I felt (quite literally) honoured recently to receive an invitation from the man who puts the ‘great’ into Paul Greatrix – none other than the Registrar of the University of Nottingham, the blogger, the podcaster and the chronicler of all things higher education. 

He asked me to appear on his podcast My Imaginary University.

If you’re not familiar with it (where have you been?), this is the closest thing the HE sector has to Desert Island Discs. It’s a ingeniously simple format in which Paul interviews someone, invites them to make some seemingly fantastical choices and, in the process, of course, they reveal as much about themselves as they do about the choices they’ve made. 

Rather than picking eight tracks, a book and a luxury, in My Imaginary University the interviewee conjures their fantasy institution using a series of prompt question that Paul emailed me in advance. 

At the start of each show, he explains that he hasn’t a clue what’s coming and, to my surprise, this was literally true. You have to hand it to him: he’s a class act. He conducted the interview slickly, probingly, and genuinely without notice or notes.   

I, on the other hand, did need notes. And I thought, with Paul’s permission, I might share his advance questions with you – as well as some of my own prompts to myself – and the notes that I made since, inevitably, not everything I had thought about made it out of my mouth and into the show. I do hope you’ll also listen to the podcast itself and subscribe (because there are some excellent previous episode by far more worthy and knowledgeable guests than me).

Q: Tell us about your history. Where does your university sit? Are you ancient? Redbrick, plate glass? Post-92? A new challenger? 

I decided to make life easy for myself with my imaginary university, by choosing the well-established and highly prestigious Camford University, which I was delighted to be appointed to lead an unspecified number of years ago. And when I was appointed I was really clear that I wanted to radically change the university so that it meets the priorities of today rather than merely the rather narrow sector of society that it has served so brilliantly for centuries.

Q: Your location: are you a campus uni? Urban? Rural? And what is your specific location? Are you even in the UK or are you perhaps a tiny liberal arts college in New England? Or even a thrusting start-up in Asia.

As you know, Camford is one of the nation’s great and ancient universities, but unlike Oxford and Cambridge, it isn’t in the wealthy southern half of the country. The city of Camford has largely built up around the university over the centuries, but the surrounding region is basically post-industrial and, while traditionally we’ve welcomed some extremely well-heeled students, within 30 miles of the university there some of the country’s most deprived areas. 

So, we’re keeping many of the features that make Camford such a special institution, but we’re turning it into a powerhouse of opportunity for all and a central driver for regional revival. 

There are three parts to this: who studies here, the student experience, and the relationship with the local community and businesses. 

Q: Who studies at your university?

Our access policy is based on potential not attainment. Our admissions policy is based entirely on contextualised offers, with a preference for students from within the region. 

We’re investing heavily in our outreach team and teaming up with some of the excellent third sector organisations working in access. We’re building up these long-term relationships with schools and colleges in the region to play a part in raising attainment, but also to help us recognise which pupils they have who would flourish in the environment we can provide, if only they had the chance. 

We organise teaching days at the university for students from those schools and we bus them in. When they apply here, we send admission staff to them to do what we call ‘interviews’. The point of the interviews though is not solely about us selecting them or them selecting us, it’s about working out with them how best to support their idea of success in life. 

The aim of these – and our whole admissions process – is to search for evidence of the potential to succeed rather than seeing if they can navigate a filtering process that’s designed to exclude. We try to ensure that, even if we can’t accept everyone, we always help them to hone their understanding of what would be the best match for them and also improve their self-presentation. 

Being the best match is really important to us and some of our genius academics from our AI research centre have developed this incredible software that hunts for signals about what kinds of people are most likely to pass various milestones on the path to a good outcome. This is heavily based on comparisons with control data about people with similar backgrounds: we’re not looking to find the people most likely to ‘succeed’ – because that’s likely to be the people with the biggest head start – but rather the people who will go on the longest journey, the people where the kind of education we can offer will add the most value and be most transformative. 

We could take the easy path and simply admit demonstrably brilliant students with loads of social capital, stamp them with a Camford-approved label and send them out into the world. That’s what we’ve been doing for centuries and, to be honest, it’s hard to say that we changed the course of those graduates’ lives greatly. So we’re not doing that any more. Instead, we’re looking at the taxpayers’ investment in higher education and we’re sweating it to maximise the return. Meanwhile we’re doing the same for our students so that their effort and investment gets them the biggest possible return. 

Those returns, by the way, aren’t always financial. Thanks to Camford’s reputation, our graduates do tend to be higher earning on average, but we’ve also seen that our approach tends to turn out graduates who’re very focused on the communities they came from, on lifting others up and on creating things rather than pursuing extrinsic markers of ‘success’. We’re trying to make sure that social mobility in a deprived region doesn’t have to mean geographic mobility.

Q: Tell me about your foundation years

We extended our foundation year programme accordingly and, while most of these courses are integrated into a full degree programme, we’ve also been building up strong partnerships with other universities in the UK and around the world to channel students wherever they feel they’ll be best suited. We’re finding, however, that most do want to stay. 

Q: Are there any novel aspects of the student experience your new recruits should expect?

Our education is radically holistic. On the one hand, you could say it’s based on what makes our graduates employable, but it’s about a lot more than that. It’s about producing rounded people. 

Employability is made up of various ingredients: 

• Firstly, there are skills, both transferable, so-called ‘soft’ skills and more job-specific skills; 
• Then there’s knowledge; 
• Thirdly, there are more character-driven attributes, such as attitudes, values, behaviours and even personality; 

There’s a fourth ingredient that I’ll talk about in a moment. But those first three are what our education is designed to develop. You might call it ’employability’, but back in the 1990s, people used to talk about ‘graduateness’ and it was the same idea. At Camford, we call it ’roundedness’ and we talk about having a unique individual ‘mix’ of these ingredients.

Becoming rounded is something that students hear about from day one… and before. It’s built into everything we say about our courses and the student experience. It runs through our partnerships with schools. We talk about it in interviews as a way of getting applicants to think about whether this is what they want and expect from their student experience. 

Students do self-reflections and appraise themselves at key points to understand what skills, knowledge and attributes they have in their unique mix. Academics are explicit about what different course components are intended to add to students’ mix and students complete reflections afterwards to see if their mix has developed in the way they – and the academics – had hoped and expected. 

This kind of self-appraisal is as important to academic progress as any summative assessments. We do have some exams, but we also have assessment through extended essays, presentations and projects. We have lots of project-based learning, often in teams. These teams are almost always interdisciplinary. As often as we can, they’re driven by practical, real world examples, providing free solutions to business challenges faced by employers, mostly from the region, but sometimes all over the world. They’re assessed by a mix of the external ‘customer’, the academic who facilitates the scheme, and peer assessments by the team. 

Students are also really encouraged to engage in activities that elsewhere would be beyond their studies, but at Camford, through reflection, if you can demonstrate you’ve added to your mix, you can gain credits. So, activities like social action in the community, student representation, sports, even a part-time job can all contribute to academic credits. But you’ve got to be able to demonstrate relevant learning. 

Whenever we can, the university either employs students or sets them projects that support the running of the university. For example, our timetabling every year is a major project undertaken by an interdisciplinary team. And students do most of the work planning and running open days, graduation etc. 

This really helps solve some of the conflicts for students, especially our students from disadvantaged background who might otherwise feel there’s a trade-off between their work, their need to earn money and wanting to make the most of the opportunities of student life. 

I mentioned that there’s a fourth ingredient to employability. That’s social capital, which is often less fair or meritocratic, but we can’t ignore it. Through our fantastic alumni network and the relationships we’re building in employers, we encourage our students to build the connections that help make up for not necessarily having the old school tie networks that Camford used to rely on.

Q: You described the university as a regional hub. Tell me more about what that means.

I’ve already mentioned the way we are partnering with local schools and colleges and the relationships with businesses in project-based learning. In everything we do, as far as possible, the relationship between town and gown – or more particularly county and gown – is less of a divide and more like a constant thoroughfare. 

We have a lot of visiting professors from local businesses and from the public sector in the region. We also regularly do placements or secondment of academics into businesses to help them with specific challenges. There are lots of labour market gaps in the region and we helps to fill those in a flexible way that helps everyone. 

We are of course also one of the great global research institutions and so we can attract funding from all over the world to our corner of the UK. We have specialist research centres in pataphysical genomics and quantum psychology – both very innovative and successful. 

We have a special alumni-backed venture capital fund for research-based spin-outs that set up in the region. 

Q: What’s in your prospectus and and what are some of the more interesting courses you might offer?

Obviously, we’re very lucky that our prospectus and website can show off lots of beautiful pictures of our stunning architecture, but the key messages are about our openness. There are no minimum requirements for any course at Camford, except being able to show the potential to thrive in our environment.

The prospectus also explains our philosophy of roundedness and the huge range of opportunities every student has to develop it. It explains about interdisciplinary ways of working, so may find themselves working on a project with others doing engineering, English, sociology or psychology. We have a fairly traditional and recognisable range of courses, but we do also offer an Interdisciplinary Degree where you can move around different courses and non-course activities collecting credits. 

Q: Where do you sit in the rankings and what you are going to do about it or perhaps you don’t care?

Traditionally, Camford has always done very well in the rankings and when I was appointed I was very clear that we might slip with our new approach, but that it was never going to be a metric for us.

We don’t co-operate with any rankings and we actively use our position to speak out against their misleading and heuristic approach. The fact is that if a university like Camford starts to slide down in a ranking, it will undermine the ranking more than it undermines us. So I think it’s really important that institutions like ours use our position of privilege.  

I’m very fortunate that my governing body are 100% bought in to this approach. 

Q: What kind of VC are you in this university?

My main role is to help keep all my brilliant team together and heading in the same direction. There are always practical challenges, brickbats, and people who don’t get it. It’s my job to take any flak and turn it around by going out and spelling out our vision. I’m the one responsible for helping everyone else stick to our sense of purpose. 

Of course, that means I’m often a spokesperson, a negotiator or a motivator. Most importantly, it’s my role to bring in brilliant people who share the vision. For me VC stands for ‘Vision Captain’ at least as much as ‘Vice Chancellor’.

We have a proctor who is our academic lead and a chief executive who manages the operations side. 

Q: What about the students’ union?

The relationship is so close sometimes it doesn’t feel like the SU is all that separate from the university. As I mentioned, students are employed or involved wherever and whenever possible. Student reps sit on all committees and are partners in designing courses. If we have a major build project, students often represent the university in meetings with architects or contractors. They often earn both money and course credits doing this work.

Q: What is the regulatory regime? Do you even care?

We work quite closely and amicably with the OfS. The advantage of being a university like Camford is that we can have quite a lot of sway with the regulator and support them in being better at their job. 

Q: Do you have a voice on the national stage? Do you have politicians queuing up to speak or open new labs?

We’re in the powerful position of having excellent relationships with politicians and civil servants because, of course, many of them are Camford alumni themselves. That’s a privilege that we use to support colleagues across the sector. We’re trying to offer something unique here that’s appropriate for where we are and who we serve, but we fully recognise that diversity is a key strength of the sector.

Q: Are there any other distinctive features we need to know about your imaginary uni? You might have a great sports team, a notable Chancellor, your own brand of gin or a colourful mascot.

We’ve got many ancient buildings, including the largest castle hall in England – where we stage graduation ceremonies. And being ancient most of our buildings are haunted. In fact, Camford boasts the most haunted university building in the world, which now houses our Centre for Rational Research which debunks superstitious nonsense like the idea of ghosts. In recent years though it’s also become a really important centre for investigating and disproving conspiracy theories. Trump absolutely hates it. 

We’ve got other unique research centres in cutting edge areas, some of which are a little way from the rest of the university. For example the Pataphysical Genomics centre took over the buildings of an old Tate and Lyle factory and is creating new jobs in what had become a run-down small town.

The Chancellor is a student elected by both the students and staff. 

Q: Given that it’s an imaginary university, what are you not allowing?

We’re not in the habit of banning anything that’s within the law and we certainly don’t believe we should treat students like children. Instead we try to give them responsibility and support. That said, we do strongly discourage fixed mindsets. If something seems too difficult, it’s about turning to others for help to learn how to do it. 

Q: Finally, and this is a compulsory question, we need to know what your university song would be?

It was ‘I vow to thee my country’, but we put it to the students and staff and they voted for ‘change’, literally. So now it’s ‘Change’ by Taylor Swift from the Fearless album, which seemed appropriate enough. Personally I voted for ‘Heroes’ by David Bowie, partly because that also seemed appropriate, but also because it’s just about the best song ever written and I thought if I’ve got to listen to it endlessly, I’d rather it’s not something I get bored of.

Thanks again to Paul Greatrix (and Sophie Marshall). Do read his blog at Wonderful Higher Ed, where you can not only find links to the My Imaginary University podcast, but also to his other podcasts and blogs about True Crime on Campus, wacky rankings, and all manner of wonderful and occasionally important HE matters.

The post My imaginary university appeared first on Johnny Rich.

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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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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Read Fairer funding: the case for a graduate levy (HEPI Policy Note) and, exclusively on this site, Fairer funding: the case for a graduate levy (full proposal).

What I’d like for Christmas:

1. We should abolish tuition fees.
2. We should fund English universities well enough that they can continue to be among the best in the world.
3. We should match graduates and jobs so that they have the right skills to get jobs they want and succeed in them.
4. We should ensure that the nation’s skills gaps are plugged. 
5. We shouldn’t ask the taxpayer to pay for more than the public benefit of higher education. 

Is that really such a big ask? Over decades of fiddling with the funding system for higher education in England, apparently so. That’s because some of my wishes are seen as mutually exclusive.  

The funding of higher education England has been played like a game in which if one player wins, another must lose. For example, if students win and don’t have to pay so much, then the taxpayer loses and has to fork out more.

More usually over the past 30 years, it’s the student who’s lost: the burden of cost has shifted consistently to the student, first through student loans in 1991, then top-up loans, then fees of £1,000, then top-up fees of £3,000 and then, in 2012, a trebling of fees to £9,000. 

The funding system is under review at the moment by Philip Augar at the behest of the Prime Minister (as she is at the time of writing). Leaks suggest the balance may swing back away from the student, but the cost will fall instead on either the taxpayer or on universities in the form of slashed  funding. 

However, there is another player in the game, keeping his gambit very quiet in the hope of not being noticed: the employers. 

For too long employers have escaped making a fair contribution. They would, of course, argue that they do contribute through corporate tax and through salaries (which, on average, are higher for graduates). 

That’s true, but this approach leaves them without any skin in the game. They’re not making their investment work for them. 

I have written a paper for the HE sector’s think tank, the Higher Education Policy Institute on how employers could and should pay a ‘graduate levy’ instead of graduates paying fees. This needn’t cost the employers more and, critically, it would mean they get what they need from higher education far better than at present. 

In the process, it would also eliminate tuition fee debt. It would improve courses and graduate employability. And sure enough, it would fund universities well while costing the taxpayer less.

It sounds too good to be true, so please make up your own mind by reading the HEPI paper or I have also produced, exclusively for this website, an expanded version of the full proposal which also includes fuller explanations and counter-arguments to some objections that have been raised with me in discussion.   

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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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