Striking staff members on the picket line in September. Photo: Guy Smallman / Getty
New figures reveal that Goldsmiths, University of London, has spent more than £14.6m on management consultants, recruitment agencies and lawyers since 2019 – with nearly £4m going to one firm – over a period in which 500 staff are estimated to have left the university in successive waves of cutbacks and restructuring.
The news comes as staff continue what has become the longest university staff strike in UK history in a dispute over further compulsory redundancies. The institution, renowned for the celebrated visual artists among its alumni, is now in its third restructuring programme in five years, amid concern that it risks entering a “doom loop”.
In response to a freedom of information (FOI) request, Goldsmiths revealed that it had made payments amounting to £5.9m to 27 management consultants. Among those paid were some of the world’s largest consultancy firms, including members of the so-called “big four”. The largest sum, £2.8m, went to KPMG, paid mostly during the pandemic, when the university was struggling financially. Approximately £250,000 was paid to Deloitte and £220,000 to PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Goldsmiths declined to tell the Nerve what services these consultants had provided to the university for the money.
Lecturers at Goldsmiths also pointed out to the Nerve the close links that some university governors and senior staff had with consultancies that the institution had hired.
Lynn Pearcy was chair of Goldsmiths’ finance and resources committee when the university first contracted KPMG for services. According to her LinkedIn profile, she spent more than 30 years at KPMG, including many years as a partner, before leaving and joining Goldsmiths’ Council just two years later.
Laura Hanna served as Goldsmiths’ interim director of IT and chief information officer from February to August 2025, according to her LinkedIn profile. Between 2025 and 2026, a company called Pulse Recruit received almost £700,000 from Goldsmiths for work on a customer relationship management system. On 19 December 2025, Hanna’s business partner announced on LinkedIn the launch of Pulse Solutions (formerly known as Pulse Recruit Ltd) alongside Hanna, after her Goldsmiths role had ended.
“There are other cases of clear conflicts of interest,” said Joe Newman, the co-president of Goldsmiths’ University and College Union (UCU) branch. “I think it’s a product of being pally with the private sector and hoping they’ll save all their problems.”
He added: “I don’t think it’s a sign of blatant corruption, I think our leadership can’t bear to admit where they’ve gone wrong and take accountability.”
‘As student numbers fall with each passing day of the dispute, the risk is that the college is pushed into financial precarity by its own decisions’
Pearcy and Hanna did not respond when approached for comment. They are not accused of wrongdoing.
The spending on consultants forms part of a wider picture of expenditure during a period of restructuring that has seen hundreds of staff leave the university, alongside millions more spent on recruitment specialists and legal services.
“We estimate 500 staff have been forced out across the last seven years,” Newman said.
The university, based in Lewisham, east London, has spent the past five years restructuring, first through its Recovery programme, launched in 2021, and then through the Transformation programme, introduced in 2024 and now its Future Goldsmiths plan announced in 2026.
New figures from a FOI now show that spending on the hiring of new and temporary staff reached since 2019 was £6.4m, with most of that spending being made between 2022 and 2025 at £4.8m.
This includes approximately £4m spent on a recruitment company that specialises in temporary administrative office staff called Gray & Associates Recruitment Services. A single amount of £44,000 was spent last year on a recruitment firm called Saxton Bampfylde that specialises in executive level head-hunting.
Spending on legal consultants amounted to £2.3m since 2019, with spending hitting a high in 2025 at £600,000 on law firms and barristers such as Pinsent Masons and Littleton Chambers, which are employment law specialists.
The size of these costs during restructuring has been a cause for concern for Goldsmiths academics. Such expenditure is often justified as a one-off expense, in the expectation that it will deliver recurring savings. But one academic said: “The process risks creating this doom-loop cycle we’ve been seeing for years, with warnings of unsettling deficits prompting people to leave, while opportunities for promotion dry up and confidence in the institution erodes.”
According to Goldsmiths UCU, the Recovery programme delivered £7.6m in recurring savings, with the Transformation programme generating a further £16.1m. Yet a few years later, the university is now making further cuts in a bid to “find a minimum of £22m of recurring structure savings to ensure our costs align with the income”, according to a spokesperson.
Photo: Brenna Spain
In a 2022 column for openDemocracy headlined “Why I may burn my honorary degree”, the writer and campaigner Anthony Barnett said: “Everything I admire about what Goldsmiths achieves is being put to the stake by consultants like KPMG.” He was given an honorary degree from Goldsmiths in July 2019.
Barnett added: “Administrators now regard students as customers and oppose scholars and teachers who speak out against commercialisation.”
Turner Prize-winning artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan, an alumnus of the university, said: “Goldsmiths has squandered its wealth! Its wealth was its faculty, a collection of unique intellectuals that defined the university and concepts that spread across the world. Instead of supporting the workers that sustain the university, Goldsmiths invested millions in corporate parasites.”
One arts academic told the Nerve: “University leadership is using sector-wide financial pressures to justify cuts that risk undermining the very purpose of higher education.”
They added: “With this being the third restructure in five years, the costs will continue to accumulate. As student numbers fall with each passing day of the dispute, the risk [is] that the college is pushed into financial precarity by its own decisions.”
A spokesperson for Goldsmiths said: "Like many UK higher education institutions, we face very significant financial challenges which need to be addressed to ensure future sustainability. Our Future Goldsmiths plan is a significant, long-term programme to renew and futureproof our institution with a strong academic rationale underpinning it, which has been developed collaboratively with university staff.”
A 21-week strike
The staff strike at Goldsmiths has become the longest in UK university history. As it enters its 21st week, students on Goldsmiths’ Master of Fine Arts course say 10 of 12 staff are on strike.
Students have raised concerns in an open letter to the university, saying: “Before enrolling, incoming students were not told the extent of the strike, or how severely it would affect teaching. Students have had no academic or workshop inductions, and second years are relied upon to explain how the course functions, whilst being unclear of the structure of their final year and examinations.”
Installation at Tate Britain by the artist and former Goldsmiths student Steve McQueen winner of the 1999 Turner Prize. Photo: Tony Harris / PA / Getty
One academic said that Goldsmiths “should be aiming for stabilisation and modest growth to hang on to the students we have and to capitalise on committed staff and build the international brand – one that’s built on art, activism and social justice”.
Nine Goldsmiths graduates have won the Turner prize, one of Britain’s most prestigious awards for contemporary art, including Gillian Wearing, Laure Prouvost, Damien Hirst and Steve McQueen.
The mayor of the London Borough of Lewisham, Liam Shrivastava, told the Nerve that staff were taking action because they believe a third round of cuts in five years “threatens to undermine the very soul of the university”.
He added: “Every one of these striking workers would rather be in their lecture theatres, in their offices educating and supporting students, producing the groundbreaking research, analysis and art which makes Goldsmiths one of the leading creative hubs in the world.”