HEFCE agrees continuation of exceptional funding to SOAS
19 February 2009
SOAS has been successful in its bid to HEFCE for the continuation of the School’s exceptional funding for its distinctive specialist subjects. The School bid for this funding in the autumn term. In reaching their decision HEFCE has confirmed that SOAS delivers ‘additional public value particularly through sustaining specialised provision in subjects of national importance such as minority languages’ and that ‘the provision necessarily incurs additional costs, because of the necessarily small scale of delivery, and that these costs cannot be met from other sources’.
This successful bid will ensure that our highly specialized subjects remain sustainable, and thereby meet national needs. HEFCE’s decision reinforces our importance in serving the UK’s strategic, political, cultural and economic interests in the Middle East, Asia and Africa through our teaching and scholarship. The School is well-placed to make a very large and growing contribution to deepening the study of Asia and Africa enabling the UK to become better equipped for twenty-first century opportunities.
The School’s teaching and research is based on a unique mix of language skills, regional knowledge, cultural awareness, and disciplinary excellence. SOAS is the only British HE provider of the following languages, only covered to some extent by special funding: Amharic, Bengali, Burmese, Georgian, Gujarati, Hausa, Malay/Indonesian, Nepali, Sinhalese, Somali, Swahili, Tamil, Tibetan, Urdu, and Vietnamese. HEFCE’s exceptional funding supports the teaching of all our languages and cultures except those based on Arabic, Chinese and Japanese.
Almost all SOAS students are able to study a language, even if only at an elementary stage, and we strongly encourage – and will increasingly require – them to do so. The combination of linguistic skills and cultural understanding are the hallmark of a SOAS graduate. Our success in winning this funding from HEFCE will enable us maintain the School’s unique distinctiveness.
