Universities are cutting funding to journalism courses following curbs on UK Government grants for higher-cost subjects.
In May, the government announced that Strategic Priorities Grant (SPG) funding is being withdrawn from journalism, media studies and publishing courses for 2025-26.
The grant, distributed by the Office for Students (OfS), supports higher education institutions with a range of high-cost subjects, helping fund various courses with training students and promoting equality.
Through the SPG, journalism courses in England receive support for purchasing equipment essential to training.
In 2024, Conservative Secretary of State Gillian Keegan delivered a £53m cut in real terms to OfS funding compared to the year prior. This year, Secretary of State Bridget Phillipson has announced a further £200m real-terms reduction.
Dawn Alford, chief executive officer at Society of Editors, told Press Gazette the funding is “basic infrastructure needed in order to train journalists”.
“It’s not just for textbooks,” she said. “Students loan an awful lot of equipment in training to be a journalist, it can be out of bounds for them to pay themselves.
“Public trust in news is crucial at the moment, so the government choosing to strip away vital support for the courses for our future journalists is alarming,” she said. “It’s not an optional extra, it’s essential for the infrastructure of democracy.
“During the Southport riots it was local journalists, not social media, that told the true story of the events that were happening on the ground. This isn’t just universities it’s hurting, it’s weakening the civic fabric altogether.”
Alford holds out “hope” the decision is reversed, highlighting it “should be part of a broader and more serious conversation” in order to “sustain and protect” the media industry for the next generation.
The National Council for the Training of Journalists (NCTJ) and other journalism bodies launched a campaign to ‘Save Quality Journalism Education’ and wrote a letter to Phillipson on 9 June.
One signatory of the letter, Lada Price, chair of the Association for Journalism Education (AJE UK), said these cuts to the grant have been happening “since 2021”.
She said: “This is the first time the Secretary of Education has written to the OfS to reduce the funding for courses [specifically] in journalism. How can you teach journalism without equipment? It doesn’t have to be the latest tech, but we can’t teach them without that software.”
On 24 June, the Department for Education responded to the NCTJ’s letter with its own, confirming the grant cuts and defending “tough prioritisation decisions” made due to inheriting “challenging fiscal context”.
Price said there is a need to “sit down with the Government and figure out what the methodology and impact will be of these cuts”.
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