Why we're fighting back

Bristol University is in a no-win situation, fined for taking too few state-school pupils and boycotted by private schools for doing something about it. Now it is considering legal action, reveals Lucy Hodges

Bristol University may be the most popular university in the country and have the honour of educating Tony Blair's son, but it is hurting badly. Not only has it been rubbished in the press for allegedly turning away high-fliers from private schools in favour of those from comprehensives, but also it now finds itself penalised by the Higher Education Funding Council (Hefce) for being too much of a "green welly" place and failing to recruit enough students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Caught between a rock and a hard place, between the new political correctness which requires universities to have a balanced intake and the old regime which left admissions entirely to the whims of individual departments, it feels a deep sense of injustice.

"You literally don't know what you can do," says Professor Eric Thomas, Bristol's vice-chancellor. "In terms of widening participation, benchmarks are set and criteria are used that are not within our control. We are a university in the south of England. We attract students from south of Birmingham which is the wealthiest part of the country."

Last month – within days of the top independent schools resolving to boycott the university in retaliation at its admissions policy – Hefce took money away from Bristol's teaching budget. In addition, the university suffered the indignity of being one of 16 universities to have a safety net applied to protect its funding.

It received a bail-out of £400,000 to help it deal with a loss of about the same amount. That might not have mattered if Bristol had done better in research funds. But the new funding formulae introduced by Hefce under pressure from the Government are designed to reward a small elite. Thus the "golden triangle" of Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial and University College London were the main beneficiaries of the extra £20m allocated to leading institutions.

"How is it that the most popular university in the country, a university that has delivered a surplus consistently and increasingly for the last 10 years, that has a clear strategy for investment, that has a double A rating with Standard and Poors, and has 15 top 5* ratings for research ends up requiring a safety net?" says Professor Thomas. "Essentially because of the techniques used to allocate this £20m of research money, we have been short-changed by about £700,000."

The effect has been to throw Bristol into rethinking its budget. It is now having to consider reducing non-salaried staff and investment in IT and libraries. That is on top of a whole raft of new financial horrors – the one per cent increase in National Insurance; the fact that it may well have to cough up more for staff pensions; the introduction of a single pay spine whose effect is expected to be inflationary; the cost of new disability legislation; and the fact that its endowments are worth less because of the stock market slump.

Professor Thomas is so indignant that he has written to Hefce asking it to answer some questions. If Bristol University does not receive satisfactory replies to those questions, it is contemplating legal action against the funding council. And if it decided to seek judicial review of Hefce's decision on the grounds that the funding council was acting unreasonably, experts believe that would be the first time that a university had sued the government funding agency.

"The only thing we have as an option is judicial review, and I don't know yet whether that would be a sensible plan to follow or not," says Professor Thomas. Specifically, Bristol is asking the funding council whether its decision to introduce greater selectivity in research funding – which entailed giving the extra money to those departments that got the highest grade, a 5*, in both the 1996 and 2001 research assessment exercises – is at odds with what Education Secretary Charles Clarke wrote in his funding letter to Hefce this year.

In this letter, and in the higher education White Paper, Clarke indicated that there would be additional funding for the best of the 5* departments that could demonstrate "a critical mass" of researchers. The phrase "critical mass" was not defined. The funding council interpreted this to mean giving the money to those that were awarded 5*s in the last two rounds of the research assessment exercise. And that benefited Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial and UCL. Bristol received only one 5* grading in 1996, though it got 15 in 2001. So, although it was able to show significant improvement it was treated as though it was not in the top rank. That, it believes, contravenes the spirit and letter of Clarke's words.

Bristol has not taken specialist legal advice but Professor Thomas says that it will do so if it isn't satisfied with Hefce's reply. "We have said we are unhappy," he explains. "We would like to know the basis of the decision in detail and why at first view there are inconsistencies between the decision and the letter from Charles Clarke."

Many in the higher education sector are chafing against what they are calling the "widening participation tax" imposed last month without consultation on those universities that were not close enough to their benchmarks on the social composition of the student body. Money has been removed from them and channelled to universities that were doing well on this indicator – and to the golden four for research. All universities were caught unawares by the sudden decision to redistribute funds in this way.

What irritates universities such as Bristol is how they will be able to sustain their excellence in research and therefore benefit their local economy without the kind of government funding they have received. "It is vital for the South-West that there's world-class research activity going on in its biggest economic cluster," says Professor Thomas. Toshiba put its European research labs in Bristol because of the university's electrical and electronic engineering department. The university is spinning out companies into the local economy. Will it be able to do so in future?

l.hodges@independent.co.uk