Our Mission and Vision in 10 Commitments: Explained
- William Hill
- 4 days ago
- 8 min read
Two of the founders, Rob left and William, right.
Champion & Celebrate British Universities
Share the strength of British universities with the world, broaden access to the knowledge they produce and restore confidence in one of the nation’s greatest cultural exports.
British universities are under intense financial and political pressure. Departments are closing, particularly in the arts, humanities and social sciences. At the same time, global demand for higher education has never been higher: in 2025, around 264 million students were enrolled in higher education worldwide, more than double the total in 2000.
University.co.uk is our response to this moment. Our primary focus is to support British universities and their professors by giving their work a wider stage, and to open their teaching to learners who may never set foot on a campus.
Platform and Promote Professors
Give leading professors a global stage to teach what they care about most and create new opportunities for personal income and for professors to become true influencers.
British universities are facing a funding crisis. Caps on home-student tuition fees sit alongside rising costs, and many institutions have come to rely heavily on international student income. This model is now under strain: proposed levies on overseas fees and changing visa rules risk reducing international enrolments, pushing universities toward further cuts.
For professors, this means precarious employment, narrowing subject offerings and fewer chances to teach the ideas they care about most. We believe there is room for a complementary model where academics can:
Teach the course they have always wanted to create
Reach a global audience, not only those who can afford to enrol on campus
Build an additional, transparent income stream for their teaching
In other words, to treat professors not just as employees of institutions, but as independent intellectual voices whose work deserves a platform of its own.
Protect Academic Freedom
Support teaching rooted in truth, curiosity and intellectual independence, free from political pressure or institutional constraint.
Academic freedom is not just a slogan. It is the space to follow an argument to where it leads, even when the conclusions are unfashionable, contested or uncomfortable. In the UK, universities now operate inside a dense mix of funding pressures, culture-war politics, reputational management and league tables. It is understandable, but still worrying, that some academics report feeling they must shape what they say, teach or research in line with institutional risk and optics rather than pure intellectual honesty.
University.co.uk cannot step entirely outside the culture it lives in, but it can set a different starting principle. Our concern is the quality and integrity of the thinking, not how neatly it fits a political or institutional line.
We want to offer:
Space for professors to design the course they genuinely believe should exist.
An environment that is politically agnostic, where no party or ideology sets the boundaries of what may be discussed.
Editorial decisions guided by scholarly standards, not by whether a subject is fashionable or easy to market.
For us, protecting academic freedom means protecting the time, courage and independence required to state clearly what a scholar believes to be true, and to invite learners into that process.
Conserve Knowledge Amidst Budget Cuts
As British universities cut jobs, subjects and departments, niche knowledge is at risk of being lost. Perhaps unpopular, but never unimportant, it deserves conserving and sharing.
Across the UK, university cuts increasingly fall on subjects that are harder to justify in pure market terms: smaller humanities, social science and arts disciplines and specialist language programmes. When a department closes, more than staff and timetables disappear. Decades of accumulated expertise, carefully built reading lists and very specific lines of enquiry can simply stop being taught.
Some of this knowledge will never attract huge enrolment numbers. That does not make it any less valuable. In fact, much of what later becomes central to how we think starts life at the margins, sustained by a small group of people who care deeply about it.
University.co.uk cannot rescue every at-risk department, but it can offer a different model:
Capture and host courses from academics whose fields are being squeezed or cut.
Give niche subjects a global audience that no single campus could sustain alone.
Keep important work discoverable and teachable, even if the original department no longer exists.
In that sense, we see ourselves as part broadcast channel, part library, part long-term memory: a quiet home for ideas that no longer fit the business model of higher education, but still deserve to live and be found.
Democratise Access to Knowledge
We exist to make the best of British higher education accessible to anyone who seeks it, without barriers of cost, geography or prior attainment.
Globally, tertiary enrolment hovers around 40%. In Sub-Saharan Africa it is roughly 9%. That is not a reflection of ability or ambition; it is mostly a reflection of cost, infrastructure, geography and prior opportunity.
At the same time, British universities continue to generate world-leading research, ideas and teaching. Yet much of that intellectual work remains locked behind:
Physical campuses
High fees
Selective admissions
Geographic and visa barriers
Our premise is modest but important: we cannot yet replace an accredited qualification, but you should not need a place on a degree course to hear a world-class professor explain the subject they have spent their life studying. Democratising access does not mean lowering standards; it means increasing the number of people who are able to meet them.
Access for the Developing World
We’re building ways to deliver British university education offline, through carefully designed hardware kits that carry the power of a British education, anywhere in the world.
We live in a world where 5.5 billion people are online, but 2.6 billion are not. That is around 32% of the global population still offline in 2024. Many of those people live in regions that would arguably benefit most from high-quality education: least developed countries, landlocked states and rural communities where connectivity is patchy or prohibitively expensive.
Most online learning platforms quietly assume stable broadband. Our starting assumption is the opposite: what if we designed for people who do not have it?
That is why we are exploring offline, hardware-based learning kits, pre-loaded with courses from British professors, designed to work in low-connectivity environments. The idea is simple: if the internet cannot reliably reach the learner, the learning should be able to travel without it.
We are not claiming to have solved this yet. But we think any serious attempt to “democratise education” has to address the 2.6 billion people that existing platforms simply cannot reach.
Neurodiversity and Disability Friendly
Create an environment designed for everyone, with flexible formats that welcome all ways of learning.
Traditional university environments are not neutral. Neurodivergent students – including autistic learners and those with ADHD, dyslexia and other conditions – often face sensory overload, rigid assessment styles and support systems that are hard to navigate. Disabled students, including those who are blind, deaf or have mobility or chronic health conditions, can encounter physical, digital and social barriers that make learning far more difficult than it needs to be.
An online platform cannot fix everything, but it can:
Offer multiple formats: video, audio, captions, transcripts and downloadable materials
Work smoothly with screen readers and assistive technologies
Allow learners to pause, rewind and revisit at their own pace
Reduce some of the social, sensory and physical pressures of campus life
Designing for neurodivergent and disabled learners is not just a matter of compliance; it is a question of honesty. If we say knowledge is for everyone, we have to build it as if “everyone” really means everyone.
Provide the opportunity to explore and discover
Help students test subjects before choosing a degree and give those who never imagined university a chance to discover what they are capable of.
Committing to a degree, with the time, money and pressure that entails, is a high-stakes decision. Yet many prospective students only get a very limited sense of what a subject is actually like before they sign up.
We believe there is real value in a four-hour, university-level course that lets someone:
Try a subject before applying for a full degree
that they love (or dislike) a field without committing three years and tens of thousands of pounds
Experience degree-level teaching for the first time and realise that university might be possible for them after all
This is not just for those already on an academic path. It is also for people who have never seen themselves as “degree material”, but who might feel differently once they’ve had a chance to encounter serious ideas in a format that feels approachable.
Exploration is not a luxury; for many, it is the missing step between vague curiosity and a confident decision about their future.
Towards the World’s Most Affordable Degree
Build, step by step, towards becoming a fully accredited online university offering the most affordable British degrees in the world.
Right now, a British degree is out of reach for many. Home students face tuition fees of around £9,535 per year in England, while international students can pay anywhere from roughly £14,000 to over £40,000+ per year, depending on course and institution. Add to this living costs and the total price of a degree rapidly becomes unattainable for many families.
We are not a university yet, and we do not pretend to be. We are at the beginning of a journey. Our long-term aim is to strip a degree back to its most essential academic elements, remove unnecessary overhead and build an accredited programme that keeps the intellectual depth while radically reducing the cost.
Over time, we want to:
Build a rigorous, professor-led curriculums from first principles
Focus on what genuinely matters in a degree, not what tradition or bureaucracy has layered on top
Use digital delivery to keep the marginal cost of each additional learner as low as possible
The ambition is simple to say and hard to realise: a British degree that someone in Lagos or Blackpool can realistically afford.
Your University.co.uk Community
Build a community of learners and academics who believe knowledge should be open, shared, and for everyone.
Higher education is more than content; it is also conversation, culture and community. Many learners, especially those studying online, experience education as an isolated, solitary act.
We want to bring together:
Learners who are serious about ideas
Academics who care about teaching
People who believe that knowledge increases in value when it is shared
A community like this can do more than consume content: it can test arguments, surface new questions, support under-represented disciplines and advocate for better policy around access, academic freedom and funding.
The aim is not to replace campus communities, but to complement them with a global network of people who share a simple belief: knowledge is not a scarce resource; but something that becomes more valuable the more minds it passes through.
END OF COMMITMENTS
Why this matters now
The combination of global demand, digital inequality, financial crisis in UK higher education and ongoing debates around academic freedom and inclusion creates a very particular moment.
More people want higher education, but many still cannot reach it/
British universities continue to produce remarkable scholarships, but face intense financial and political pressure.
Neurodivergent and disabled students are entering systems that were not designed with them in mind.
University.co.uk is our attempt to respond, not with grand slogans, but with a set of quiet, serious commitments: to access, to professors, to academic freedom, to affordability, to neurodiversity and disability inclusion, to exploration, to community, and to the protection of knowledge that might otherwise disappear.
We do not imagine we can repair the entire system.
What we can do is build one concrete place where British professors can share the ideas they take most seriously with anyone who wishes to listen; wherever they live, whatever their educational past, and whether or not a local university still has a department for that subject.
If we do that well, we will not replace universities. We will simply help them do something they were always meant to do: let knowledge travel beyond their gates.
