Reflections for the higher education sector from the Autumn Labour and Conservative Party conferences

The story goes that the French writer Guy de Maupassant ate lunch every day in the restaurant at the top of the Eiffel Tower. Not out of any fondness for their croques monsieur, but rather because it was the only place in Paris where he didn’t have to look at the tower as he dined.

So it is with party conferences. You can only really see what went on from a safe distance. In the midst of the assault on your sleep, diet and liver, it’s hard to read the room.

For example, you couldn’t turn your head at the Labour Party conference without seeing another screen proclaiming ‘Hope again’, but it wasn’t until I’d escaped the Liverpool Experience Centre that it felt like anything more than a slogan (although I couldn’t help feeling that Liverpool Hope University must have been pleased with the unintended plug).

The reality of the sentiment finally hit me when I was already homeward bound, watching the leader’s speech on my phone on a train where I’d retreated in the expectation that I might still be able to get a seat before the exodus.

Two directions

Whatever you thought of the content, it’d be churlish to deny the speech was powerful rhetoric, movingly delivered. This was poignant stuff. I heard later from friends who were still at the conference that eye-mopping was universal, both in the hall and in the Hilton lobby, where hundreds more watched on screens.

It was the first leader’s speech for quite some time that felt genuinely bold and visionary. For universities, though, it pulled in two directions.

On the one hand, the prime minister spoke about “the burden of student debts that never get smaller” and schools that were “overly focused” on university pathways—both narratives that will have stoked sulky scepticism about the value of a degree.

On the other, “our world-beating universities” were core to building the UK as an “innovation nation”, and he talked about how his father had worked and voted to enable his sons to have the university education he had been denied. In other words, at the same time as talking about “parity of esteem” between academic and technical education, his most stirring comments acknowledged that university had indeed been his aspiration and his father’s.

Parity of esteem does tend to be something politicians talk about for other people’s kids.

Fringe issues

For political wonks, the real action of conference is not in the hall but in the fringe events. That’s where you see what issues are hot and what’s not. The Higher Education Policy Institute hosted some packed and lively discussions that focused specifically on higher education themes, but otherwise the main interest for the sector was around three topics: devolution, NEETs (those not in education, employment or training) and growth. The fringe diary was peppered with events that were either directly or indirectly about one or more of these topics. (I could have said AI instead of growth, but as far as the fringe was concerned, the two seemed virtually interchangeable.)

Always on trend, ResearchPlus, the grouping of universities of which I am director, hosted our own session on NEETs. Along with a catalogue of examples of the ways that universities are directly tackling the NEETs crisis, the picture that emerged was one in which research drives innovation, innovation drives growth, and growth drives opportunity.

It also became clear that this only really works in a region where there are the relevant skills, which—handily enough—are developed by the same higher education institutions that lead the innovative research. Done right, it becomes a virtuous circle.

These conversations about universities as regional anchor institutions, critical partners in devolution and providers of opportunities for young people meant that most in the sector came away from Labour’s conference feeling far more supported than undermined.

Lives of regret

The same was not so true at the Conservative Party conference. There, I sat through multiple sessions describing universities that, if you believed the stories, barely ever contact their students but nevertheless manage to indoctrinate them. Those students become graduates facing lives of regret, penury and debt.

One fringe panellist claimed: “Most degree outcomes are worse than [for] apprenticeships” (spoiler alert: they’re not), which led the shadow education secretary, Laura Trott, to claim degree apprenticeships are now more sought after than places at Oxbridge. This, if true, may explain why so many of them get snapped up by privately educated school leavers—the middle class’s acceptable face of parity of esteem.

The Conservatives were once stalwart defenders of university education. After all, many of them were highly educated themselves and understood the benefits personally. Now, however, Trott, shadow minister for work and pensions Amanda Spielman, shadow education minister Saqib Bhatti and other party spokespeople were keen to make clear they would reduce student numbers and “create 100,000 more apprentices”. Alison Wolf, a crossbench peer, and Sir Roy Griffiths, professor of public sector management, were among the handful of voices of reason pointing out that apprenticeships are jobs and, if creating 100,000 more of them were that easy, we might not have a NEETs crisis.

When higher education did get a mention in Conservative conversations in Birmingham, it was generally framed as part of some problem or other, rather than part of a solution as it had been in Liverpool. I barely heard the word ‘research’, and as for an ambitious drive for growth through innovation, it simply wasn’t in the buzz.

Perhaps that’s to be expected. The Tories aren’t in government, and they’re not likely to be in the next three years. It makes sense for them—like the other opposition parties—to be preoccupied with what they feel they can cast as policy failings.

Nevertheless, for those of us in the HE sector, it cuts deep whenever our value to society and the economy isn’t better recognised. With the politicians back in Westminster, we must find new ways to get that message across so that, like the Eiffel Tower, they all come to recognise us as a beacon, not a blemish.

This blog was originally published in a slightly different form by Research Professional as their Sunday Reading column on 18th October 2026.

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