Like many others with an interest in higher education policy, HEPI Director Nick Hillman swung by Liverpool for a sojourn at the Labour Party Conference. His suitcase’s wheels have never been so clean. Here’s what he found.
Each person’s journey through any political party conference is different. There are a huge number of official and unofficial events and no two attendees follow exactly the same path through them, let alone speak to the same people. So I make no claim that my time at the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool recounted here is typical or representative.
This fact also means no delegate’s journey through conference is exactly the same as that of any journalist – which may explain why media reports of party conferences often seem out of kilter with the experiences of others who are there. In other words, don’t trust anyone who claims any one conference is wholly excellent / mediocre / awful. Every conference is all three of these things for different people.
All this is doubly true in Liverpool in 2024. I first attended the Labour Party Conference back in 2014, when the Coalition were in charge and the left were a long way from retaking power at Westminster. If you wanted to influence government back then, you focused more on the (then) uber-professional Conservative Conference (or even the smaller Liberal Democrat one). Meanwhile attendance and security were much lighter at Labour’s annual shindig.
How times have changed. This year in Liverpool, the queues to get in were longer, though less excitable, than even the queue for the joint Boris Johnson / Stanley Johnson book signing at the Tory party conference in days of yore.
At pretty much any Labour Party conference of the past few years, you could find higher education policy wonks sat in a corner looking dazed and confused. At successive conferences, HE-focused folk were teased with titbits on how Labour’s approach to post-18 education was all about to become clear … but it never really did, seemingly because the shadow Treasury and shadow Education teams could not align their priorities. Now Labour are back in Government, the mood is different but we’re still waiting, and being teased instead that the 2024 budget or perhaps the 2025 spending review will be the moment that reveals all.
My conference this year started how it went on – by getting totally soaked (actually not metaphorically). It’s not so much that I lacked a coat as that my definition of ‘splash proof’ seems very different to Uniqlo’s. But it was worth getting wet to attend the National Union of Students’s party to celebrate how student unionism set many of us on the path to policymaking. I was given a badge to celebrate the fact, which I have since been wearing with pride. (On this occasion, I felt it might be impolite and impolitic to mention my role in the University of Manchester’s NUS Disaffiliation campaign of the early 1990s, but then again I wouldn’t take the same stance today.) Sadly, the NUS event clashed with the Wonkhe drinks, which sound like they were great fun too and where you could doubtless also find many NUS bods of old.
In any policy area, if there has been no change of direction announced, then a new Government’s policies are the same as the old Government’s policies and even if the two come from different political traditions. It has to be that way or else the civil service wouldn’t be able to do anything after a change of administration.
This means the old Government’s ban on dealing with the NUS appears to remain in place. Perhaps there is some egregious activity going on somewhere in the official student movement that we do not know about, but it seems to me that it’s time for the new Government to rescind the ban. The challenges facing students are so immense that there needs to be some formal feedback channels to Ministers and senior officials. If two former Conservative Ministers for Universities are willing to share a platform with one of the impressive new NUS officer team at the KCL / HEPI party conference event next week, as they are, then it shouldn’t be too hard for the new Government to look at the ban again and to lift it, even if only on a trial basis.
After the NUS event, I made my way to a private dinner on higher education admissions, where I am ashamed to say I arrived looking like a contestant in a wet t-shirt competition, necessitating a trip to the Gents to work the hand dryer as hard as Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan. Then after a few hours’ kip, I made my way to a private breakfast on higher education access. I’m not at liberty to divulge what was said at either the dinner or the breakfast suffice to say that I came away with a sure sense that both sector leaders and the new policymakers in charge are seriously grappling with the live issues of changing demand, demographic peaks and troughs and persistent inequality.
The HEPI event on Monday morning was, in contrast, held entirely in public – and in front of a packed room. Hosted with support from the University of Nottingham and the University of Sussex, we heard wide-ranging speeches from their leaders, Professor Sasha Roseneil and Professor Jane Norman, who focused on the financial challenges faced by institutions and students and the contributions universities can make to delivering the new Government’s five missions.
We then heard a punchy speech by Professor Tim Leunig from the LSE / Public First, who outlined his thoughts on how best to reform student fees and loans (in a way that is cost-neutral to government). He did this in his own inimitable way, not shying away from a number of suggestions that could prove controversial. More will be revealed in his new HEPI paper, out on Thursday. Watch this space.
Our final speaker before a busy Q&A was Alex Sobel MP, whose constituency has perhaps the most students of any. Focusing on the differences the multiple higher education institutions in his seat bring to his city and his region, he won a spontaneous round of applause for comments on how policymakers should treat international students more positively than has occurred in the recent past.
My blog from last year’s Labour Conference was titled 24-Hour Party People Carnt Smile (blame The Happy Mondays for the spelling). It sometimes seems as if Labour Party members are still not prone to smiling despite their historic and huge election victory – perhaps that is because of the cock up over Winter Fuel Payments, or because they don’t want to look triumphalist at the start of a five-year slog or because they haven’t (as yet) set out a really clear plan of action and aren’t quite sure what the whole project will amount to.
Overall, the oddest feature of this year’s Conference, however, is how we all spent our time going from event to event gaily eating free food, imbibing free drinks and enjoying someone else’s hospitality only to find the main topic of conversation was whether it is appropriate for other people to accept free hospitality.
As I waded through the rain back to Lime Street Station, I pondered on something that’s been bothering me. Tonnes of conference events across a multitude of policy areas were designed around the new Government’s five missions – in our area of higher ed, for example, much of the conversation dwelled on what universities can do to help the Government deliver on its missions. ‘What can we do for you?’, was the endless refrain.
As the rain gradually ruined my suit, I tried to work out whether the university sector is right to adopt this mission-based language. The missions are pretty attractive to people of all political persuasions and are undoubtedly aimed at tackling the country’s ills. But should a sector that is chock full of independent and autonomous institutions so readily adopt such politically charged language?
There may be other ways to show we care about economic growth, social mobility, net zero, good public services and lower crime than adopting the missions wholesale. And why the silence from all those people who, after the Coalition came to power, ran to the newspapers to complain it was ‘gross’ and ‘grotesque’ for academia to engage with the latest political priorities?
Political fashions change, language evolves, ministers move on. And these processes happen at a faster rate than in the past. So when it comes to the five missions, is there not at least a small risk that we could end up looking strangely out-of-date and strangely out-of-touch if we absorb the new terminology wholesale?
* You can’t go far in Liverpool without being reminded of The Beatles. ‘Here Comes the Sun’ is their most streamed song, approaching 1.5 billion listens on Spotify – that is 99.9 times the number for Rain, the b-side of ‘Paperback Writer’.
I’ve not attended a party conference since 2014, but before that, attended at least 3 a year for nearly 20 years lobbying for adult continuing education (lifelong learning in today’s money but then too often segmented into HE, FE and community learning).
Not sure if I’m reassured or depressed that so little has changed! It’s great that there remain chances for educationalists concerned with how parties determine policy to find relaxed spaces to explore approaches but IMHO, there is less disagreement between L, LD and Con approaches than there is between the sector and HMT.
I warm to the idea that the higher education sector (and FE) should not simply reflect party priorities back to ministers and their shadows in their languge and instead, simply affirm what matters to ensure effective higher education,