Forget about canaries, the signs of impending doom are more like the sound of cracking rock thundering through the coal mine and debris collapsing around us.

Here are just two recent signs.

Sign 1

New research recently revealed that now more than half of supposedly full-time undergraduates are doing paid work for more than 15 hours a week and nearly a quarter have full-time jobs alongside their studies to make ends meet.

The idea that students whinge about not having enough money is nothing new. (There are even a jokes about it in Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale from the fourteenth century.) But we have reach a different order of poverty now. The situation is desperate and it’s damaging to their wellbeing and their outcomes.

Sign 2

In the past few weeks dozens of universities have announced redundancies. Just this morning the number crept to 49 and there are probably more to come. This is because HE funding in the UK has been facing real terms cuts for the past decade. This is the equivalent of anorexia for our world-leading HE sector. With no more fat to shed, the system has started to consume itself.

There is a crisis in the way we fund students and the way we fund the institutions where they study.

What should politicians do about it?

The major political parties would rather not say anything about this. They know the parlous state of the nation’s finances. They know the majority of voters would prioritise any available funding to be directed towards health, crumbling schools, bankrupted local councils, the cost of living, et cetera et cetera et cetera. And the politicians fear that commitments to solve the crises in HE will not come cheap.

They have to say something though. A blank where an HE policy should be will be noticed and challenged. So right now, I suspect drafts are being drawn up with long-grass-kicking promises of a ‘review’. If we’re lucky, they’ll be wondering where to commit to ‘a radical review’.

They shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the opportunities to win votes and do The Right Thing in the process. The rewards of having a successful higher education sector are boundless: a higher skills pipeline leading to greater productivity in the workforce; home-grown talent filling labour market shortages; social mobility opportunities; investment-sparking research; levelling up around HE providers acting as innovation hubs and major regional employers; et cetera et cetera et cetera.

To that end, I want to offer two options for the manifesto of any party that wants a real and practical solution.

The safe option

I was delighted that my Fairer Funding proposal for an Employer Levy has been economically modelled & polled in Higher Education Policy Institute’s latest report published this week.

It wouldn’t cost taxpayers more. In fact it would save a staggering £8 billion a year compared to currently.

Yes, you read that right: £8 billion for each cohort of students. That’s not my estimate, that’s according to the independent economic modelling by London Economics Ltd, who analysed the Employer Levy alongside 3 other proposals for English HE and one for Scotland.

Not only would it save billions of pounds, it would better balance student demand and labour market needs, support access, provide financial headroom for more student maintenance support and better HE funding.

What’s more, student debts would be slashed and – instead of loan repayments of 9% by graduates and, in effect, their employers – grads and employers would pay just 3% each.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that among potential students, polling showed the Employer Levy as easily the most popular with 78% saying they would definitely or probably apply (compared to 41-74% for other proposals and 68% for the current system).

The bold option

The bolder option (which is not necessarily mutually exclusive with the safe one) is for politicians to stop regarding the human capital of the nation as a cost at all and start to recognise that – like building roads, railways and power plants – building a skilled future workforce is an investment in the infrastructure of the country.

As such, all post-compulsory education could be treated as expenditure that will be financed by the additional revenues that will be generated by the investment and by avoiding the costs that would be incurred if the investment were not made.

It would require radical change to fiscal rules, but when the rules get in the way of so much benefit, I suggest they are what’s wrong, not what they prevent.

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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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An edited version of this blog appeared in Times Higher Education on 19th January 2022 (subscription required). 

In a recent speech the Further and Higher Education Minister Michelle Donelan described the Government’s planned changes in post-16 education as the greatest political endeavour since the creation of the NHS. She may have been overstating the case, but it is fair to say that the creation of the Lifelong Loan Entitlement (LLE) does have game-changing potential.

The idea is to give everyone – whether they go to university or not – roughly the same access to government-backed loans to pay for education or professional development after they’ve left school. This will, it is hoped, herald a wave of upskilling and reskilling that the economy will need for the multiple challenges of post-Pandemic and Brexit recovery, ‘levelling up’ disadvantaged areas, embracing the so-called Fourth Industrial Age and reaching Net Zero.

Certainly, access to funding is a major obstacle for many who might otherwise make the sacrifices – albeit temporary – in their career and family commitments so they can invest time and effort in learning or training. However, being entitled to plunge oneself into lifelong debt may not be the temptation the Government imagines. Providing access to funding may be a necessary step to change the game, but not a sufficient one.

Some of the other challenges are spelled out in the first report of the Lifelong Education Commission (of which I am proud to serve as a member). Lifelong learning needs to be less like the set menu offered by a traditional three-year residential degree, and more like a finger buffet, where the learner can choose what they want and keep going back for more.

Lifelong learners, it is assumed, are more likely to want shorter courses, perhaps with a bite-size qualification – a ‘microcredential’ – attached. Perhaps they will return to take further modules at different times in their lives at different institutions, sometimes studying full-time, sometimes alongside a job. Sometimes on a campus, sometimes at a night-school, sometimes online.

An advantage of the set menu is that it’s designed the ensure that the learner enjoys a full and nourishing meal – a starter, main and dessert. However, there’s no such guarantee with the buffet. In education terms, traditional degrees move through levels 4 and 5, building to a level 6 qualification, whereas a more piecemeal approach that the learner puts together may be exactly that: pieces of a meal. An abundance of level 4 without ever amounting to more or a disconnected smorgasbord of incoherent bits of learning.

Although we do want to encourage LLEs to be used in a piecemeal way, we must also nudge students towards incremental learning. To make this possible, we need a credit transfer framework – a system of recognising the value of each module of learning and having a common agreement of how much it contributes to achieving a higher qualification, such as a full degree.

Such credit frameworks exist, but they’re a long way off achieving true transferability. Some institutions don’t recognise the equivalence of credits gained at another institution (after all, in these days of marketised education, they would be trading away competitive advantage). But, as often as not, it’s about the type of credit as much as value: universities teaching even the same degree might tackle different concepts at different points in the course. Rightly, they don’t want a student who’s done preliminary learning elsewhere to miss out on something that, on their course, they would have covered in first year.

A game-changing LLE will need to solve this problem. It’s not easy. More than half a century of education policy is strewn with the corpses of previous attempts. What’s more, allowing an ever-more piecemeal approach may make it harder as the bureaucracy involved in granular credit decisions will become exponentially more complex.

On the other hand, greater granularity could help. If many modules can be worth tiny amounts of credit, each ‘microcredential’ becomes less critical to the integrity of a whole qualification. There’s an obvious risk here though: if the availability of funds through the LLE prompts a gold rush of poor-quality, badly regulated mini-courses across the country, they’ll add up to nothing other than a waste of learners’ time and taxpayers’ money.

Someone needs to decide whether courses – long or short, large or small – meet the standard to qualify for LLE funding. There are many candidates: the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education, the Office for Students, or perhaps a special new body. Whoever ends up with this task will necessarily be involved in an exercise that assesses the value of courses. While they’re at it, I suggest they might as well award a credit score as part of the assessment and assume regulatory control of the credit transfer framework.

That way learners can build a portfolio of credentials stored and certified by the regulator, with a view to perhaps one day, bundling them as a level 6 qualification or even higher.

It is important that learners should be able to bundle. Apart from being a motivational goal (vital for lifelong learners), a portfolio of credentials doesn’t have the same portability as a degree when it comes to getting a job – even if they amount to the same set of skills and knowledge. Recent research has highlighted the extent to which degrees act as a signal of a level reached rather than merely an accumulation of learning.

But bundling should not be routine: not all credits are equal. The buffet plate may be full, but it may still not be a square meal. As a learner’s credits approach 360 credits (the usual value of a bachelors degree), they should be able to opt for a ‘capstone’ module, available only from institutions that have their own degree-awarding powers. Like the capstone lintels at Stonehenge, a capstone module connects, completes and consolidates the student’s learning. They should assess prior learning, encourage reflection and support application of the learning – basically, wrap up prior learning into the parcel of a recognised qualification.

But what if the modules are too scattered to be packaged as a degree in any particular subject? That may not bother employers. For most graduate roles, the subject studied is largely irrelevant. I propose that credits could be bundled as a General Degree – again with a capstone module to draw the disparate parts into a coherent whole of varied knowledge and transferrable and specific skills. 

If we’re serious about game-changing lifelong learning, we need to apply Fourth Industrial Age thinking to education. We need to hand over control to individuals to shape the product they want and access it at their convenience. And the government’s role is to ensure the interests of learners and of wider society are protected.

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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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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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The media coverage of my paper for HEPI Fairer Funding: the case for a graduate levy has been widespread and the reactions surprisingly favourable. While there haven’t been many people getting out the bunting and ticker tape, many people seem to agree that it is an interesting proposal and it is right and timely to address the question of employer contributions to the cost of higher education. 

The most common complaint, however, appears to be to deny that market forces have any place in higher education. One tweet read:

You’ve made the fundamental mistake of assuming that market forces can be made to operate efficiently in HE. There’s no evidence of that at all.

(I won’t name the author (although you can find it on Twitter), because I haven’t asked his permission to quote him and his only right of reply will be in the comments below or back on Twitter).

Market forces exist whether we like it or not. It is not a choice whether to let them in to higher education. There were market forces even in the days of full grants, no fees and low student numbers. Remember how polytechnics were seen as ‘a lower quality product’? That wasn’t fact. It was market forces – the interplay of demand and supply creating their own ‘truths’.

Only Canute would try to defy market forces in a capitalist economy (which, like it or not, is what we have), but that doesn’t mean we let those forces decide the market. Market forces are amoral. It is the way we set up the rules of the market that imprints our values on them.

To talk of market forces operating ‘efficiently’ implies that those forces know what they’re doing. They don’t. They are more like the forces of evolution by natural selection, driving changes without mercy or meaning.

We need to supply the mercy and meaning.

At the moment the market in higher education is a fabricated and self-destructive one, setting the interests of students against those of taxpayers and universities, and ignoring how the money actually enters the system. My proposal acknowledges who the ‘customers’ actually are (employers and taxpayers) and values the partnership between unis and students, directing change in the direction we want.

Would my proposal be 100% efficient at delivering the desired outcomes? No, of course not. But it is easier to head in a direction with the tide helping you along than to try to swim against it or to try to plan a course without recognising that the tide is likely to overwhelm your plans.

I’m no neo-liberal, but I like to think I’m economically realistic and, like a sailor who uses the winds but doesn’t control them, I want to steer a course that protects the values of HE that I’m sure most people in society – and particularly in the higher education sector – share.

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My policy paper for the HEPI think tank was published yesterday proposing that employers contribute directly to the cost of higher education. 

Here’s a quick and dirty round up of some of the coverage.

• Here’s a link to the paper itself as published by HEPI
• Here’s a longer version with a more detailed argument and commentary on potential objections.
• A blog I wrote about it on this site. 
• A piece I wrote about it for the Times Higher Education (subscription).
• Another one on Wonkhe.
• This week’s Wonkhe Weekly podcast where I talked about it (among other topics), episode 10.
• Interview on BBC Radio 5 Live.
• Interview on TalkRadio.
• Article on BBC website.
• Article on the i.
• Another article on the i.
• Article in The Times (subscription).
• Article in FE News.
• Article in Media FHE. 
• Interview on RT.
• Response blog by Alan Simpson of Million+.
• Another response blog by HEPI’s Hugo Dale-Harris.
• A response from UCU.

I’m sure there are others out there and will be more (The Guardian will be doing something next week), but that’ll do for now.

You may also be interested in:  

• Fairer funding: achieving the impossible

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