HEFCW admits merger targets unlikely to be met

Three of the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales’s three-year targets due to be met in 2012-13 will be missed, the body has said in its latest corporate strategy.

The funding council’s 2012-13 to 2015-16 strategy, published on 6 June, describes two of these as being essential government priorities. These are targets for part-time education, which has seen a “major reduction” in the period 2010-11 to 2012-13, and increasing universities’ income through mergers.

HEFCW had aimed to ensure that Welsh univerisites’ income exceeded the UK median income through merging universities. Despite three mergers taking place during the past three years, HEFCW says its reconfiguration and collaboration target is “unlikely to be met”. Although the strategy does not say how far the Welsh institutions’ incomes are from the UK median, it notes elsewhere that some comparative data is not yet available for 2013.