Future of public engagement at risk amid financial challenges

Public engagement projects being cut by universities across the country amid financial challenges will “take years to rebuild”, experts have warned.

The National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE) has released a report on the state of universities’ public engagement efforts, and what is needed to sustain them in the face of current challenges.

It outlines that over the past 20 years, public engagement has “moved from the margins of UK higher education into its core” and is now largely recognised as “central” to universities’ civic purpose.

The report, based on desk research across 24 UK universities and interviews with 16 sector experts, says however that this role is at risk as universities are operating under “increasingly challenging conditions”.

“Financial pressure presents the most immediate risk,” it outlines, as “engagement roles and funding streams are often vulnerable to cuts, and practitioners consistently describe a gap between strategic ambition and lived experience”. 

“Short‑term, project‑based funding undermines relational practice, while power imbalances in funding make equitable partnerships difficult to sustain,” it adds.

One respondent told the report that they had lost roughly “two hundred staff over the last 18 months”. 

“That does force you to think where does community engagement sit within this? We have lost people in that team, but we are in the process of trying to replace them, which says something – it is still important for us,” they said.

The recommendations warn that this capacity will take “years to rebuild”, arguing that public engagement depends on trusted relationships and partnerships that “once lost, cannot be quickly replaced”.

It notes that while the strong civic missions of universities are understood by those within the sector, “the wider public often remains unaware of how university research benefits society”, with one recent poll by the Campaign for Science and Engineering finding that only 18 per cent of UK adults can name a way that university research benefits them or their community.

“Taken together, the findings show a sector that knows how to engage and has invested heavily in building capacity and capability. They also show how exposed these investments are. The open question is whether the conditions that enable high-quality, relational engagement will be sustained through current pressures or whether progress will stall or reverse,” it says.

juliette.rowsell@timeshighereducation.com