The crisis facing UK higher education is all too apparent. So too its causes, as set out in Dave Hitchcock’s opening article to this series: ‘History and the Crisis in UK Universities’. In my contribution, I look to move on from the causes of our current state in two ways. First, by focusing on the manifestations of this crisis—for history and historians—as seen from the perspective of the Royal Historical Society (RHS), of which I was recently appointed President. The Society’s understanding of the impact of cuts and closures on history in UK higher education owes much to work led by my predecessor, Emma Griffin, which culminated with an RHS briefing, ‘The Value of History’, published last October.
Academic history is a complex ecosystem and one of the tasks of organisations like the RHS is to gather, interpret and communicate the data and policy initiatives that historians in university departments—who are focused on teaching, research and, increasingly, on resisting cuts—are too busy and disparate to undertake. The second focus of this post is, therefore, to think about how we advocate for our discipline and profession. In particular, I ask how the Society can work to protect as many departments, historians, courses and options for study as possible.
RHS Presidents and Councillors have been working with history departments facing cuts or closure since the late 2010s. Up until 2021, staffing cuts and course closures—while devastating to individuals and institutions—were still relatively infrequent and most often experienced at Post-92 institutions seeking to cut costs and tack towards more directly vocational subjects.
The 2020s have seen a rapid increase and change to this pattern. Between 2021 and September 2024, the RHS was contacted by historians from 21 UK institutions facing challenges to fulfil their responsibilities as teachers and researchers. In nearly all cases, concerns have focused on the loss of academic and research support staff; the ending of degree programmes; reductions in the courses and options available to students; mergers with other departments; or—in several cases—complete closure of provision in history teaching and research. At Chichester and Goldsmiths, cuts in 2023 and 2024 have removed or risked severely depleting nationally-recognised centres of Black British history.
Since the publication of our briefing last autumn, the Society has worked closely with historians at two further institutions facing cuts to staffing and the ending of degree programmes. Communications now come from colleagues from across the UK, from all kinds of institutions, and those working in and outside of history departments. The severity of the crisis means situations like these are now common to academics, students and professional support staff across many disciplines, including STEM and vocational subjects. Even so, the arts and humanities continue to bear the brunt of cuts.
There are numerous intersecting causes that explain how we got here. Some are local and institutional, others derive from national policy decisions or the HE sector’s growing dependence on and exposure to shifts in the global economy. In each case we come back to student numbers and, especially, the shifting allocations of students across the sector. Student intake is fundamental to the relative health and prospective actions of a growing range of universities. But since the mid-2010s, the unpredictability and gaming of where next year’s students will come from has created an environment of ‘feast and famine’ in which even short-term departmental planning becomes near-impossible.
Within the humanities and social sciences, history remains a significant subject. With 40,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students, according to the latest HESA data (for the academic year 2022-23), history is in the 10 most popular subjects in the arts, humanities and social sciences. But overall history enrolments are falling: by 11% between 2019 and 2023. Students are also gravitating to a smaller pool of universities which have benefited (at least in terms of student numbers) on account of their relative public prestige and changes to policies on entry requirements.
From the Society’s recent engagement with historians in 23 UK departments, we know what structured programmes of cuts and closures can mean for historians and students. But what about life day-to-day in departments that may not (yet) have made the news? In 2024, the Society surveyed its members to get a better sense of the scale and consequences of lower level disruption. Some 39 of the 66 departments taking part reported cuts to staffing levels since 2020. This equates to decreases in at least 40% of all UK history departments.
Cuts are continuing to hit hardest in departments at Post-92 universities. Here, nearly 90% of history departments in our survey reported a decrease in staffing since 2020, and nearly 60% have seen cuts to degree programmes. Historians from 1 in 3 participating departments reported increases in teaching hours and loss of research time and funding for research. In our survey, well over half of the departments experiencing cuts of this kind were Post-92s. These were findings gathered in July 2024. We can be sure the situation has deteriorated further in the subsequent eight months.
For trained historians, the implications of such changes are far reaching; from the threat of redundancy and reduced scope for innovative teaching and research to greater inequality between institutions and a diminishing of history’s influence and contribution beyond the university sector. For current and future students, degree programmes risk becoming more restricted, with the cancellation of courses and loss of specialist teaching staff.
There is now growing discussion of regional ‘coldspots’ in the humanities in which a shrinking of institutional provision removes degree choices for students living within 60 km of a centre of higher education. The Society fears that cuts to history provision—especially in those UK regions where universities are scattered and few in number—will reduce the options available to key groups of students. Closures will disproportionately impact those who are required to remain living at home while studying, and those who come from areas with historically low numbers of students going onto higher education. More concerning still is the prospect that history becomes a subject ever-more concentrated in selected universities, and the increasing preserve of students who are more mobile, wealthier and benefit from familial experience of a university education.
Data of this sort is as dispiriting as it is familiar. Of course, it’s essential we know the contours of the crisis as it affects history, given that experiences across the humanities vary subject by subject. Importantly, being informed can also guide how we act and engage.
For example, recent UCAS figures for History applications at age 18 show an overall 7% decline between 2019 and 2024. Looked at more closely, however, we see that the decline was greatest in the years 2019-21. Since then, application rates have remained stable—even though they’ve not kept pace with an increase in students taking history A-Level in recent years. By studying UCAS data we also see that the overall trend is driven by a sharper decline in applications from male students compared to their female counterparts. For female students aged 18 years, the number of accepted applicants in history—between 2020 and 2024—has remained stable compared with a 6.2% decline for male students. There is also growing divergence between numbers of female and male accepted applicants. From 2022, the number of female accepted applicants rises, while that for male applicants begins to decline, accelerating from 2023.
Studies like this help us identify weak points in the history pipeline and, in turn, how we view and respond to these breakpoints. One particularly helpful insight came in a recent meeting with Antonio Sennis, co-chair of History UK. As Antonio observes, history is popular among 16-18 year olds who believe it keeps their options open. However, when it comes to choosing a degree subject, history’s status changes, and it loses its enabling capacity. Put simply, history is seen as limiting one’s options once within the arena of higher education, where empowerment is defined principally in terms of career opportunity and earning potential.
In developing this mindset there have been numerous contributing factors, many of which are ably set out in Dave Hitchcock’s earlier post. One more, though impossible to quantify, has been the popular and politically sanctioned, indeed politically led, culture of hostility towards those working in the humanities in UK higher education. This was most intense under previous Conservative governments.
Since last July, there has been a move away from ‘talking down’ history and the humanities as degree subjects, and also from a proactive stoking of the history ‘culture wars’. And yet, to date, Labour has shown neither appreciation of the scale and implications of the HE crisis, nor a willingness to intervene. Historians and history students will be among those to suffer in an ongoing political culture of tough love and market solutions.
Alongside its teachers and students, history—as a practice and discipline—will also suffer. This will have negative outcomes for many more than those currently employed in higher education. History is prominent and popular in UK public life. We read and debate history, watch programmes and listen to podcasts about the past, trace our ancestors, and visit sites of historical interest in greater numbers than ever. This is to be welcomed. However, it sits awkwardly with the current plight of history in many UK universities, where our discipline is often regarded as being of lesser importance than more overtly vocational or ‘useful’ subjects. Yet it’s in these same universities that we find those who teach and research history, within dedicated departments and other disciplinary centres, who are central to the creation of the public history many of us seek out and enjoy.
This disjunction in attitudes to public and academic history is also reported by colleagues in equivalent international associations, with whom the Society is in regular contact. One priority for us all is to demonstrate the interdependency of history within and beyond higher education. In doing so we would do well to follow Michelle Arrow, President of the Australian Historical Association, who takes every opportunity to remind history-loving publics that the programmes they enjoy originate with and owe their rigour to academic research. Similar links were also powerfully made by David Olusoga in his 2025 National Humanities Lecture, delivered last month at the University of London. Both are well worth our time.
This exchange between academia and public audiences is further evident in the thriving environment of community history. Just how many university-based historians work with non-academics is amply demonstrated in last year’s interactive British Academy report of impact case studies submitted for the 2021 Research Excellence Framework. This resource provides data on 240 projects undertaken by academic historians in concert with those outside higher education. One third of these projects had an international reach (across 70 countries), while the remaining two-thirds benefited public groups in the UK across 305 cities and towns. Moreover, this work goes well beyond fields we’d expect, such as heritage and curation, into areas including crime and policing, public health and climate change.
Of course, we cannot build the case for academic history simply by referencing its contribution to popular forms of historical study and awareness, important though these are for enhancing civic culture. We know that most history undergraduates won’t, or can’t, continue on to research and careers in higher education. For current students—as well as prospective undergraduates now studying and enjoying history at school and sixth form college—we need more clearly to demonstrate that choosing a history degree is not the closing down of professional options that many fear. Addressing popular misconceptions surrounding careers and employability was a further motivation for the Society’s ‘Value of History’ briefing and it remains a priority for the Society’s future advocacy work.
Those studying history at university overwhelmingly enjoy their courses. Responses to the UK’s National Student Survey consistently score history very highly in terms of its intellectual challenge and the quality of teaching, with departments in Post-92 institutions doing especially well. Contrary to popular claims, history graduates perform strongly in terms of employability and earnings when they enter the labour market. The latest government data, from June 2024, shows over 87% of history graduates in ‘sustained employment, further study or both’ five years after completing an undergraduate degree. This puts them alongside graduates in subjects including politics, computing and economics, and just behind those in business, management and bioscience. The same data shows median earnings for history graduates are also strong: above those for students in psychology, social policy and education and close to those for law and politics.
So far so good. Shifting perceptions at this macro level is necessary. But on its own it won’t be enough to connect with, reassure or convince cautious—and understandably concerned—prospective students, let alone their parents. In making the case for history to constituencies who are at best sceptical and sometimes dismissive, we have to become more articulate and meaningful when we speak about the qualities, skills and aptitudes honed by three years of studying history and thinking as historians.
These statements of skills and added value need to go beyond the tired generalities and platitudes that history teaches us to synthesize information and create an argument. It does, of course, and to good effect. However, in the era of quickening Gen AI what does this actually mean for students who in 5, 10 or 20 years will inhabit a workplace far different from anything their teachers have experienced?
Better appreciation of future professional needs, and greater fluency in mapping these to history as a degree subject, is challenging and needs careful thought. We might start by better understanding and communicating what a history degree actually involves. I suspect many outside university history would be surprised to learn that today’s students work as often with data sets and digital tools as they do with paper archives. We might also listen and learn from those who’ve just completed a history degree and who leave university with a fair degree of optimism. In the 2024 National Student Survey, 80% of history graduates described themselves as confident that the skills they’ve gained will serve them well in the workforce—a level higher than many more overtly vocational programmes.
We currently face many challenges in an environment that’s set to worsen further before it stabilises. There is a huge amount of work to do for organisations like the Royal Historical Society. We exist to provide support (for example, via direct advocacy or research funding); to speak for the discipline and profession as a whole in an increasingly unequal HE sector; and to collate and communicate news and information about our subject and its practice.
Given these many demands, I’d like to close with a word of caution. While better resourced than many subject specialist organisations, the Society remains an organisation run by a volunteer Council of full-time university academics and a very small office staff. We need to think carefully about how best to deploy our limited time and resources to support historians in the months and years to come. If you’re a Fellow or Member of the Society, you can help us identify these priorities by completing the survey recently circulated.
We can also work with one another. As RHS President, I believe that we are stronger and more effective together. Our meetings with international organisations, while highlighting specific regional debates, also reveal common priorities and causes—for example, on demonstrating links between academic and public history—from which we can all learn. In parallel with the Society’s connections with international organisations, we also enjoy a close working relationship with three fellow UK organisations—the Historical Association, History UK, and the Institute of Historical Research—with whom we share similar interests and concerns. Last month, we released a joint statement on history in a time of crisis.
Our partners also include similar societies in the wider humanities and, together, we are distinctive in thinking about and speaking for our disciplines independent of the priorities of any one or group of higher education institutions. It’s essential therefore that we coordinate our work on different fronts, share expertise, and campaign together when appropriate. A critical part of this is to train ourselves—and also our members—to become ever more effective advocates for history. We know the value of history. It’s time to share that knowledge.
In addition to links provided in this article, please see also the Society’s ‘Toolkit for Historians’ and pages on ‘Data on the UK Historical Profession and Discipline’.
If you wish to contact Lucy with recommendations for the Society’s future work or to offer your time, please email: president@royalhistsoc.org.