To promote social mobility, we need to measure it. To measure it, we need to define it. We need to identify markers of socio-economic background. To put it crudely, we need to work out what makes someone working, middle or upper class.

Over the years, I’ve been directly or indirectly involved in many attempts to come up with a simple, but accurate way to define socio-economic background (SEB) for a variety of social mobility and inclusion initiatives. 

Most obviously for me, this has been about university access, wider participation and career opportunities. For many years, the Office of Fair Access & Participation (now part of the Office for Students) has used POLAR quintiles as its headline indicator. This is the rate of progression to higher education from within a postcode. Obviously, this doesn’t equate directly to class and, if the mission to eliminate access gaps were ever successful, POLAR would becoming increasingly meaningless as the differences between quintiles tended to zero.

More recently, OfS introduced TUNDRA, another chilly acronym to identify cold spots of progression. UCAS uses its own Indicators of Multiple Deprivation. Of course, ‘progression’, ‘deprivation’ and ‘class’ are very different things and it’s important not to confuse them, even though the barriers to social mobility may intersect across them.

I could go on listing the zoo of other measures out there, adopting different approaches based on occupational prestige, access to resources (like education or housing), absolute and relative poverty measures, subjective social status, and more marketing-style typologies like, for example, Experian’s colourful Mosaic tool.

Simple or accurate

Last week, this issue of defining background came up in relation to a new project I’m involved in to build more equity, diversity and inclusion into engineering. So I went back to the first work I did on it back in 2010 when the coalition government were first trying to build a Social Mobility Toolkit for employers, providing a comparative way of recording SEB so performance and improved could be measured and tracked.

The assembled experts (which generously included me) compared notes, shook heads, and generally agreed that it is genuinely impossible to come up with a means of classifying individuals that is both simple and accurate. 

Even if a simple measure were ever possible, I’m pretty convinced that an accurate one isn’t. And the simpler it is, the less accurate it gets.

People’s complex individual stories will always be diminished by being put in boxes. That said, aggregated data that approximates at scale to patterns and trends is better than the historic, condescending approach of three classifications of class, based on vague notions about jobs, income, region and accent. (Note the image from the iconic Class Sketch which featured in The Frost Report in 1966, which is copyright, but used under Fair Use.)

How to record and tracking social mobility

So, if you’re an employer, say, who is looking to be more intentionally proactive about social mobility, what data should you gather?

I was inspired to write this by the ever-brilliant Laura McInerney’s blog on Substack in which she mentions coming across the attempt by the Solicitors’ Qualifying Exam, which clearly elevates simplicity over sophistication.

The best practice, I think, is the Government Statistical Service’s recommended series of questions which it has devised to try to harmonise standards. The Government also published this useful guidance for employers (in the financial and professional services sectors, but it applies more generally).

In 2022, the Social Mobility Commission in partnership with The Bridge Group also came up with a new toolkit, which is the gold standard for employers wanting to take social mobility seriously. It includes guidance on what data to gather and how. The Sutton Trust has a similar toolkit too.

Who knows best?

All this data is important and clearly defined terminology is critical if you want to build a solid evidence base. However, when it comes to socio-economic background – or class, as some might call it – there is something to be said for abandoning more scientific approaches and embracing self-identification.

If you’re going to ask questions about someone’s background in order to allot them to a class, why not just ask them – as well or instead – to say where they think they should be placed?

What class you are may well be best defined by where you feel your ‘belong’.

For some people that will never change: former politicians, enrobed in ermine in the Lords, often insist they are still working class. Meanwhile, a titled aristocrat, bankrupt and scraping a living, may never lose their sense of self as upper class. 

For other people, class is mutable. Social mobility, of course, suggests that it is something that can move – or, at least, even if ‘class’ is fixed, everything that gives that word any useful meaning can be changed.

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Will emergency measures prove to have been the key to fairer admissions, based on potential more than performance?

A slightly shorter version of this blog originally appeared on Wonkhe as part of its ‘Build Back Higher’ series of short articles about the potential positive impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on UK higher education.   

In the face of the difficult logistics of feeding his troops, Napoleon looked for innovations to ensure his forces could carry supplies that would remain edible over lengthy campaigns. As a result, margarine was developed as a substitute for the more perishable butter and the canning process was invented. Without war, we would not have baked beans.

As the clichés have it, desperate times call for desperate measures and necessity is the mother of invention.

The pandemic has undoubtedly driven a host of inventive approaches to teaching, assessment and much else that we may want to keep. But surely no one will ever hail the exams debacle of 2020 and the centre-assessed grades that followed as a welcome novelty?

Maybe we should. One day, we might look back on this cohort as the experiment we never could have done otherwise. 2020 may be the year in which almost everyone got the grade they had the potential to get, rather than what they scored on the day of an exam, when they were ill or the exam room was too hot, or when they were fine, but their examiner’s dog had just died.

As Denis Sherwood (@nookophile) has shown, almost half of all exam grades in some subjects are wrong and even Ofqual’s head, Dame Glenys Stacey has acknowledged that exam results have a fuzziness of a grade either way.

Meanwhile good teachers know their pupils and understand what they’re capable of at their best. Surely students should be admitted to university based on what they might achieve if given a chance rather than as a prize-giving ceremony for one day’s performance.

I’d like to think that after this year we will revisit Level 3 assessments (that’s A-Level and their equivalents, but it applies to other levels too, for that matter) and ask whether summative exams tell us what we need to know in order to allocate places in higher education fairly. We’ll reconsider the role of continual assessment and, rather than dismiss teachers’ professionalism, we’ll work harder to eliminate any bias in their judgements (because it’s not as if examiners are immune to bias).

As a result of pandemic panic grading, this year’s entry cohort may turn out to be the most diverse yet and if their learning proves to be as successful as other years, it will be hard to argue why student recruitment shouldn’t take more account of context and less of exam results.

For further reading on this topic I recommend Mark Corver‘s brilliant analysis of admissions driven by predicted grades in HEPI’s recent collection of essays Where next for university admissions?

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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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BBC Radio 4 reported this morning a leak from the current Augar Review of Post-18 Education Funding. They claimed that a ‘source’ had supported a report in The Times last week that the review would propose that tuition fees should be capped at £6,500 and the “shortfall would be made up by capping student numbers”. 

For starters, the way this is worded makes no sense as capping numbers would only make funding shortfall worse, not better because of loss of economies of scale. I put this down to the BBC’s over-simplified description.

More worryingly, this would be a disaster for any course costing more to run. That’s any STEM courses, specialist courses with a small intake, high-quality courses where the teaching is especially engaged and with low staff-student ratios, courses with lots of students from non-traditional backgrounds, and so on. In order words, it would undermine a damaging proportion of what is best about English higher education. 

Even for arts courses it would place greater pressure on unis to pass course costs to students for materials. The National Union of Students did excellent research in 2012 showing huge hidden costs across many courses, such as thousands of pounds for artists materials, for example.

A £6,500 cap would be a way of incentivising unis only to offer badly taught courses in subjects where the skills shortage is lowest.

To solve the shortfall for STEM subjects, the Government would be forced to top up funding through a teaching grant for particular prescribed subjects. Unless this extra funding is sufficiently generous – i.e. it allows universities to subsidise their overheads – they will still have an incentive not to offer as many of those courses. And even if the top-up were enough, it would still be subject to political control and adequate funding would be impossible to sustain.

These proposals would be a triple whammy for disadvantaged students:

1. The student number cap (which BBC couldn’t confirm with their source) would hit them by limiting places. That means sharp-elbowed, richer or otherwise privileged students get to front of queue.
2. Universities would have no money to support their access activities like outreach, bursaries and other support intended to help non-traditional students into and through higher education.
3. This proposal does nothing to address the main problem of debt for students (as opposed to the Governments financial problems or universities’), which is to do with living costs while studying. This, of course, isn’t just a problem for disadvantaged students, but for almost all students and the reason why student disquiet prompted Theresa May to set up this review in the first place.

I could have said it’s a quadruple whammy for disadvantaged students, because it does nothing to address the collapse of part-time and mature study, which are an especially effective way of opening access to higher education to non-traditional students. However, like student living costs, that’s a wider problem too – one that desperately needs to be solved for sake of students and UK’s skills shortages.

Ultimately, a £6,500 cap doesn’t even help the Government financially anyway. The way student loans are accounted, this would just dump more cost in the deficit, although the imminent (or should I say ‘impending’)  review of accounting arrangements by the Office for National Statistics may change this.

These proposals wouldn’t even be a win politically. The only graduates who would benefit would be those who end up earning most, who might end up paying back less. Most graduates wouldn’t see their repayments change – not the amount, nor how long they make them. This would be a thoroughly anti-progressive approach to the problem.

Even in terms of the political optics, this proposals isn’t sufficiently helpful to students to seem good enough. Indeed, it would just draw attention to how much better Labour’s offer to stop tuition fees altogether appears to be.

Fortunately, this proposal is just a leak and it is unlikely to be much like what finally appears. (The interim report is due in January.) There are too many clever heads on Augar’s team to let this be the true shape of their report (I hope).

I suspect this may be a DfE leak either (a) to prepare the ground for something bad, but less bad, (b) to run ideas up the flagpole, or (c) to create reasons to chuck the Augar Report altogether if they don’t like it.

When I say DfE leak, we may be seeing an internecine battle between HE and FE in the Department. The HE officials may be leaking the worst excesses of mooted proposals in order to goad the HE sector into putting up an opposition, which they’ve been pretty poor at over the last few months. HE officials, right up the the Universities Minister, might well be trying to regain ground versus the effective and worthy campaign that FE sector has waged in support of a better deal for them.

We all (universities, government, students, employers, and the whole of the UK) need much better ideas than this.

With that in mind, I have written a paper with a quite different approach to HE funding that will be published by the Higher Education Policy Institute later this month – watch this space.

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How solving a small problem like clearing could help solve a big one like youth unemployment: This is an article I wrote some time ago for a publication which never used it because, while it was waiting to be published, UCAS announced the results of its consultation on its proposals for a post-qualification application process. That consultation – quite rightly – dismissed those proposals as effectively not removing the clearing process, but putting everyone into it. PQA was off the table and my modest proposal below never saw the light of day.

Outside of old people’s homes and Daily Mail editorial meetings, it’s not that fashionable these days to call for a return of National Service, but that’s just what I’m going to do. Sort of. Bear with me.

It all starts with university clearing. Who is exactly is it supposed to help? Universities? Students? UCAS? Because it isn’t working. 

During clearing, wannabe students who haven’t found places through the usual admissions system make rash choices about courses and institutions. The correlation between the proportion a uni accepts through clearing and their flunk rate suggests strongly that these are decisions the students – or possibly the universities – come to regret. 

Poor choices don’t help universities either. Sure, they put bums on seats, keeping undersubscribed courses ticking over till the next year of unwilling students land in front of an increasingly demoralised lecturer. But universities know deep down that they should be making their offering available to the students for whom it is most suited, not those left on the shelf by the admissions system.

Even UCAS – normally a well oiled machine (or at least a reliable clockwork automaton) – has its cogs stressed by the disorderly panic of students without places and places without students. It can descend into chaos. A couple of years ago a student told me he had been offered a place during clearing at a university that shall remain nameless after failing the A level in his chosen degree subject. The university told him, “Well, at least you failed in the right subject”. 

Clearing is like a jumble sale: a lot of people get hurt in the crush to buy something most people wouldn’t want. 

I’m not saying there are no bargains to be had. Many of the courses on offer during clearing are well taught courses which would benefit certain students greatly in developing themselves and their employability. However, clearing is not the best way for those niche students and niche courses to find each other. 

And who does it hurt most? The students who are most desperate and least well advised. The ones for who the cost of going to university is challenging enough already and the prospect of extra fees because they have dropped out of a course will be disastrous. In other words, it’s those same students from deprived or non-traditional backgrounds who are constantly disenfranchised by the system.

So what can we do instead? The Government and UCAS have been absolutely right to explore the possibility of a post-qualification admissions system (PQA), but UCAS’s current plan runs the risk of making matters worse by effectively shoving everyone into “New Improved Clearing (now with added weeks!)” rather than taking anyone out of it. 

There is no way around the problem that A levels take time to teach and can only be fully assessed at the end of teaching, that assessment takes time and a well considered admissions process also takes time. There’s just not enough time in the system before the start of the university year in Autumn. 

So, how about we start the year at, well, the start of the year? Or how about different institutions offer different start times? Some might even offer a choice of starting points. Whenever the year starts, the admissions process runs from August (when results are published) to December and you start university as soon after that as the institution offers a starting date. 

But hold on, what do we do with all these errant youths who’ll now have nothing better to do with themselves but tear up our streets while they wait for term to begin? That’s where National Service comes in. 

I’m not suggesting military service nor even a compulsory conscription into any activity. I’m suggesting that it would be good to introduce a period when young people have the explicit opportunity to improve either themselves, their society or both. Similar National Social Service schemes already operate in many countries including, very successfully, in Germany.

This particular stone could slaughter many birds. Employers bemoan the lack of employment skills and work experience among graduates. Academics grumble about their inability to spell or speak clearly. In this mini-gap year, students could play catch-up on these skills (or learn a language or improve their computer wizardry). They could do voluntary work, travel (if they can afford it) or just get a job for a while. The point is that they would be free to focus on what will make them more rounded, employable people. 

In order to work, the Government would have to establish a programme of opportunities – with funding. Certain activities, depending on their social benefit or potential for personal development would attract a small grant for the school leaver. So, for example, for doing a six-month course in business skills, working as an unpaid trainee in a crèche or volunteering for an environmental charity, a school leaver might get £40 a week, say (not perhaps so different from the EMA that the Government possibly now regrets despatching so hastily). 

Everyone (including those who have no intention of going to university) would have the opportunity to do up to six months of such activities during their year after leaving school. And if they choose activities that aren’t on the Government’s list of supported schemes, but rather swan off backpacking in the Punjab or doing other Gap Yah jollies, then that’s fine, but they’re not entitled to the grant.

As a scheme this is intended not merely to slice up the Clearing problem, but also to fry some much bigger fish in the process: the skills gap and the (supposed) lack of engagement in society among our young people. It would involve a willingness to embrace change on the part of our universities (but possibly only among those who suffer at the hands of the clearing system). 

It would also need money from the public purse. However, the costs would not be as high as all that and when compared with the savings and the investment (the flunking students, the dole pay-outs, the better qualified workforce, the free work done on social projects, etc), it looks like a good deal. What’s more, it’s got Big Society written all over it and simply the words ‘National Service’ might raise the pulses of Tory vote-wranglers, so, who knows? Maybe the Government could get behind it.

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