2025 recapped and 2026 previewed

Hello and welcome back to The Student Eye, a publication for university students and those interested in higher education across the UK.

We hope you’ve had a restful holiday period. You may have noticed that we skipped our edition due out on Christmas weekend, so we are resetting the schedule this week with a look back at the big education stories from 2025, as well as looking forward at the trends which are set to shape 2026.

We will be back with a full edition of The Student Eye next time - happy New Year!

This year was the first year of the Student Eye and our coverage has been shaped by many of the big trends in UK higher education this year.

Both government signalling and policy on tuition fees changed multiple times in 2025. In January, after it was announced that fees would rise by 3.1%, to £9,535, we looked at how that ran against the financial problems facing students.

Since then, the government have announced that that amount will continue to rise in line with inflation. The move has pleased universities, desperate for more funding, but is of concern to many student bodies. We wrote about those changes, alongside shifting government targets for students going to university.

Throughout the year, we have written extensively on the slow progress of improving access to higher education. In some cases, there was some backsliding in 2025, and we will be on the watch for more of that in 2026.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to reshape education across many subjects. Most universities, however, remain unsure how to harness it and are unclear in how they plan to discipline students that misuse it.

After writing about the importance of universities educating their educators and properly understanding the limitations of these new technologies in March, we reported on a series of freedom of information requests (FOIs) to leading UK institutions.

They found dramatic and widespread increases in penalties for misuse of AI tools in exams and coursework. Often, these penalties were administered without clear guidelines for students in place.

When we spoke to the new Chancellor of the University of Oxford, William Hague, he told us that he expected the university to harness the tools across the board. Hague predicted truly personalised learning and drastic changes in the education system in the near future. Exactly what those may be and when they might arrive, remain unclear.

This will, no doubt, continue to be a space to watch in the coming year. As the pace of AI improvement slows, it remains to be seen whether much of the predicted changes occur. If they do, most universities appear unequipped to deal with them.

In the past year, the dire state of many universities’ finance has come into even clearer focus. After many years predicting the downfall of institutions, many continue to be make losses and look for new ways to adapt.

That was clear to see in the part merger of Greenwich and Kent university ‘merger’, announced in September. Elsewhere, we have reported on relentless staff and course cuts across the sector, as universities look to make themselves more financially sustainable.

The bleakness of the picture was obvious in our analysis of financial reports of many of the UK’s top universities, which illustrated just how much money most lose on each domestic student they educate.

In the coming year, universities will look to do even more to harness different income streams. Both the government and leading universities believe that research and spin-outs will be at least part of the answer. Progress on that and the ‘OxCam’ arch will be important to watch.

While the year began with us lamenting the drawbacks of the Turing Scheme, it was announced last month that the UK will rejoin the Erasmus+ scheme in 2027. It is a substantial shift in government policy and came after a freedom of movement deal for young people was also agreed earlier in the year.

Lastly, the influence of the Chinese state on UK institutions, including many education providers, has been exposed in dramatic ways this year.

That will continue to be the case in 2026, as the government both talks up trade arrangements with China and warns about espionage.