Vet school head issues funding warning as new £20 million facility opens

A veterinary education leader has warned the sector needs more funding, but says increasing tuition fees to provide it raises a potential “moral issue”.

Harper and Keele Veterinary School head Matt Jones has urged the Government to meet the sector’s financial challenge, arguing the current system “doesn’t really work”.

The comments came ahead of the official opening of the school’s £20 million facility at the Keele campus on 17 March, by Lord Sandy Trees.

Resources needed

Lord Trees said recent remarks by Defra minister Lord Benyon in a speech at the BVA’s London dinner showed the school had “good friends” in the department and the positivity shown by the minister was “thoroughly deserved”.

But, with public health a key focus of the school’s work, Prof Jones told Vet Times the current challenges in that area emphasise the need for ministers to provide more resources to train the professionals of the future.

He said: “These are roles, don’t forget, that underpin the safety of this country and, without sounding hyperbolic, we’ve got avian influenza still. That has been massive for government veterinary services.

“If we get African swine fever or something like that coming in on top, we’re in trouble. We would be really, severely stretched and we do need the Government to rise to the challenge.”

Fee increases

The focus of current lobbying is on the block grant paid by the Government, amid moves to diversify income streams to close the gap between teaching costs and the money that comes in from the grant and the tuition fees paid by students. The prospect of the present £9,250 annual fees charged to UK students being increased is thought to be unrealistic, despite reports last summer that some vice-chancellors were pushing for a rise.

Asked whether he would raise fees if he could, Prof Jones conceded the extra money would be welcome and said the current funding model needed to be looked at again, highlighting the work done by the Veterinary Schools Council, of which Harper and Keele is a member, to outline the full cost of education.

But he also stressed that such decisions would be made across a university as a whole and suggested an increase would raise much wider questions.

He said: “Students are now graduating with debts anything from £50 to £100,000. The costs of EMS add to that.

“Morally, for us as a vet school to say that’s the answer, we’re now going to take 12 grand or 15 grand a year off them in student fees, I think that is a moral issue and we would probably baulk at that.”

Campuses

Around 140 students per year group can be accommodated at the school, which welcomed its first cohort in 2020, with teaching split between the Keele campus near Stoke-on-Trent and the Harper Adams University site near Newport, Shropshire, around 20 miles away.

The Keele building is home to the school’s anatomy and physiology laboratories, plus other teaching spaces and lecture theatres with technology that enables sessions, and even the work of individual students, to be delivered flexibly and shared across the two campuses.

Prof Jones described the opening of the new building as “huge”, adding: “One of the beautiful things about the joint vet school model is that combining the resources of two universities that have got a lot to offer in complementary elements as a whole gives us an extraordinarily rich environment to create a vet school.”

Plans are also in place for digital simulation facilities at the Keele site, while work to integrate a full veterinary practice within the building, in partnership with Garden Vets, is expected to be completed in the coming months.

Caseload

The practice has been designed to provide the caseload that students need, as well as providing vital services to the surrounding area, including out-of-hours emergency cover.

Prof Jones said: “That’s going to create a huge amount of jobs. It’s going to be there for the local community; for pet owners; for pet owning staff and students across the campus.”

The practice is also envisaged as a facility where students from other vet schools could complete some of their EMS training.

New rules, reducing the required period of EMS by six weeks, are due to come into force next year and the design of the placement database – which the RCVS plans to develop as part of the project – has now been approved, a development confirmed during the college’s latest council meeting.

EMS reforms

Prof Jones said the reforms were “a step in the right direction” and the database would help to reduce some of the burden on vet schools.

But while he acknowledged that the schools would face extra work as a result of plans for greater quality assurance checks on placements, he said the college had shown understanding of the challenges that both they and students face.

He said: “A lot of students’ EMS experiences are amazing, and we tend to remember them, but there are also a lot where they get nothing out of it.

“We’d like to see it go a bit further, but it’s evolution rather than revolution.”