What is the Conservative approach to UK higher education now?

These are the remarks made by Nick Hillman, HEPI Director, at the HEPI / KCL Policy Institute fringe event at the 2024 Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham. A sketch of his time at the Conference is here.

What is the Conservative approach to UK higher education now? I’ve no idea and there’s about to be a new Conservative leader, so instead I’m going to say what I think it should be.

But let’s start with the last 14 years. The Conference Guide is full of sessions about how the Conservative Party can learn from its failures in Government. When it comes to higher education, this feels like the wrong question. For the first half of those 14 years at least, the Conservative Party had a rather good record on higher education, whether it was:

• ensuring more money for teaching through higher fees, or
• encouraging growth via the uncapping of student places, or
• putting a more resolute focus on teaching quality via the Teaching Excellence Framework.

In other areas, the record in office was mixed of course, most obviously with the stop-start-stop approach to encouraging international students.

And in a few areas, the Conservative approach to universities was just deeply odd towards the end of the period in office, as with the campaign for ‘KICKING WOKE IDEOLOGY out of science’ launched at last year’s party conference.

Then at the election, the Conservative Party hid the good stuff and embraced the silly stuff. Why would anybody who cares about higher education vote for a party that, after 14 years in power, was telling everyone that our universities were overblown degree mills? People could sense this was not true but, if it had been true, whose fault would it have been? 

So where should Conservatives go now when it comes to higher education policy? At the Tory party conference 22 years ago, in 2002 in Bournemouth, my boss at the time, who was none other than David Willetts, declared the Conservative war against lone parents to be over. It sent a signal about how the Tory party was changing, albeit slowly.

I think it is now time for the Conservative Party – if they are serious about showing they’ve changed – to say the war on universities is over. Labour’s impressive Secretary of State for Science, Peter Kyle, has already done this but he wasn’t a participant in the war so it has less meaning coming from him.

Without the innovation, the regeneration and the skills that universities provide, it is very hard to deliver on any sensible programme for government. That’s why I have never met a Conservative councillor or a Conservative MP who wants their own local university to close.

In fact, all the big places in the UK without a local university of their own want one. They know the civic, economic and social benefits that universities bring. And, critically, these places are exactly the places that Conservatives lost in July and need to win if they are to return to power: constituencies like Swindon, Peterborough and two in Milton Keynes.

If I were the Shadow Minister for Higher Education, then I would be seeking to build a Conservative approach to higher education based around:

• helping universities help themselves – for example, by helping them sort out their over-expensive pension provision (some of which is mandated in primary legislation);
• strengthening autonomy underscored by smarter regulation – by giving the Office for Students a shorter and sharper set of responsibilities (starting by putting quality assurance back with the QAA);
• supporting students – if the Conservatives want more support from younger people, then ensuring full-time students have enough money to live on with dignity would be a good place to start.

So don’t disown the inheritance left to Labour on higher education, join the dots between the Tories’ low levels of support among young people and the Party’s negative attitude towards universities and build an alternative approach based on what is good for students.

Finally, I urge any Tory leadership candidate who thinks we have too many universities to visit my nearest university. It is a modern university that trains our local nurses, teachers and police officers. It is probably the sort of place that some Conservatives want shut down, as it is not centuries old, does not undertake oodles of research but does deliver proper widening participation.

That University is Bucks New in High Wycombe – that’s another seat recently lost to Labour that the Conservatives need to win back by the way. And when you enter Reception, the first thing you see is a quotation from a former Conservative Prime Minister painted in huge letters on the wall:

A University should be a place of light, of liberty, and of learning.

That was Benjamin Disraeli in the House of Commons in 1873 and I suggest it should be adopted as the motto for the new shadow Education team once the leadership election is over.