It’s not looking good, guys. Unis across the UK are making even more cuts in 2025. Things are looking particularly gloomy for modern languages. So many UK unis have announced plans to get rid of language degrees.
Modern languages are way less popular in the UK than they used to be. According to the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), 96,740 students enrolled for “language and area studies” courses in the 2019/2020 academic year. But in 2023/2024 academic year, just 80,180 did. It’s expensive for unis to run courses which require very specialist lecturers, but not many students sign up for.
So, here are all the UK unis which are making huge cuts to their modern languages courses (or are even axing the department altogether).
University of Bristol
Management have told 45 people in the Centre for Academic Language and Development (CALD) that their jobs are at risk. This department helps students with their English language skills. Staff went on strike over these planned cats in July and August.
Kingston University
This London uni has announced plans to scrap many humanities courses. As part of this, the Kingston Language Scheme faces closure. This department offers free (or very cheap) courses to students, staff and the wider community in Arabic, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Portugese and Spanish.
University of Leicester
Yes, part of the uni is in an old Victorian asylum
(Credit: NotFromUtrecht)
The uni has told academic staff several departments – including modern languages – that they could be made redundant. Management hasn’t ruled out compulsory redundancies, or confirmed which departments will be cut back. The Leicester branch of the UCU opened a strike ballot on 28th July.
University of Lincoln
Sorry, but Lincoln has already disposed of the modern languages department. You can’t study French, German, Italian, Mandarin or Spanish there anymore.
University of Sheffield
A very dramatic pic of the University of Sheffield
(Credit: Paolo Margari )
So, management have proposed lots and lots of job cuts at the University of Sheffield.
The uni has proposed plans to get rid of all specialist undergraduate degrees in Chinese, Korean and Japanese, and to only offer a more generic East Asian Studies degree. This restructure could involve teachers losing their jobs. The uni has started a voluntary severance scheme for the department (plus a few others).
The Sheffield branch of the UCU opened up another strike ballot in August, so staff might organise protests against these cuts soon.
Eight prestigious unis in the north of England
According to the Financial Times, the N8 group of unis are looking into merging their language departments “to keep them going”. This could lead to students at different unis sharing modern language lecturers, or even getting degrees through more than one uni.
The N8 group is formed of seven Russell Group unis – Durham University, the University of Leeds, the University of Liverpool, the University of Manchester, Newcastle University, the University of Sheffield and the University of York – plus Lancaster University.
No plans about this are definite – the unis are still at the stage of discussing their options.
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