Military Education and the Higher Education Sector

Areas of engagement also vary from research with single or dual-purpose outcomes, to wider industry collaboration projects and major educational contracts involving large numbers of military students. Into this mix, we should add national and sector dynamics: principally, a higher education (HE) sector, which is under stress, notwithstanding recent movement on tuition fees, and with significant downward pressure on UK and overseas student numbers. More positively, there is a substantial government-led demand for greater engagement with the HE sector. This manifested itself in the 2025 Strategic Defence Review, which goes further than many of its predecessors by asking how the Ministry of Defence can work more closely with the sector to advance national objectives for defence-related skills and research.