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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Widening participation: Who gains? This is the text of a presentation I gave recently at a roundtable outlining the case for employers to get involved in the promotion of wider access to higher education.

Why should employers care about widening participation in higher education?

The answer depends on how we see the role of HE in society. Among other things, it is a training ground for the workforce, many of whom work within the private sector. Even if they don’t end up as private sector employees, having a larger supply of graduates is a cultural and economic resource that drives regional, national and global prosperity which is good for business. 

    So, if we fail to have the widest possible participation is HE, it’s like trying to water the flower beds with one foot on the hosepipe.

    Let’s forget social equality, that a fairer society is intrinsically better and that all parts of society benefit from a better whole. There are, I would argue, three clear and distinct commercial benefits 

1. WP in HE allows social diversity in business, particularly at higher levels. That in turn also means other types of diversity: ethnicity, age, gender, disability, etc. This creates companies that look like their customers, greater empathy, broader experience, etc. I remember hearing an HR Director from a high street bank telling a conference she wasn’t interested in diversity, she just wanted the best people for the job. I’m glad to say she was taken to task for failing to recognise that she would not have the best people for the job unless they were diverse, because her customers were diverse and as a business they would fail to understand them if they were not representative of them. 
   
2. Where do we find talent? Does privilege exactly coincide with ability? If so, then no, employers don’t need WP. If not, however, then fishing in a talent pool that includes the disadvantaged means more fish with more talents and a greater probability of a greater number of employers catching the right fish for the job. 
   
3. How do you retain and strengthen your existing workforce? Does it not make sense to keep upskilling your staff, ideally with recognised qualifications taught by institutions that are educational experts? In other words, why don’t more employers work with universities to provide courses, particularly part-time, to their staff? This is the really tough battlefront in WP. Some of the greatest barriers are the need for people to keep working to pay the bills and the fact that people feel they’ve “missed their chance”. 
   

Even if we can all agree that these are real and significant benefits, what can the private sector do about increasing and widening participation? 

We need to follow the pipeline back to find out why individuals do not participate.  Pretty soon you get to schools and colleges. There is a moment – or many moments – when someone – we – could step in and influence a key decision at just the right time. 

In fact more usually, it’s not that people decide not to go to uni. It’s that they don’t make a decision at all and are left with a socially determined default option. For the advantaged, that means they do go to uni. For the disadvantaged, it means they don’t. 

So, who can intervene? Teachers and parents – but they’re just another step back in the pipeline. How do you engage, inform and – using a word David Willetts seemed disturbingly keen at a meeting I attended a couple of days ago – “nudge” them? 

Then there are careers advisers. Sadly, the Government has virtually dismembered the careers profession in England, hacking away like a metronome with an axe. 

I think it’s a scandal that there’s no funding, no national body, no requirement even that ensures that the words ‘career’ or ‘university’ are even spoken to students in post-16 education, let alone actually giving them impartial, high-quality careers support.

We need to make up for this careers advice vacuum. If someone is stuck in a hole – and being in the hole is the only thing they’ve ever known, and they have no ladders or grappling hooks – then you can’t wait for them to magically rise up out of it just because you make things ever more attractive outside the hole. You need to reach out to them to help them up.

And what do we call this reaching out? We call it outreach. Timely interventions that get in the way of their normal daily business – in their schools, their homes or their place of work – and which strike a chord with them.

Outreach is not cheap though. It’s rarely worth it for a private sector organisation to go into a school, say, at a cost of hundreds if not thousands of pounds to talk to maybe 50 students. Any cost-benefit analysis will torpedo that one. 

But what if 50 organisations were willing to chip in and what if it weren’t just one school, but hundreds?  Suddenly the cost is spread, the benefits are increased and the reach is widened. 

We need collaborative outreach between all parties with an interest in WP: universities, Government and the private sector. Collaboration has other benefits too: 

• The outreach gets better because quality assurance is easier to manage;
• The resources can be allocated more effectively through coordination. That means better geographic and demographic coverage at lower cost;
• The whole exercise becomes more measurable, therefore more evidence-based and therefore, in the long-term, ever more effective;
• And follow-up activities can reflect a wider range of options (whether it’s an invitation to a uni summer school, a mentoring project or an invitation to apply for a sponsored degree scheme or a school-leaver programme).

There are many examples of good collaborative outreach projects, but not enough and without enough collaboration. Many are funded by HE. For example, although AimHigher was ‘discontinued’ by the Government, regionally collections of universities have decided to keep some similar arrangements going. There are other third sector initiatives such as Future First, Into University, The Access Group, MyKindaCrowd, Brightside, etc, many of which are engaged in some form of outreach. 

Most of the private sector however hasn’t seen this at its responsibility. So far. 

Without wanting to make this look like a plug, what I’ve been talking about is the reasoning behind another outreach initiative which my own organisation runs: Push. Please forgive me for telling you a little more by way of illustration of how, I believe, collaborative outreach can work and how we’re putting what I believe into practice.

We took a National Careers Award-winning programme of schools outreach that we’d been doing for nearly 20 years and decided to get private sector businesses and universities to support it as a focus for some of their outreach. We received backing from the Association of Graduate Recruiters and a number of key employers. Along with support from various other stakeholders and universities means we now reach nearly 400 schools a year, amounting to over 30,000 students. 

We gather contact details which means that it can be just the first step in a ongoing process of ever-mounting engagement with choices about which options suit them best. This is run as a social enterprise which means that the more organisations we involve, the more backing we get, the wider the reach and the more students and the supporting organisations benefit. It’s all based on a win-win strategy for everyone.

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