Badenoch, O’Sullivan and Sturgeon: What did my holiday reading reveal about higher ed?

• HEPI Director, Nick Hillman OBE, searches for mentions of higher education in some of his holiday reading.

Having taken an early summer break this year, I have managed to read the stories of three successful and resilient women: Kemi Badenoch, Katrina O’Sullivan and Nicola Sturgeon. And as this is an entry on the HEPI blog, I have scoured their stories for what they tell us about higher education.

Badenoch

Michael Ashcroft’s biography of Kemi Badenoch was written immediately before she became Conservative Party leader, so it predates her bumpy early months as Conservative Party Leader and the smoother more recent ones and can therefore offer only a limited guide to what a future Badenoch Government might do.

Born in London in 1980, Kemi Badenoch – I follow the book in using her married name – was entitled to a British passport but spent her childhood in Nigeria. For much of that time, that country was in a state of severe economic and political chaos (which I experienced myself while spending time in Lagos in the summer of 1993).

As Kemi Badenoch said in her 2017 maiden speech to the House of Commons, ‘I was born in Wimbledon, but I grew up in Nigeria. I chose to make the United Kingdom my home.’ Arriving back in the UK to study A-Levels, she later took a gap year during which she got hands-on practical experience (and an NVQ or National Vocational Qualification) fixing computers via the Year in Industry scheme, which Badenoch has called ‘my apprenticeship’. The book does not mention it, but presumably this third year as a teenager in the UK helped ensure the future Conservative Leader met the three-year residency requirement for accessing student support.

Discouraged by her teachers from applying for Oxford and then missing out on the grades necessary for a place at the University of Warwick, Kemi Badenoch ended up at Sussex studying Computer Systems Engineering. This means the political leader who made her name in part by rejecting identity politics was educated at the University most associated with recent campus culture battles.

Ashcroft says Badenoch found some of the other students annoying, especially for their political naïvety (later describing some of her fellow students as ‘stupid lefty white kids’). She also took successful action with other students against a drug-using aggressive flatmate. 

Later on, Badenoch also studied Law at Birkbeck but, for a higher education audience, much the most relevant and topical section of Ashcroft’s book is the part on how students’ first-year accommodation affects their whole experience. Kemi Badenoch was in a shared flat that ‘lacked any sort of common room or social space of its own, meaning students would often eat in their bedrooms. For recent arrivals who were shy or reserved, this gloomy set-up could make getting to know their flatmates even more difficult.’

It is a stretch to assume this means a future Badenoch government might focus on the supply, cost and quality of students’ living quarters. But perhaps it may just stop this particular type of accommodation falling through the cracks between Whitehall Departments – currently, the wait goes on for the Government’s oft-promised ‘statement of expectations on [student] accommodation’.

Either way, it is all a good reminder, as people prepare for this autumn’s great internal migration from home to higher education, that accommodation choices matter because they shape so much of the wider student experience. (And if you have now locked down your place in higher education but still do not have any accommodation, do get on to it super quick.)

O’Sullivan

The second book I read while away was Poor by Professor Katriona O’Sullivan. I had not heard of either the book or the author but found it at Birmingham Airport’s WH Smith’s after hearing O’Sullivan being interviewed by Adrian Chiles on Radio 4.

He has since written about this experience in his Guardian column:

In more than 30 years of live broadcasting, I’ve only once sobbed on air. This was the other week, during a radio interview with a professor of psychology called Katriona O’Sullivan. That’s what she is now, a professor at Maynooth University in County Kildare. Before that, she was at Trinity College Dublin, where she also got her PhD. Before that, she was to be found on the access programme through which she got into Trinity. Before that she was living a life of chaos in Dublin, a single mother with next to nothing.

She was in Dublin escaping an even more chaotic life in Birmingham, which had followed a childhood in Coventry, growing up in harrowing, grinding, distressing, miserable, terrifying poverty. No single adjective feels adequate here, so I’ve thrown in as many as I can think of.

She’s better with words than me, as you’ll find if you read her memoir, which is called Poor. I’m buying so many copies of her book to give to people that she may soon have to write one called Rich. I’m on a mission to get everyone in the country to read it.

Chiles mission worked on me and, if you listen to his interview of O’Sullivan, it probably won’t only be him sobbing by the end. If you want a truly uplifting story of individual victory over adversity via higher education, you’d be much better starting with O’Sullivan than with Jason Arday (whose new book came out this week in the United States).

Most vividly, O’Sullivan’s early life took her towards addictions that blocked her from being who she could be. But some heroic individuals pushed her and pulled her to help her meet her full potential and one result is a book that does so much to answer the critics of modern higher education:

Coming from poverty, dreams aren’t sky high. Most of the time they barely go past the ceiling of a council house. The ideas I had of ‘making it’ as a kid were on Top of the Pops or in the cinema. And being ‘better’, in my eyes, meant having a job or not selling drugs. Nobody ever told us that we had a right to an education. And the kid I was didn’t understand what an education was. I thought it was grades, like being first in a quiz or winning at a match. I had no idea it could make the world easier to navigate. I didn’t realize that it could change your entire viewpoint, that an education is more than just a job. You gain a qualification or a degree, but you also develop a way of thinking.

In the last 24 hours, we have yet again heard all about how some higher education courses don’t guarantee their graduates extra earnings, but is there any better argument than O’Sullivan’s for the non-pecuniary benefits of higher education? In the end, O’Sullivan shows education is even more powerful when it is saving people rather than enriching them.

Sturgeon

The final book in my holiday trilogy was Nicola Sturgeon’s autobiography, the paperback edition of which came out last week (though I read the original hardback). I expected it to be the most interesting of the three, given Sturgeon’s past dominance of Scottish politics, but it isn’t.

Aside from some nice-ish remarks about David Cameron, Sturgeon comes across as excessively tribal for a front-rank mainstream politician. This conveys an unpleasantness rarely present in such memoirs. I don’t recall many recent UK Prime Ministers, for example, so readily using their autobiographies to label their main opponents as ‘odious’ ‘charlatans’ who deserve to be ‘pariahs’. #BeKind this is not.

Aside from when discussing what she owes to Alex Salmond, Sturgeon also come across as a misandrist. Warm words are reserved for female political progressives while male politicians generally get a kicking. In her acknowledgements, the only male friend she thanks is the former MP Ian Blackford (‘just to prove than men can be great friends too’).

It all led me to question whether, if Sturgeon’s outlook has been more equitable, young boys and men in Scotland might now receive a better education? Last week, when reporting on Scotland’s exam results, the BBC reported: ‘Girls outperform boys in all exam levels’. But this is perhaps unfair because, despite yesterday’s headlines about boys outperforming girls in the very top grades at A-Level, males fall far behind females across the UK when it comes to education, so it is far from a problem unique to Scotland.

The main frustration though, for me at least, is that the book is not a book on policy; it is a book on politics. And politics as a game to deliver Scottish independence. Indeed, the treatment of politics as an oppositional game means there are more similarities with Nigel Farage’s career than her supporters might readily admit.

As a result, there is next to nothing in Sturgeon’s book on the SNP’s flagship policy of ‘free’ higher education, which was once literally carved in stone and placed on Heriot-Watt’s main campus. Early on, Sturgeon claims in passing she wouldn’t have gone to university if fees had been in place but, given what has happened to access where tuition fees and tuition fee loans do exist (for example, in England), this seems unconvincing – at least in terms of its wider applicability to others. 

Sturgeon does nonetheless write of pushing to ensure ‘young people from poorer backgrounds would have just as much chance of going to university as their wealthier peers.’ Yet the costs of this approach – such as underfunding those places that are reserved for home students as well as penal student number controls – are not discussed. Scotland’s higher education model also rests even more than England’s universities (at least those outside London) on the shoulders of some of the richest people from other countries, which feels like it deserves a little more acknowledgement.

A lot of what has been written about this book notes Sturgeon swings between insecurity (never quite feeling up to her roles) and supreme self-confidence bordering on arrogance. Strangely, while there is more self-doubt than arrogance, it’s the arrogance that lingers longer (‘the best possible first minister would be a mash-up of me and Alex [Salmond]’, ‘I was hugely popular’, ‘I was a massive electoral asset’ … ). The other truly notable characteristic is that Nicola Sturgeon comes across as not having changed her views on anything significant since she was a teenager. Is this impressive steadfastness even in the face of adversity, or might it lead to exaggerating the benefits offered by nationalism?

In the end, the endless complaints, the anti-male rhetoric and the general tone of I-admit-I-could-have-done-some-things-differently-but-it-wouldn’t-have-made-much-difference becomes relentless. At one point, Sturgeon castigates her party’s campaigning as ‘a strange mix of insecurity, electoral expedience and arrogance.’ But all the personal details, the pursuit of independence primarily as a route to implement progressive policies more than as an end in itself and the batting away of alternative ideas also makes this a perfect description of her book. As with Wes Streeting’s memoirs, you end up wondering if perhaps the goal was less to provide political nerds with their latest fix and more to serve an alternative purpose: to build a backstory in Streeting’s case; to build a defence against her recent travails in Sturgeon’s.