Balancing the incentives in English higher education: the imperative to strengthen civic influence for levelling up^*

The UK government’s levelling up strategy is the latest attempt to address the nation’s spatial inequalities. This issue has been amplified by voting in the 2016 referendum to leave the European Union, within which people in places with lower levels of educational qualifications and wages demonstrated their desire for change. These places have been characterised as ‘left behind’ by the pursuit of a knowledge economy fuelled by university expansion and mobile labour. The article explores how the specific policies adopted to support university expansion in England have influenced spatial inequalities and the political motivation for levelling up. It then describes how universities are recognised within the diagnosis of spatial inequalities in the Levelling Up White Paper and the vision for addressing them, but not the strategy embodied in its prescription of missions. The article concludes by exploring how tertiary education systems can strengthen the civic influence on universities, and how this could inform future approaches to funding and regulation in England. This could balance the growing influence of national government and global market forces, which has been a feature of university expansion in England since the 1980s, and thereby position universities better for the imperative of levelling up.