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The Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) and the social mobility charity Brightside are jointly publishing a collection of essays by senior higher education figures entitled Where next for widening participation and fair access? New insights from leading thinkers.

Contributors include: Kirsty Williams AM, the Cabinet Secretary for Education in the Welsh Government; Vonnie Sandlan, the former President of NUS Scotland; and Peter Horrocks, Vice-Chancellor of The Open University. Les Ebdon, the Director for Fair Access, has contributed a Foreword.

The policies put forward in the chapters include: much bolder contextualised admissions policies for highly-selective universities (with AAA+ offers typically being reduced to CCC), more support for people in care with the potential to benefit from higher education and new Personalised Learning Accounts to meet demand for more flexible lifelong learning.

The Director of HEPI, Nick Hillman, who wrote the Introduction to the collection, said:
Despite the progress in opening up universities to people from under-represented groups, we have miles left to go. The current changes to higher education, including the closure of the Office for Fair Access, mean we could be in for a bumpy period. It is time to take stock by learning from all those working with disadvantaged people inside and beyond universities, being willing to change tack when initiatives are ineffective and incorporating new insights from areas like behavioural economics.
Anand Shukla, the Chief Executive of Brightside, said:
If we are serious as a country about having a higher education system that unlocks everyone’s potential rather than just helping a privileged minority, then bold proposals like radically reducing entry requirements for disadvantaged students will need to be embraced by universities and government.
In his Foreword, Les Ebdon, writes:
While we celebrate improvements in access for disadvantaged young people, we must […]

HEPI is today publishing The Comprehensive University (Occasional Paper 17) by Professor Tim Blackman, the Vice-Chancellor of Middlesex University. The report argues the comprehensive ideal is the best way to fix how the UK’s class-based university system is holding back social mobility.

The paper’s recommendations include:

measures to ‘desegregate’ and diversify universities, including quotas for the proportion of student places that can be subject to academic selection;
targets for universities to re-balance their skewed social class intakes, driven by levies on the most selective universities; and
a funding system that reflects the benefits of higher education to both the individual student and wider society.

Professor Blackman said:
The UK’s higher education system is said to be one of the best in the world, but it is failing to make the contributions to tackling social inequality and poor economic productivity that our universities could make if regulated in a different way. The root of these problems is academic selection, which has created a sector based on social class advantages rather than recruitment and teaching practices that equalise opportunities.

The narrative of “leading” and “top” universities has marginalised the transformational potential of higher education, which lies in adopting comprehensive principles. Mixing students of different backgrounds and abilities and teaching them together would force more universities to develop their teaching expertise, but there are many added benefits.

Evidence shows that less selection and greater diversity would create a better learning environment for all students, and it is much the best and most cost-effective way to widen access.
In a Foreword to the report, Matthew Taylor (a former head of the Number 10 Policy Unit and author of the recent report Good work: the Taylor review of modern working practices), says:
Tim Blackman’s case for comprehensive […]

In a new report for the Higher Education Policy Institute (www.hepi.ac.uk), Mary Curnock Cook, the former Chief Executive of UCAS, says the Government must address six big gaps in technical education policy to raise skills and productivity.

Mary Curnock Cook, the author of Misunderstanding Technical and Professional Education: Six Category Mistakes (HEPI Policy Note 1), said:

‘The success of the British economy, particularly after Brexit, will depend in large part on the quality of technical and professional education. In the past, this has generally been ignored, underpowered and underfunded.

‘Before the recent general election, skills policy was – rightly – placed at the heart of a new industrial strategy. Technical education is now being reorganised into 15 routes matching the main industrial sectors and new technical qualifications, called T-Levels, are being introduced.

‘I’d love to see this new attempt succeed because students and employers would welcome it. But there are some fundamental design flaws that need to be ironed out up front.’

Nick Hillman, Director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, said:

‘The Conservative manifesto promised to make British technical education “as prestigious as our world- leading higher education system”. That challenge has proved a particularly big conundrum for British policymakers, bedevilling past administrations.

‘Recent changes provide hope that we can raise our game, but they will not succeed without further improvements. In particular, if the new T-Levels are to be respected by students and employers, they need to be clarified, tweaked and explained.’

Notes for Editors

HEPI Policy Note 1, Misunderstanding Technical and Professional Education: Six Category Mistakes, considers six areas:

Parity of esteem: The new T-Levels are supposed to give technical education the same status as academic education. But they have a different purpose and structure to A-Levels. So they will […]

It was a busy weekend for higher education announcements. First, the Green Party announced a plan to pay off all outstanding student debt on graduates’ behalf. The details were sketchy but there is over £75 billion worth of outstanding debt in England alone. So it is a big policy whichever way you look at it.

The Green Party’s own calculations focus on the annual cost of servicing the debt on graduates’ behalf. They cost the policy at about £14 billion between now and 2022 but claim the long-term cost is ‘more difficult and uncertain to estimate.’

In electoral terms, the danger with such eye-catching announcements is that, while they may appeal to students, they may repel other voters. Non-students may raise questions about a party’s wider economic competence when they choose to spend so much on an area of policy that actually appears to be working rather well. Other voters may also wonder if they will have to pick up the tab.

The second announcement came this morning from the Labour Party. Just a few days ago, they published a manifesto that included the abolition of tuition fees and the reintroduction of maintenance grants. This was their biggest single spending commitment, and is costed by the Institute for Fiscal Studies at £8 billion a year. Now, Labour have apparently offered something even more generous or unaffordable (depending upon your view).

Their latest promise is to abolish fees from this autumn rather than 2018 as originally planned. The Tory Party have been accused of tweaking a manifesto commitment of their own today (on social care), but it is hard to find another similarly-sized spending commitment being made after a manifesto has been published in any past election. For most of the past seven years, the Labour Party has said […]

A new HEPI paper on the past, present and future of teacher training written by Dr John Cater, the Vice Chancellor of Edge Hill University, will be launched at a HEPI conference at King’s College London on Thursday, 27 April 2017. Among the various recommendations is a call to consider replacing bursaries for trainee teachers with a new system of forgivable fees.

John Cater, the author of HEPI Report (95) Whither Teacher Education and Training?, said:
There are worrying signs that the profession is failing to attract enough entrants and failing to retain existing teachers in sufficient numbers and with appropriate specialisms to deliver the revised curriculum to a rapidly increasing school-age population.

This is no longer the time for hackneyed debates about the merits of different types of provision of Initial Teacher Training, which should be judged solely on the quality of provision and the success in recruiting and retaining future teachers.

But it is the time for all stakeholders to work together to ensure that an emerging issue does not manifest itself into a crisis which affects the life chances of a generation.’
Nick Hillman, Director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, said:
Policymakers love to meddle in teacher training. In recent times, they have tried to shift the training out of universities and into schools. But the numbers speak for themselves: in every year between 2013 and 2016, teacher recruitment missed its targets. Large sums have been splurged on bursaries for trainee teachers to stem the flow, but without much effect.

We need to stop ignoring the facts. Trainee teachers typically do not want to be at the same chalkface all of the time. Learning how to teach in a university environment – and not just at a single […]