Secretary of State for Education, Charles Clarke, has submitted a list of courses which should be considered of national strategic importance.

The decision follows a recent raft of controversial decisions by universities to shut down courses, most recently at Exeter University and architecture at Cambridge. As a result, Clarke has requested that the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) consider the following courses of national strategic importance:

• Arabic and Turkish language studies and other Middle Eastern area studies.


• Japanese, Chinese, Mandarin and other Far Eastern languages and area studies.


• Science, technology, engineering and mathematics.


• Vocationally orientated courses of particular interest to employers in industries that are of growing importance to the UK economy.


• Course related to EU accession countries, especially those from Eastern Europe and the Baltic.

The government are responding to “concerns that on current trends we may not be able to produce enough graduates in these fields in the future and have them provided for in enough regions in the country."

Charles Clarke said:

“Any sensible government needs to take a long-term view of what our students are studying and whether we have enough graduates in the subjects needed to help our economy thrive. We have now agreed a list of key subjects of national strategic importance.”

The government will have to tread carefully as Universities UK, the umbrella organisation that provides the a voice for the institutions, will not take kindly to any attempts by Whitehall to interfere in university decision making.

“Higher Education institutions are autonomous bodies. We cannot force them to keep courses open, or to offer courses of a particular length of type. However, as a strategic body, HEFCE is perfectly placed to give me advice on what encouragement and incentives we can introduce to meet our key objectives.”

The universities in question cite government funding pressures for making it uneconomic to offer subjects that too few students wanted to take, or to keep departments open that were not doing research deemed to be ‘world class’.

The government has been accused of doing too little too late to avoid the growing crisis. More than 100 science departments have been forced to close in the last ten years. Shadow Education Secretary, Chris Grayling, said:

“Significant university departments are closing with increasing regularity. We need action now.”