Universities risk ‘creeping death’ from unsupervised mergers

Specialist institutions could be subsumed without high-level oversight of sector consolidation, MPs warned

Published on
October 9, 2025
Last updated
October 9, 2025
People passing a shop window filled with mannequins in the empty interior of a fashion retailer, London. To illustrate that without oversight of university mergers, the UK risks “sleepwalking” into a homogenised higher education sector.
Source: Mike Kemp/In Pictures via Getty Images

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Reader's comments (4)

Not much of a story really, a few hypotheticals. However one thing I noted is yet another of those consultancies or so-called Think Tanks, lobby groups, or whatever they are. We get notice of so many of them and this one is called Six Ravens Consulting. Personally, I would not take any advice from an organisation with such a daft name. Maybe the THES could actually do a feature on the nbumbers of these aorganisations, how they are funded (they seem to get a lot of promotion on here), what they actually do for what they are paid. Are they objcetive or just fulfilling their clients briefs (as it were)? That sort of thing. But there is a bewildering variety of these bodies all extracting resource from the sector (i.e. taxpayer) in one form or another. Fron an outsider's perspective they do seem to be rather parasitical on the body politic, one might say, but others may have a different view. Maybe when they make us redundant we can set up one of these ourselves and charge some hefty fees for saying the 'bleeding obvious' (as Basil Fawlty would say)? We could call ourselves the Seven Crows of Consultancy. And people wonder why the sector is in such a mess!
Well yes exactly! This really reads more like a piece of promotional PR for this "Six Ravens of Doom" outfit.
Well of course, on the one hand ..... but on the other.... we will have to wait and see. Is that news?
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