The last Labour government was right to reform student finance and to introduce tuition fees. The costs, like the benefits, of higher education need to be shared between the individual and the state. Tory-led reforms fail in not recognising the wider public benefits of higher education and the significance of widening access.
However, one of the problems with this debate is that too often the complexity of higher education policy becomes simply an argument about student finance options. That is why the report of the IPPR Commission on the Future of Higher Education makes refreshing reading. It does put forward a range of models for future reform of student funding and there is certainly an important debate to be had about how Labour’s pledge to cut tuition fees fits with Ed Balls’ call for ‘iron discipline’ in spending. However, let’s put that debate aside for a moment.
There are 21 other recommendations in the report and a recognition that austerity, international competition – both for students and for the skills and research produced in higher education – and changing student and employer demands need some big reform in HE. There are two issues which particularly interested me.
As a teacher in the early 1990s, I introduced vocational qualifications into a very high-achieving academic school. The impact on the students who were finally able to demonstrate their skills and gain credit for their learning was inspiring to me – and life-changing to them. As a minister, I worked with Ruth Kelly on the introduction of new vocational qualifications led by employers. This government scrapped them before they could really take hold. But in both of those cases, we failed to achieve the ‘holy grail’ of vocational qualifications – equivalent status and respect with academic qualifications. That is why I was pleased to see Stephen Twigg talking about new vocational qualifications like the Technical Baccalaureate and developing national FE centres of excellence for vocational areas like catering or software design.
In the IPPR report this theme is developed into the idea of allowing some FE colleges which offer degree level vocational courses to develop into new polytechnics. Recognition of prestigious, higher education vocational centres seems like the right way forward to me.
Second, the report suggests some new ways to open up access to Oxbridge and Russell Group universities. As the first person from my comprehensive school to go to Oxford, I benefitted from the radical admissions procedure operated by my college, Hertford, which gave unconditional offers to students from state schools. Far from dumbing down, the college found that having the highest proportion of state school students in the university also took it to the top of the degree league table.
Ideas like greater use of contextual value-added data to allow lower offers to students from schools where gaining the highest grades could be difficult, and allowing universities to recruit without limit from students eligible for a new student premium of £1,000 could be important steps. Imagination and bold measures are needed at a time when Les Ebdon, the HE access regulator, says that little progress is being made. And there are real worries that outreach programmes are being cut by cash-strapped universities. This is an enormously retrograde step. The real clincher for whether young people can apply to university is which options they choose and how much they believe that prestigious universities are the place for them. Universities, teachers, parents and schools need to open up options and aspiration, not close them down. That’s the real test for access.
Our HE system is one of the best in the world in terms of economic impact, student experience and international competitiveness. But the world is moving quickly. Austerity can’t be an excuse for no change in HE or for retrenchment. Labour – and our universities – have some big thinking to do. This report is an important start.
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Jacqui Smith is former home secretary, writes the Monday Politics column for Progress, and tweets @smithjj62
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I think the IPPR report makes a number of other more welcome recommendations, not least:
Point 6: creating a “national network of Applied Research and Innovation Centres focused on boosting applied research in the strategic industries of the future and on revitalising regions with below-average growth.” I wholeheartedly agree and would hope that they might be similar in size and funding to the Max Planck/Fraunhofer/Helmholtz Institutes in Germany or CNRS in France, as I have called for before (see
http://cantab83.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/home-ownership-and-economic-mobility.html )
Point 12: “Eligibility for part-time loans should be extended to tackle the crisis in part-time learning.”
Point 14: “A new postgraduate loans system should be introduced to enable fair and wider access to postgraduate courses.”
Points 12 and 14 are essential if we are to address the UK’s lamentable record in making provisions for lifelong learning, and career changes for mature workers. If we want to have a more flexible labour market then we need to enable more people to change careers as the labour market changes. As many of those that need to change careers will be forced to do so because of unemployment, most will therefore not be in a strong enough financial position to pay for tuition. They therefore need to have the same access to government loans as the young currently do.