When I spoke to your predecessor, Emma Griffin, in 2023, she identified university history funding and access to higher education in Britain as key areas of work for the RHS. Is that still the case, and how big is the problem in 2025?
I’m sorry to say it has only got worse. Since I became president, we have started working with two departments facing significant cuts to their programmes and, potentially, to staffing. We’ve also been in touch, informally, with two other departments that have asked for our support in the face of threats of cutting down degree programmes.
Last year, the RHS published The Value of History, a report on the state of history in British universities. It’s based on feedback from our members and fellows, rather than a quantitative survey of history in those institutions. But what it reveals is that, of the 66 departments from which people respond- ed to the survey, 39 had seen cuts in what they’d been able to offer since 2020.
Some of that has been the result of redundancies and well-publicised cuts to programmes, but other impacts are more hidden: staff retiring or leaving and not being replaced, for instance, or departments being merged into larger ones.
Overall, the situation seems to be worse in institutions that became universities after 1992 [when former polytechnics were first able to gain university status], many of which have smaller numbers of staff and students, and sometimes – though not always – have shorter traditions of teaching history. But it’s also increasingly impacting more established universities, including those in the Russell Group [a self-selected group of 24 institutions], where in some cases entire history programmes are now at risk.
Tellingly, the British Academy, which represents humanities and social sciences, published a study last year that identified ‘cold spots’ in the provision of Shape [Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts for People and the Economy] subjects – places where students would have to travel at least 60km to access their chosen subject at a higher education institution.
As more and more students now live at home because of the costs of going to university, it’s becoming harder for some to access programmes in humanities, history and languages than it would have been a decade or so ago.
It’s important to stress that history remains very popular among students. In 2024, more than 47,000 people took history A-level in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and more than 10,000 took history Highers in Scotland. In 2023 – the most recent year for which we have statistics – about 40,000 students were taking under- graduate and masters’ programmes with ‘history’ in the course titles.
What are some of the reasons given by universities for these cuts?
It depends on which university you ask. Some of the larger Russell Group institutions – Cardiff, Durham and Newcastle, for instance – cite changes to legislation preventing overseas students from bringing family with them to the UK. [The Labour government announced in August 2024 that it did not plan to lift these restrictions, which were imposed by the previous Conservative administration earlier that year.]
Other, smaller institutions are finding that the numbers of undergraduates from the UK are falling because some of the larger, Russell Group institutions are making it easier for students to access their courses. School pupils are sometimes told – wrongly, in my view – that there’s little point spending their money on going to a non-Russell Group university, which leaves courses at smaller institutions struggling.
And, of course, all of this is underpinned by the changes to the funding model introduced in 2010 by the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government. Among the changes, university fees shot up almost overnight from around £3,000 to £6,000 and, in some cases, up to £9,000. That’s a huge burden for most students to carry – and yet, because universities’ income has not kept pace with inflation, universities have a smaller and smaller funding pot to draw on.
Standing up for history is central to our work – in a way that the Victorian founders of the RHS could surely not have imagined
What can be done to address the issue?
I honestly think that the current model for British universities is broken. I think there needs to be a willingness among politicians and policymakers to work with university representatives on a profound rethink of how we fund and organise higher education.
It might not be popular with some universities, but one thing that could be done is reintroduce the cap on student numbers for specific degree programmes at individual institutions – a restriction that was withdrawn in 2015. But it’s a complex situation, and a lot of work needs to be done.
Have there been any changes since the Labour government came to power last summer?
Not as many as we would have hoped – and absolutely no movement on the kind of structural changes that, in my opinion, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that British universities need. There’s no way that universities are going to be able to continue acting as ‘soft power’ cultural ambassadors for Britain if they’re starved of funds in the way that they have been and continue to be.
Having said that, there have been two changes that are, in my view, welcome. First, the door of government now feels less closed to universities and to humanities subjects, which I hope will give us more opportunity to work with policymakers.
Second, the announcement that the ‘era of culture wars’ of the past few years is over [promised by new culture secretary Lisa Nandy after Labour’s election win in July 2024] was very welcome for historians. As any history student knows, the way we think about the past is not fixed. It’s always evolving, always changing, and I think that process was adversely affected by the ‘culture wars’.
It had become increasingly difficult to carry out any kind of critical thinking about history, which is a large part of what we do. I work on the experience of the two world wars, and sometimes run an undergraduate module at the University of Essex, exploring the memory of the Second World War.
The students really enjoy this approach, and it leads on to thinking about how those memories were mobilised during the Covid-19 pandemic and in debates during the run-up to the 2016 Brexit vote. However, I think that such topics had become unhelpfully politicised – and that placed historians in a no-win situation.
What would you like politicians to understand about history?
I’d really like them to understand that history is a process, not something that stands still – and that critiquing existing ideas is at the very heart of historical practice. History is a living profession.
Politicians have often promoted the importance of STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] subjects in recent years. What are the arguments for studying history?
Our Value of History report looked at a range of data for outcomes for students on different programmes. What we found was that graduates from history programmes performed really well both in terms of their earnings and in going into what’s called ‘graduate employment’ when compared with a range of other disciplines in the humanities, social sciences and non-vocational STEM subjects.
A few years ago, here at the University of Essex, we had a great student in his 60s on our history MA programme. He had recently stepped back from the computing company that he’d founded several decades ago, and which had made him a lot of money. He came and talked to our students to explain to them that, though he had employed computer engineers to do the technical work, most of his staff were former humanities students.
That was because, he argued, such students – and particularly history students – come out of their degrees with the ability to read and synthesise a large mass of material, pull out and interrogate arguments, communicate clearly and work to tight deadlines. History gives them what are often called ‘core transferable skills’, which are very attractive to employers.
In a world of fake news and AI-generated content, do you think those skills are more vital now than ever?
I think they are. One of the core skills we teach our students is critical thinking – that to make an argument, you need to be able to support it with evidence. I would really hope that any history student seeing a story posted on social media as fact, but which is actually opinion and which doesn’t link to verifiable facts, would be able to see that for what it is rather than just taking it as read.
Taking a wider view, what’s your take on the current state of public history in the UK more generally?
I’m struck by the continued huge public appetite for history. People love listening to podcasts and watching television programmes such as The Mirror and the Light, based on the last of Hilary Mantel’s fantastic novels about Thomas Cromwell.
There’s the popularity of memoirs such as Daniel Finkelstein’s Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad [2023], which interweaves the story of his own family with the history of Europe in the mid-20th century. And I really enjoyed the recent BBC TV series Simon Schama’s Story of Us – but I was struck by the fact that 20 or 30 years ago, in the pre-streaming age, it would have been appointment television.
It was a fantastic set of history documentaries, and I would urge anybody with an interest in contemporary and recent modern British history to watch it. But there were only three parts, and I think that maybe 20 years ago this would have been commissioned as a big tentpole series that would have been watched by many more people. It’s difficult in an age of streaming, but I would like to see more investment in history on television.
I would also like to see a wider understanding of the fact that, without historians and historical research, there just wouldn’t be any of this public history that we celebrate so much. This research is often published initially in academic monographs or journals that aren’t necessarily going to be read by the wider public. It is only when they are read by figures who communicate well with the wider public that they reach a wider audience.
History teaching is always evolving, always changing – and I think that process has become unhelpfully politicised
Finally, it’s important to acknowledge that here’s also a huge appetite among members of the public for researching history themselves. You can see that in the popularity of genealogical services and tools to help people research their own family histories and position themselves in the past.
I became particularly aware of this during First World War centenary events between 2014 and 2018, when thousands and thousands of community groups, history groups and heritage groups across Britain, often receiving funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund, produced fantastic and really valuable work.
Do universities have a role in this?
Engagement with public history is really popular among undergraduate students. Often, but not exclusively, it’s post-1992 universities and newer universities that have been proactive in organising opportunities for students to work outside the classroom at historical and heritage organisations, helping to produce resources for public history.
Many people may not be aware of this work that universities often do with local communities and organisations to explore public history, which has real benefits for those communities. People involved learn transferable skills. They learn how to access and explore an archive. They gain confidence. They learn how to write up research. They might learn how to create a website or to put together a podcast. And this kind of public history engagement work is also threatened by cuts to history in universities.
What would you like the RHS to achieve in the next two years?
My wishlist would be topped by history thriving in the UK. That’s got to start with investment in British universities, a rethink- ing of the funding structure, and a recognition of the value of history and the humanities. If we grasp that history is really popular with the public as well as with prospective students, we can start to reinvigorate history more widely across our national culture.
Lucy Noakes is president of the Royal Historical Society, and Rab Butler professor of modern history at the University of Essex.
This article was first published in the April 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
