have remained stable.
The risk is now of a worsening spiral of decline—driven by a failed policy of institutional competition and marketisation—which results in options for the most in-need aspirant history students being, quite literally, closed down.
On the ground, this fall in total enrolments is sharply exacerbated by changing recruitment practices, as previous high-tariff institutions revise their offers to secure larger undergraduate intakes. Those bearing the brunt are, of course, the institutions which currently serve the most disadvantaged and least mobile students. The risk is now of a worsening spiral of decline—driven by a failed policy of institutional competition and marketisation—which results in options for the most in-need aspirant history students being, quite literally, closed down. Without this core provision, any lingering question over which subjects might qualify for maintenance grants becomes obsolete.
If, as the Education Secretary claimed this week, the government is serious about choice, social mobility and access to education it needs to appreciate that the provision of local universities and courses is now at considerable risk given the financial turmoil affecting UK higher education. What’s clear is that our current situation and trajectory is not a route to greater choice and accessibility. Rather, it is a potential channelling of resources and students into an ever narrowing range of options deemed by policy makers as being in the country’s best interests for the future.
To do so is a significant misreading of history’s future as a subject of university study. Yes, recent years show an unwelcome decline in student numbers, but the rate of this decline appears to be slowing. For 2023/24, figures for undergraduate enrolment show a 1.8% fall on the previous year, compared with a 5.4% decline for 2021/2 to 2022/3.
Moreover, despite negative messaging about this year’s GCSEs and A-Levels, history is still a substantial and popular subject. In 2025, it remains in each case the fifth most studied of all subjects on offer. Again, 2025 did see a decline for history in those taking both exams, but a longer timescale shows a subject of consistent popularity, with a 4.8% increase in enrolments for GCSE history between 2020 and 2025 (292,270 vs 306,760 students) and a modest 0.4% decline at A-Level (44,900 against 44,720 students).
To protest an infrastructure and public discourse that cuts provision and reduces student choice is not to deny the importance of the government’s favoured ‘priority’ subjects. But it is to question the wisdom of covertly diminishing or overtly denying the value of all other options, history included. Those working in the humanities now encounter considerable misinformation and misunderstanding about the ‘value’ of subjects like history, be this the gain for an individual student or society more broadly. Few of these negative claims stand up to scrutiny. As the Royal Historical Society shows, the personal and professional return from a history degree is equal to many subjects within STEM when measured in terms of access to employment and salary.
We believe this future will be easier (if never easy) to navigate with recourse to the skills and temperaments integral to a historical (and humanities) approach to life.
The value of history goes further. We live at a time of considerable uncertainty and peril— environmentally, technologically and politically—and many are justifiably concerned about a future shaped without adequate appreciation, and application, of the skills of those trained in the humanities. We believe this future will be easier (if never easy) to navigate with recourse to the skills and temperaments integral to a historical (and humanities) approach to life: contextualisation, scepticism, a seeking after evidence, an acknowledgment and tolerance of complexity, and an appreciation of the value, and precarity, of civic responsibility and democracy.
Presently, we are failing to be heard when we make this case—notwithstanding the popularity of history as a pursuit. It is incumbent on organisations like the Royal Historical Society, in collaboration with others, to do better: to make the place, contribution and potential of academic history (much of which takes place far beyond higher education) more legible and intelligible to those who, while ‘liking history’, struggle to see its place in education, its potential as a degree or its value to society.
For this, or any, government to advocate for universities and higher education—indeed education as a whole—as a public good, rather than a means to an end, is welcome.
But we also need, and now request, help and support in this endeavour. For students to have greater choice and access we need the environments in which choices are made to be fair, balanced and accurate. In her conference speech this week, and in addition to her announcement on grants, Bridget Phillipson criticised previous Tory governments for treating ‘our amazing universities as a political battleground, not a public good.’
For this, or any, government to advocate for universities and higher education—indeed education as a whole—as a public good, rather than a means to an end, is welcome. To acknowledge the place of history, and the wider humanities, as central to ‘our amazing universities’ and to the good they do would be yet more welcome. A speech—in defence and appreciation of the humanities—is one that’s long overdue, now urgent, and one we wish to hear. All the more so if it comes from our present Education Secretary, a graduate in History and French.
About the author
Lucy Noakes is President of the Royal Historical Society and Rab Butler Professor of Modern History at the University of Essex.
