Let’s crunch some numbers. In each cohort of just under 1.5 million 16-year olds, the choices are A levels, BTECs or apprenticeships (accounting for about half the cohort between them), jobs, unemployment or ‘other’. For T levels to grow to even a quarter of those in education or training and, let’s say, a tenth of the rest would mean nearly 275,000 T level work experience opportunities per year. Are there really that placements many out there to be had? 

Each T Level requires 45 days of work experience. For 275,000 T levels, that equates to just under 100 million hours. Let’s suppose each placement takes just one hour of administrative work to arrange and each experience hour that they provide takes up just 10 minutes of oversight by a paid employee. I suspect both those estimates are generously on the low side, but even that is nearly 17 million hours of employer time.

At a median hourly rate of £18.50 for those employees doing the administration or oversight (again, I’m being generous), that’s well over £300 million of direct cost to the employers. That’s before you account for any of the other costs in providing work experience (the space, utilities, equipment, insurance, etc).

A fund of £12Mn looks pretty paltry by comparison.

But let us not be churlish. It’s better than nothing and presumably the DfE hopes the £12Mn will help to fund tens of thousands T levels next year, not yet the hundreds of thousands which it may hope may be realised in the future.

Besides, it’s not as if employers engage in T levels to add to their bottom line anyway. This is an investment in the future of their workforce, creating a skills pipeline and contributing to wider society, surely?

So let’s think like a business. How else could they invest and achieve a similar outcome? Well, instead of the new-fangled T levels that as yet have no track record, one alternative for an employer would be to offer apprenticeships to young people instead.

Would it be cheaper and more cost effective for the employer?

Cheaper? Yes. Larger employers can offset the cost of apprenticeships against their levy. Smaller employers can claim (most of) the cost back.

More cost effective? Probably. Apprentices are employees whereas T level students aren’t. That gives employers have more control over what they can expect from apprentices’ productivity. And when they finish their apprenticeship, the employer can chose to (continue to) employ them, rather than, with T level students, hoping that, when they finish, they apply for a job with them rather than perhaps with their competitor, going to uni or doing something else.

If an employer is looking to invest in their future skills pipeline, they may well decide apprenticeships are a more attractive option than engaging in T levels and even the prospect of a share of a £12 million fund doesn’t come close to tipping that calculation.

That is perhaps why when the DfE tried setting up a similar fund in 2019, they managed to allocate only £500k out of a total available of £7Mn, funding about 2.5% of the intended number of T level placements.

The £1,000 per placement incentive simply didn’t sweeten the deal sufficiently. Even DfE’s own research told them as much: just 7% of employers said it would make a difference. (My back-of-an-envelope calculation above of £300 million costs for 275,000 placements – which works out at an optimistic £1,090 each – perhaps explains why.)

If at first you don’t succeed… right?

Or there is another way of looking at it: the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

When you have a bold and ambitious policy, you don’t get it to fly by giving it half a feather instead of a full set of wings

This may all sound like nay-saying about T levels as if I don’t approve of the concept. Nothing could be further from the truth. I would love to see them succeed. The problem is that when you have a bold and ambitious policy, you don’t get it to fly by giving it half a feather instead of a full set of wings.

Rather than recognising that a change this big needs real investment of money and effort – especially to overcome the real challenges of delivering T levels at scale at a regional level – the Government’s approach appears to be to defund other options, even when its own targets for T level expansion won’t replace what’s being lost.

Realistically, T levels won’t ever be the vocational silver bullet qualification that the Government longs for. The problems of employer engagement and regional disparities in provision can be tackled, but never fully overcome, and the fact will remain that for some young people, commitment to a single T level at 16 will simply be less suitable than a mix of BTECs or other options (which usually require a less academic approach to learning and can help a young people keep their options open for longer). 

I do hope, however, that T levels find a place in the choice of provision and do not suffer the fate of so many of the other well-intentioned efforts to create new vocational qualifications. The only vocational qualification that can really be said to have stood the test of time – six decades and counting – are BTECs, which, ironically, the Government wants to scale back. 

A shorter version of this blog was first published as a thread on Twitter on 17th February 2023.

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The Education Select Committee has launched an inquiry into CEIAG – Careers Education, Information, Advice and Guidance – and issued a call for evidence to which I submitted a few thoughts.

Among the many points I made, there were two that I thought might be worth blogging about. Firstly what do we actually mean by CEIAG? Secondly, what does that tell us about professional careers practitioners?

What is CEIAG?

It’s worth drawing a distinction between the components of CEIAG and why it is necessary to consider them separately as well as together. 

Careers education is education about careers, ie. learning about the different ways people make a living, what those different careers involve and some of the pathways that people take into and through careers. Ideally, careers education also involves learning about employability (those attributes that mean an employee can add value to an employer), how to acquire it and how to demonstrate it to a potential employer. 

Careers information is factual. It may be data (for example, labour market information) or it may be other factual information, but generally, it is largely uncontentious (if soundly derived) and lacks context. One analogy I often use is to say that if I say “beer in this pub is £2 a pint”, I am providing you with information. In isolation, information is not very helpful to the person at the receiving end.

Careers advice puts information into context, making it potentially useful to any person who happens to receive it. To use the same analogy, it would be advice to say that “the average price of beer is £2.40/pint, so this pub is relatively cheap”. Good advice is true in a general sense, even though it is insensitive to any individual’s perspective. 

Careers guidance, however, is personalised and starts with the individual and their hopes, opportunities and needs. For example, it is guidance to ask, “Are you thirsty? Do you like beer? How much can you afford? What are your alternatives?” 

I find this a useful distinction because it helps us understand how best to deliver the component parts of CEIAG. Careers support should not stop at CEIAG though. Beyond those components we should not overlook the potential role of mentoring, behavioural/mindset support and practical help (such as funding for trips and open days or clothes appropriate for work experience, etc).

Careers physicians

Of the four components of CEIAG, guidance is the most useful to the individual, but the hardest to deliver and largely redundant without the other three. Guidance requires knowledge, skills and contact (albeit sometimes virtually) with the person being guided. A careers guidance practitioner bears enormous responsibility because it is their role to draw aspirations out of their client and frame them in the context of opportunities.

I often find myself drawing comparisons between professional careers practitioners and doctors.

A doctor uses their training, experience and expertise to diagnose someone’s needs and prescribe treatment with the selfless aim of relieving suffering and improving the patient’s quality of life.

A careers practitioner uses their training, experience and expertise to diagnose someone’s needs and provide guidance with the selfless aim of giving their client self-agency and improving their quality of life.

Like medicine, careers guidance has become an evidence-based, theory-driven profession equipped with sophisticated tools and, given the almost Hippocratic responsibility, careers guidance should never be entrusted to anyone who is not adequately trained to do it responsibly, knowledgeably and professionally. The Government should require anyone working in a publicly funded role as a careers practitioner to be on the CDI Professional Register.

Speaking plainly

Another parallel with medicine is that careers policy seems to get bogged down in jargon easily. Many professions do this – law, academia, the armed forces – develop a jargon to signal to those on the outside that there is a guarded gateway through which only the cognoscenti may pass. 

In the case of careers practitioners, it may be something to do with a defensiveness against the kind of dismissive attitude that they often face and which I’ve written about before.

So, in my submission to the Select Committee, I made a point of writing plainly.

The problem of inadequate CEIAG contributes to huge policy issues: low productivity, social and regional inequality, and the opportunities of individuals to live fulfilled lives. Yet the solutions – or at least the principles behind them are not that complex and don’t need to be wrapped in gate-keeping language.

After all, the MPs on the Committee – boundless in their wisdom though I’m sure they are – are not inside the gateway.

Nor am I. I have no qualifications in careers practice and, by my own strictures, I should definitely not be allowed to deliver careers guidance. However, I have worked in awe alongside careers professionals; I have delivered careers education, information and advice for many years; and I have read and researched widely.

Some of the most useful research – for me – has not been the research on careers itself, but the wealth of behavioural science research that has been published in recent decades. This developing understanding gives us a fresh perspective on how humans do that difficult thing of making decisions. By understanding that, we get a whole new window on how to improve CEIAG to promote informed choices.

If anything I’ve written here has piqued your interest, I do hope you’ll feel it’s worth reading my submission in full – I will post it here when the Committee has reviewed it. (Until then, I am not supposed to put it in the public domain.)

UPDATE 30/6/2022

The Select Committee has now published the evidence it received and so, I can now share my submission.

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Not a single person has taken a T-level yet and there are still no solutions to the vast challenge of finding enough employer support, but the Department of Education thinks the time is right to axe all alternative vocational qualifications.

Vocational qualifications have long been regarded as the low road of post-16 education compared to the more academic pathway of A levels and university. Too often they’re seen as what you do if you’re ‘not clever enough’, rather than being a positive choice. The most prominent, BTECs, suffer from this self-fulfilling depiction, but are nevertheless an important route into work and/or higher education for many, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds.

We all desperately want vocational qualifications to be regarded as a different and equally valid route, but replacing the tried, tested, popular, but admittedly flawed BTECs with untried, untested, and clearly flawed T-levels is like burning all your clothes because you’ve heard Primark is having a sale next month. What’s going to come along probably won’t be all that great and, in the meantime, you’re naked.

T-levels have been designed with the best of intentions, but many issues surrounding them remain far from solved. We’ve been here before. BTECs, vocational A levels, GNVQs, National Diplomas, and so on and so on – these were all valiant initiatives that didn’t live up to the high hopes when tested by realities. Finding a gold standard for vocational qualifications is a path strewn with bodies. It’s not as if A-levels are a robust gold standard for academic qualifications, so it’s not surprising how much harder it is for a field with an even more battle-worn past.  

The iceberg

For me, the iceberg right in the path of T-levels, whose existence DfE seems reluctant even to acknowledge, is that there just won’t be enough employers willing to provide the necessary 45 days of work experience – even if the government were willing and able to throw money at the issue.

To employers the current offer is this: take on an untrained learner who will soak up management time, but not contribute significantly to your business’s productivity (unless they’re employed in something so menial it gives them no real experiential learning). You’ll get no money or tax breaks for helping out, but it may mean that, at some point in the future, there may be someone better qualified to work for you – or who you have helped train to work for your competitors. This point in the future may be within a couple of years (a long time in business) or, since T-levels are intended to be a better pathway to higher training and education than BTECs, if your contribution works as it should, it may not be until many years from now.

Even the most socially minded employer is likely to prefer to spend their limited resource of time and money supporting the far more attractive proposition of providing apprenticeships instead which provide a faster, more targeted way of plugging their gaps, where they actually employ the learner and dictate many of the terms of their training.

To scale up T-levels to even 10% of post-16 learners (let alone half) will mean employers investing in the additional provision of around 3.5 million days of work experience every year. It’s simply unrealistic to imagine this is going to happen without significant bribery – sorry, I mean financial incentives.

Even if I’m wrong (let’s hope I am) and employers don’t act as they always have in the past, then the provision of T-levels will depend critically on what employers exist within a small radius of where the learner is based and whether they operate in a sector appropriate to the 24 T-level subject areas.

In some areas – big metropolitan centres – there may be plenty of choice, but in the areas where the skills needs are most needed, almost by definition there isn’t an excess of employer capacity to get involved in training. Almost nowhere will be able to offer anything like a full range of T-level choices.  

Even if the government were proposing to throw money at the problem of incentivising existing employers (which they’re not), the problem of incentivising nonexistent ones is not resolved simply with investment.

Without this work experience component, learners can’t pass the T-level so schools and colleges can’t offer the courses without those relationships in pace. Of course, DfE (and the T-level regulator IfATE) could relax or rewrite the rules on whether work experience is strictly necessary and how much, but then T-levels will lose their key point of differentiation. We’d be better off keeping BTECs.

A stormy T-cup

I do understand why DfE thinks that if it allows the continued availability of alternatives to T-levels, then they’re not giving the new qualification every bit of backing that they can. However, I would argue that, if T-levels can’t rise above the competition as attractive and valuable qualifications because they’re genuinely a better choice, then making them the only choice will make them weaker not stronger.

This government is genuinely engaged in trying to solve the problems of ‘the other 50%’ (those who don’t follow academic pathways) and ‘the Cinderella sector’ (further education and technical colleges), but they won’t make vocational education right by making the same mistakes that got us here in the first place. Indeed, the danger – the brick wall towards which they are steering deliberately and at speed – is to undermine the very thing they hope to improve. 

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The Higher Education Policy Institute has kindly published an article I wrote on the interim plans for reform of the National Student Survey. 

The proposed changes are contained in the OfS’s Phase 1 Report of its NSS Review which was sparked by a somewhat untoward statement by the DfE last year that the NSS was responsible for “dumbing down standards“. No evidence for this claim was offered and it was exactly the opposite of… well, everything that they and predecessor governments had ever previously said about NSS’s role in enhancing the quality of higher education.

Indeed, the credibility afforded to the NSS previously meant that it was a key metric used in the TEF (the Teaching Excellence Framework, as it then was, now called ‘the Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework’).  Its weighing as part of TEF was downgraded, however, when student opposition to the exercise led to widespread boycotting of the survey.

The main reason the government has gone sour on the NSS though seems to me to be that it doesn’t endorse their political narrative about higher education – or, even if it does, the signal is too noisy, too nuancy. For example, NSS doesn’t say that the only good education is one that results in a job. It doesn’t say that our universities are all world-beating while at the same time managing also to say that they’re full of woke academics and snowflake students. And it fails woefully to confirm that traditional redbrick and Russell Group unis are better than jumped-up polys. 

Indeed, the university with the strongest record of performance in the NSS since its inception is – wait for it – the Open University. What should we make of that? There are multiple explanations for its NSS success, not least the fact that the survey is taken as students approach graduation and for OU students, that’s likely to have been a long, hard slog of many years, involving considerable commitment and sacrifice. Anyone who wasn’t going to give a good report will probably have fallen by the wayside by that point or at the very least will be convincing themselves that it was all worth it after all. Another explanation is that the OU does an amazing job for its students far exceeding their expectations and therefore yielding high satisfaction. 

What it doesn’t tell us is anything absolute. No wonder the government has lost interest in the NSS – it doesn’t tell them anything clearly or that’s politically helpful and even what it does tell them is not what they wanted to hear.

By chance, the DfE does happen to be right that the NSS needs reforming. It’s just it’s not for the reasons they imagine. As my HEPI article explains, the problems lie in (i) imagining that NSS can ever be about informing prospective students helpfully, (ii) the snapshot data dip process of a survey and (iii) the over-emphasis on satisfaction as a measure of quality when it is in fact a function of expectation compared to delivery. 

The reform needed is to shift to a longitudinal national survey of student engagement that tracks shifting patterns throughout a student’s time at university. Engagement has been shown to be an indicative precursor of positive learning outcomes. If you can show that a student has been effectively engaged throughout their studies, you’ve got a good indicator of effective education.

Satisfaction measures are poor proxies that will never tell you much and will always be too easily gamed or misinterpreted. They do not, however, dumb down anything that wasn’t dumb already. 

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This slide, presented by UCAS’s Chief Executive Clare Marchant at a recent event hosted by Wonkhe on higher education admissions, shows starkly the correlation between clearing and drop-out that I have been banging on about since the 1990s.

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In my last blog post, I mentioned that I’d got into a correspondence with teacher and author Matt Pinkett about whether young people – especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds – should aspire to university.

Matt suggested that perhaps young people should set their sights on the career they want and, if they can’t make serious progress towards it as they leave school, then they should consider university as a back-up – a ‘failsafe’, as he called it. 

After our previous discussions, he asked what I thought about this. This was my response (with a few edits to make it a blog more than a email to Matt)…

I don’t think I agree with the idea of university as a ‘failsafe’, although I’m still not sure I understand what you intend by the word. So I’m going to use Matt Pinkett’s line: ‘Aim for whatever you want to do, and if you don’t get it, well, at least you can go to university.’ That assumes that whatever you want to do won’t be best achieved by going to uni.

Obviously, university is not the best route for everything or for everyone, but for the vast majority of the best paid and most secure jobs, it is – if not a prerequisite – at least a head start.

The evidence is pretty clear: on average, uni helps everyone regardless of background, earn more in life and have other benefits such as health and happiness. It doesn’t eliminate the social advantages some were born with, but it does narrow the gap a bit.

For many students with disadvantage, higher education is not only transformative, it is almost the only thing that could ever have provided them with that transformation. On average, uni would be the right thing to do, if you are able and so minded. 

However, the sticking point there is ‘on average’. There are some people whom it won’t suit or for whom it further their aspirations. I never try to persuade people to go to uni, but I do try to outline the advantages – and disadvantages – so they can make an informed choice for themselves. You need to consider the individual. All guidance should be ‘Person first’. Or, more to the point, the person should consider their individual needs for themselves.

Rather than ‘aim for what you want to do’, I tend to think about ‘what do you want to be’.

For all of us, the answer to that is that we want to be happy. What happiness means to each of us and what will bring that happiness is different (and changes over time), but it might involve earning a lot (however much ‘a lot’ might be); it might be fame, security, a work:life balance, a family, power, a sense of doing something worthwhile etc. Each of us has a set of rewards we want in life and each career has the potential to deliver a different set of rewards. Finding a career that delivers the set you want is half the journey.

The other half is to be able to offer to that career the skillset that the employer will want. Just as each career offers a different reward set, each one demands a different skillset. If you don’t have the suitable skillset, the job might be a good match for you, but you’re not a good match for it.  

It’s worth unpacking what that skillset actually is. It’s not just skills, but broad ‘employability’. Employability comprises the following in no particular order:

(1) Skills:
(a) Hard skills, ie job specific skills, such as welding if you want to be a welder;
(b) Soft skills, ie transferable skills, such as communication, team work or numeracy, which are all useful in any job, albeit to varying degrees.

(2) Knowledge, some of which is specific to the job (eg. a surgeon’s understanding of anatomy), but much of it is broader (although to some extent, this comes up in (4) below)

(3) Character, which comprises attitude, behaviours and personality (and includes important traits like grit, resilience and a growth mindset, but also determination, politeness and amiability).  

(4) Social capital, or how society perceives your intrinsic value (based on class, age, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, height, accent, use of the right fork, etc). This is the often unwelcome component of employability because it explains why Boris Johnson gets to be Prime Minister with a record of being repeatedly sacked when anyone from a disadvantaged background wouldn’t have been given a second chance. We cannot ignore social capital though, if only to recognise that, in order to make it matter less, you need to ensure you have all the other components in overwhelming supply. There are also things that one can do to build social capital – most importantly, the wider knowledge is key to this and not in a bad way.

Although these four components comprise ‘employability’, actually we are talking about something far broader than merely producing career fodder. We’re talking about creating rounded people: someone with a full complement of the four components is well equipped for making a life, not just a living.

What role does university play in any of this? It’s easy to see that disadvantaged students might start out with even more limited employability than more affluent students. University explicitly sets out to build knowledge and often hard skills too. It builds soft skills, although it tends to do this implicitly. It builds social capital through exposure to a wider cross-section of society, establishing networks and broadening horizons. It might also build character, but it is arguable whether it does so better than the ‘university of life’. In any case, research shows that disadvantaged students tend to have a lower propensity to take advantage of many of the character-building opportunities (such as extra-curricular activities) that uni might offer. This is often down to money, circumstances and habits formed in school.

When you look at it like this, you can see how uni builds employability into a quality some researchers have called ‘graduateness’, which is clearly prized by employers.

So, should uni be a failsafe or a first option? As I said, it has to be down to the individual and the gap between their skillset and that required by the career that might fulfil their reward set.

Critical to this is the questions of ‘if not uni, then what?’ Around 50% of school-leavers do not go to university. Most go into jobs (usually just ‘jobs’, rather than ‘careers’). A few go into apprenticeships, training or other non-higher education. Too many become NEETs (Not in Education, Employment or Training). There’s not a sufficiently good other pathway (although there absolutely should be) and, unless there is a better option, university must surely look attractive to anyone with the grades and willingness to spend longer in education.

Degree apprenticeships are a decent option, but they are few and far between, fairly limited in the choice of jobs, and subject to many of the same prejudices against the disadvantaged that exist at any level of employment.

I haven’t touched here on the fact that uni is an expensive option. It is. And I believe the student/graduate’s contribution to the cost is disproportionate. (In fact, I have proposed an alternative system of funding.) That said, uni is pretty much free at the point of entry and you only pay when you earn a decent wage. In that sense, cost should not be seen as a barrier, although it might be seen as an impediment.

I agreed with Matt Pinkett that he could also publish my comments on his own blog which can be found at All Ears. I’m really grateful to him for what’s been – for me at least – an interesting discussion.

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Back in August, a teacher drew my attention to the following tweet and asked if I might be able to answer it:

Can anybody point me to research regarding outcomes in later life for disadvantaged students who go to university vs. disadvantaged students who don’t? https://t.co/BiYatOdKMh

— Mr Pink (@Positivteacha) August 1, 2019

The tweet was from Matt Pinkett (@PositivTeacha), teacher, blogger and author of Boys don’t try? Rethinking masculinity in schools.

My thread of tweets in response sparked a correspondence between us and, in the end, Matt was kind enough to say I had challenged his whole perspective. He suggested others might be interested too and I should publish some of my thoughts on the topic. 

So, in the first of two blogs (here’s the second), here’s how I responded to his initial question… 

There is plenty of research showing a significant earnings premium on average for graduates regardless of background. Probably the most comprehensive work is the paper by the IFS ‘How English domiciled graduate earnings vary with gender, institution attended, subject and socio-economic background’. The Sutton Trust has also done many excellent studies on different aspects of this question which is actually a lot more complex than it sounds.

Policy Press | The End of Aspiration? – Social Mobility and Our Children’s Fading Prospects, By Duncan Exley

 

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This article first appeared on the Wonkhe website (8th April 2018) under the heading ‘TEF won’t sweeten my rankings rancour’.

Which is the best university? It’s a seductive question to ask, but that doesn’t mean there’s a sensible answer. League tables, aka rankings, is the nonsensical answer you’re likely to get.

They weigh the wrong factors – a very narrow idea of best, based on counting what’s measured rather than measuring what counts. Traditionally, this has led to a dominance of rankings by research-led institutions.

But even if the factors weighed were the right ones, the rankings use poor proxies to measure them – as if research citations, for example, were an unambiguous marker of quality, rather than being hugely dependent on publication in English, in the right journals and in the right disciplines.

But even if they were the right proxies, the data is often of poor quality: out of date, non-comparative, self-reported.

But even if the data were good, what rankers do with it isn’t: aggregating and weighting arbitrarily.

But even if the methodology were sound, the way the results are presented suggests an equal distance between say, first and thirty-first place as between fortieth and seventieth. Anyone who has ever seen a bell curve knows that is misrepresentation.

But even if league tables didn’t make all these mistakes and more, their worst crime is to imagine that there is such a thing as a single best university, rather than many different ways in which universities can be good at different things. Indeed, it is the very diversity of the higher education sector that is its strength. It means the sector as a whole can paint a rainbow of objectives catering to the divergent needs of particular students, communities, employers, economies and societies.

No platform for rankings

You can’t ban league tables, sadly. If we want information about higher education to be transparent, then there are those who will put it in a pop chart. That will attract attention, because offering an answer to that “best university” question is sexy.

The answer might not be to have fewer league tables, but instead to have more: an infinity of rankings so that each person can pick the one that combines just the factors they want, weighted perfectly to their needs. No ranking would be authoritative, because the array would reflect the personal and diverse nature of the question.

THE’s latest rankings product (its Global Impact Ranking) is a step in the direction of infinity in that it adds another league table to the shop window, incrementally diminishing the value of the ever-increasing heap.

However, perhaps we should welcome the desire to rate universities according to criteria such as recycling, fair labour practice and admissions policies, even if the process is as flawed as all the others? After all, the sexiness of rankings does shine a light on issues that might get overlooked (especially when the desire to do well in other rankings distracts universities from considering what else matters).

TEF: just another ranking?

That was explicitly the government’s intention when it introduced its own form of ranking – the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), which the then-minister Jo Johnson said would “introduce new incentives for universities to focus on teaching”. The idea was to rank universities’ teaching quality to get them to improve it and to drive student choice based on quality.

The problem is that TEF repeats the mistakes of other rankings. It weighs the wrong factors: the metrics (as was later acknowledged with the change of the name to include student outcomes) have little to do with teaching. It uses poor proxies, such as measuring employment not employability. The data is poor: the NSS component was downgraded after an NUS boycott undermined it. The methodology is arbitrary: for example, benchmarking by disciplines, but not regions.

The list goes on, but TEF is unlike other rankings in at least three respects. First, being the government’s own ranking, TEF bears more responsibility than most. It purports to be a truer truth – an authority that it hasn’t earned.

Second, most league tables – even though they are rarely entirely open about their methodology – do tend to stick to it. TEF, however, recognises the failings of its metric methodology and adds a subjective element: the review panel.  It may be the best part of TEF, but it’s the least transparent and most susceptible to inconsistency.

Third, most league tables’ misrepresentation is a single hierarchical list. TEF retains the hierarchy, but shrinks distinctions to three categories: good (bronze), better (silver) and best (gold). This, of course, creates a cliff edge where a fine judgement between silver and bronze, say, translates into a presentational gulf.

Informing student choice

Interestingly, there is no “mediocre” or “bad” in this hierarchy, but that’s not how students see it. Bronze is no one’s idea of an endorsement. This highlights an absolutely critical issue about rankings – TEF included – which would be the case even if they were more rigorous in their approach: how do they inform student choice?

Human choices are rarely rational. They emerge from a soup of feelings and preconceptions, sprinkled with croutons of information fried in confirmation bias. When it comes to a complex decisions, such as which university to choose, we don’t devise a personal list of criteria, sourcing objective data on each, and then coolly and fairly appraising the options relatively. Instead we latch on to something that provides a basis for beliefs we already hold.

In other words, we use heuristics: rules of thumb that often bear little resemblance to nuanced realities, but which hurt our brains less. This is precisely the quality about league tables that makes them so sexy. They say, don’t you worry your head about the real differences between two institutions that are both good in their own way, we’ve made the whole process simpler. Misleading, but simpler.

The same is true of TEF. Rather than providing information that disrupts misplaced beliefs and encouraging students to examine what kind of educational experience will support their own learning, TEF short-circuits the thinking and provides a yes/no/maybe checklist.

The Government was right to shine a light on teaching (well, on learning), but not the seedy neon beam of TEF. There are other approaches and, as Dame Shirley Pearce proceeds with her review of TEF, I hope she will think boldly about options that promote diversity and innovation rather than aping league tables that suppose there is a single model of “good” and which play blind darts to see who gets closest.

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If you want to cut fees to win back the youth vote, you start with the courses that give the lowest financial returns, right? At first glance, this looks like a good idea to a new Secretary of State. So we can forgive Damian Hinds for flying the policy kite of differential fees for STEM and arts degrees amid the announcement of the HE and Post-18 Review.

However, after even a moment’s thought, the idea collapses. It is a policy that is misisng a clearly defined intended consequence and yet would undam a flood of unintended ones. 

The problem is that all too often kite-flying ministers get distracted by the pretty ribbons floating in the breeze and they start trying to keep the mess of string and tissue paper aloft. Before they realise what they’re doing, their blue-sky thinking has turned into a bold idea of which they are the champion, a legacy-defining paradigm shift from which any retreat would be a U-turn.

For Damian’s sake – but, more importantly, for the sake of students, of universities, of taxpayers and of the economy – we need to nip this idea in the bud. Cutting fees for arts and social science degrees, but not for STEM, would be bad for all courses across the sector. It’s a direly dumb idea and here are just ten reasons why.

(1) Courses that are cheaper to run, such as arts, but which attract the same fees as more expensive courses make a greater contribution to the infrastructure and the cross-discipline services of unis, such as libraries, students unions, IT facilities, welfare, careers services, and so on. If you take away that contribution, those services would be cut, damaging the experience and outcomes for all students.

(2) Many STEM courses cost far more than £9,250 a year to run. Some receive some extra funding as a result, but often even that comes nowhere covering the marginal cost let alone the real cost. By cutting the funding from other courses that tops up the cost of those courses, ironically, it may well be those most expensive courses that get axed first. 

(3) Even if they weren’t actually axed, the cost of running STEM courses would need to be slashed to eliminate the cross-subsidy. Imagine doing mechanical engineering without ever getting your hands on any machinery or doing chemistry without access to chemicals. 

(4) If graduates from certain courses do genuinely earn less, charging them less does make sense. But, hang on, that’s exactly how the current loan repayment system works already. In fact, it’s designed to ensure you pay back more if earn more and pay back less if you earn less, regardless of what you studied. It seems fairer that a rich politician who studied history should pay more than a physics graduate who went into teaching. (And, by the way, the country is very short of properly qualified physics teachers.)

(5) If you make some disciplines more expensive, there are likely to be students who decide to opt for cheaper courses, looking at the ticket price in front of them rather than the potential financial return, which is far from guaranteed and is at best no more than hypothetical.

(6) The very students most likely to think like that are those for whom the cost is most important, ie. those from the poorest backgrounds. Disadvantaged students may well avoid STEM subjects in order to get a degree on the cheap denying them the supposed higher salaries and social mobility that wider access should be promoting. 

(7) A lack of diversity in the student intake would be bad for those courses and even worse for the career sectors they feed into. Drawing from a narrower pool of applicants is hardly likely to maximise the quality of those applicants. 

(8) Of course, I’m specualting about future applicant behaviours here. It may go the other way and, in practice, rather than courses becoming socially divided, instead the cheaper courses would simply become tarnished, second-class qualifications. (Indeed, ‘Veblen Good’ mentality is exactly why so few institutions price their course under £9k now.) Having an arts degree might single you out for derision – the butt of jokes about ‘only an arts degree, not a proper one’ – or at least for lower employment opportunities. It would exacerbate earning differentials in a spiral that would undermine some of our leading university depts & cutting off talent from creative industries, which just happen to be one of the UK’s most lucrative exports. 

Or maybe I’m wrong: we would get neither the social division across disciplines nor the demonisation of all cheap subjects. We might get lucky. On the other hand, we might get both. The avenue for avoiding disaster is dangerously, evidence-lackingly slim and doesn’t actually to lead to anywhere better than now.

(9) In order to decide which courses should be cheaper, the Government would have to use somewhat patchy data based on past graduates’ earnings. There would be a built-in assumption that employment and pay patterns from past, say, 30 years are a good predictor of the future. When you look at the 30 years before that, they weren’t.

(10) There is a radical shift going on in industry – big enough to be described as the Fourth Industrial Revolution – as automation, artificial intelligence and custom servicing become mainstream. Many in industry are predicting that the skill we’ll need most in future is creativity, at which humans – especially arts graduates – outperform machines and are likely to continue to do so for quite a while. 

It’d be an ironic shame if, in an attempt to turn students into salary-chasing units of supply, the Government ended up undermining our future labour market needs and damaging the lives of the very graduates whose votes they’re trying to win.

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