Nick Hillman is the Director of the Higher Education Policy Institute (www.hepi.ac.uk), a former Special Adviser to the Minister for Universities and Science and stood in Cambridge at the 2010 election. He writes here in a personal capacity.
The Conservatives have a good record in English higher education policy. Under Cameron and Osborne, they delivered sustainable funding via higher fees and removed student number caps to meet demand from aspirational families. UK-wide science and research spending was protected from the austerity cuts before being increased.
Under Theresa May, the regulation of English universities was reformed, meaning courses can now be defunded if they don’t deliver for their students. Under Boris Johnson, there was a better regime for international students, meaning the UK hit the Government target of 600,000 overseas students a decade early.
Recent Governments have also shown little patience for the petty-fogging attacks on free speech that are sometimes evident on university campuses. And they have ensured national security is properly accounted for by institutions that undertake research with people in China and elsewhere.
So why do I feel worried about what the next Conservative election manifesto could say about higher education?
First, the party seems ashamed of its solid record of achievement. The Government has, for example, consulted on the reintroduction of student number caps, which would reverse one of the most successful recent social policies just as the number of school leavers grows. Why go through the pain of introducing higher fees if you’re going to perform a U-turn on the demand-driven system it enabled? The Government threatens to limit international students too, despite foreign students making our campuses more diverse, bringing huge spending power to the UK, and helping with levelling up.
Secondly, because it’s not currently clear what the next big Conservative idea for higher education is. The top candidate is the Lifelong Loan Entitlement, which Ministers have compared to the foundation of the National Health Service. The principle behind the policy is a good one: letting people access a loan for each higher education module they want to take. But the policy was first announced in 2020, doesn’t begin properly until 2027 (having just been delayed by two years), and currently has no clear budget from the Treasury.
When the Lifelong Loan Entitlement (LLE) does finally get implemented, its scope will be limited – for example, people over the age of 60 will be excluded so it’s not really ‘lifelong’. Most people who need to retrain but who already have four years of higher education under their belts will be shut out too. On the supply side, it is up to universities whether to redesign (modularise) their courses to make them eligible for the LLE. Many institutions may not think it’s worth the candle.
Even if the Lifelong Loan Entitlement is a great idea, it’s not enough on which to base an election pitch in part because it’s not a differentiator between the main parties. Labour says, ‘we are prepared to support the Minister throughout the Lifelong Learning (Higher Education Fee Limits) Bill’s passage’.
Thirdly, students seem to have been written off by the Conservative Party. It’s generally true students tend not to vote Conservative in large numbers and also that students’ votes don’t determine the outcome in many constituencies. But previous Conservative Governments have made an effort to appeal to students and their families – Margaret Thatcher’s last significant social reform was the introduction of student loans for maintenance, which were designed to put more money in students’ pockets while relieving financial pressure on their parents.
But in 2023/24, students loans will go up by under three per cent while inflation is currently over 10 per cent. Even before this devaluation, the average student rent was eating up nearly three-quarters of the full maintenance loan (89 per cent in London), with little left over for everything else, such as travel, clothes and books.
Relations between the higher education sector and the ruling Conservative Party are not as poor as in the late 1990s when vice-chancellors collectively refused to meet with the Major Government. But there has been a notable hardening of the position in recent months. The universities’ main lobby group, Universities UK, has started a ‘national conversation on university funding’ to consider completely different funding models.
So what should the next Conservative manifesto say on higher education? Most importantly, it could adopt a positive and optimistic policy on the number of student places. The UK trails other countries for the proportion of young people in higher education. Yet most (97 per cent) mothers of young children want their child to attend university and there’s a decade of increasing demand coming due to social changes, including shifting demographics. So the Conservatives could put itself on the side of those aspirational households in which the children want to be the first in their family to reach university.
This year is the sixtieth anniversary of the Robbins Report. The Conservative Government of 1963 immediately accepted Robbins’s idea that ‘courses of higher education should be available for all those who are qualified by ability and attainment to pursue them and who wish to do so.’ It was the right principle then and it is the right principle now. Capping places, thereby limiting aspiration, is best reserved for political parties that aren’t brave enough to sort out university finances through mechanisms like high fees and loans.
The next Conservative manifesto could also recognise that the Government’s long-term economic priorities are unlikely to be realised without further increases in research and development (R&D) spending. Changes to the way such spending is calculated means the UK has recently jumped from spending 1.7 per cent of GDP on R&D to spending the existing target of 2.4 per cent. But this is a statistical change, not a real-world one.
Imagine the ONS were to change the way it measures child poverty, thereby showing the problem had been eradicated. Policymakers would be tempted to take their eye off child poverty and focus on other issues. Now we’ve hit the target for R&D spend, the risk of complacency is the same. So it would make sense to a clear ‘longer-term goal of three per cent’, as outlined in Theresa May’s 2017 election manifesto.
The third area worth focus is student incomes. Past governments used to decide how much students need to live on via the detailed Student Income and Expenditure Survey. The last available such study covers 2014/15, almost a decade ago and before all undergraduate cohorts in England were on the higher fees introduced in 2012/13. Yet the absence of an up-to-date picture is not a good reason to ignore the reality of life for students, who are taking on more paid work and are increasingly worried about having to drop out for financial reasons.
If young students feel the Government has not stood by them, they will be less likely than their predecessors to become Tory voters once they’ve moved into the labour market and settled down. So the electoral punishment of getting higher education policy wrong now could be long-lasting.
Nick Hillman is the Director of the Higher Education Policy Institute (www.hepi.ac.uk), a former Special Adviser to the Minister for Universities and Science and stood in Cambridge at the 2010 election. He writes here in a personal capacity.
The Conservatives have a good record in English higher education policy. Under Cameron and Osborne, they delivered sustainable funding via higher fees and removed student number caps to meet demand from aspirational families. UK-wide science and research spending was protected from the austerity cuts before being increased.
Under Theresa May, the regulation of English universities was reformed, meaning courses can now be defunded if they don’t deliver for their students. Under Boris Johnson, there was a better regime for international students, meaning the UK hit the Government target of 600,000 overseas students a decade early.
Recent Governments have also shown little patience for the petty-fogging attacks on free speech that are sometimes evident on university campuses. And they have ensured national security is properly accounted for by institutions that undertake research with people in China and elsewhere.
So why do I feel worried about what the next Conservative election manifesto could say about higher education?
First, the party seems ashamed of its solid record of achievement. The Government has, for example, consulted on the reintroduction of student number caps, which would reverse one of the most successful recent social policies just as the number of school leavers grows. Why go through the pain of introducing higher fees if you’re going to perform a U-turn on the demand-driven system it enabled? The Government threatens to limit international students too, despite foreign students making our campuses more diverse, bringing huge spending power to the UK, and helping with levelling up.
Secondly, because it’s not currently clear what the next big Conservative idea for higher education is. The top candidate is the Lifelong Loan Entitlement, which Ministers have compared to the foundation of the National Health Service. The principle behind the policy is a good one: letting people access a loan for each higher education module they want to take. But the policy was first announced in 2020, doesn’t begin properly until 2027 (having just been delayed by two years), and currently has no clear budget from the Treasury.
When the Lifelong Loan Entitlement (LLE) does finally get implemented, its scope will be limited – for example, people over the age of 60 will be excluded so it’s not really ‘lifelong’. Most people who need to retrain but who already have four years of higher education under their belts will be shut out too. On the supply side, it is up to universities whether to redesign (modularise) their courses to make them eligible for the LLE. Many institutions may not think it’s worth the candle.
Even if the Lifelong Loan Entitlement is a great idea, it’s not enough on which to base an election pitch in part because it’s not a differentiator between the main parties. Labour says, ‘we are prepared to support the Minister throughout the Lifelong Learning (Higher Education Fee Limits) Bill’s passage’.
Thirdly, students seem to have been written off by the Conservative Party. It’s generally true students tend not to vote Conservative in large numbers and also that students’ votes don’t determine the outcome in many constituencies. But previous Conservative Governments have made an effort to appeal to students and their families – Margaret Thatcher’s last significant social reform was the introduction of student loans for maintenance, which were designed to put more money in students’ pockets while relieving financial pressure on their parents.
But in 2023/24, students loans will go up by under three per cent while inflation is currently over 10 per cent. Even before this devaluation, the average student rent was eating up nearly three-quarters of the full maintenance loan (89 per cent in London), with little left over for everything else, such as travel, clothes and books.
Relations between the higher education sector and the ruling Conservative Party are not as poor as in the late 1990s when vice-chancellors collectively refused to meet with the Major Government. But there has been a notable hardening of the position in recent months. The universities’ main lobby group, Universities UK, has started a ‘national conversation on university funding’ to consider completely different funding models.
So what should the next Conservative manifesto say on higher education? Most importantly, it could adopt a positive and optimistic policy on the number of student places. The UK trails other countries for the proportion of young people in higher education. Yet most (97 per cent) mothers of young children want their child to attend university and there’s a decade of increasing demand coming due to social changes, including shifting demographics. So the Conservatives could put itself on the side of those aspirational households in which the children want to be the first in their family to reach university.
This year is the sixtieth anniversary of the Robbins Report. The Conservative Government of 1963 immediately accepted Robbins’s idea that ‘courses of higher education should be available for all those who are qualified by ability and attainment to pursue them and who wish to do so.’ It was the right principle then and it is the right principle now. Capping places, thereby limiting aspiration, is best reserved for political parties that aren’t brave enough to sort out university finances through mechanisms like high fees and loans.
The next Conservative manifesto could also recognise that the Government’s long-term economic priorities are unlikely to be realised without further increases in research and development (R&D) spending. Changes to the way such spending is calculated means the UK has recently jumped from spending 1.7 per cent of GDP on R&D to spending the existing target of 2.4 per cent. But this is a statistical change, not a real-world one.
Imagine the ONS were to change the way it measures child poverty, thereby showing the problem had been eradicated. Policymakers would be tempted to take their eye off child poverty and focus on other issues. Now we’ve hit the target for R&D spend, the risk of complacency is the same. So it would make sense to a clear ‘longer-term goal of three per cent’, as outlined in Theresa May’s 2017 election manifesto.
The third area worth focus is student incomes. Past governments used to decide how much students need to live on via the detailed Student Income and Expenditure Survey. The last available such study covers 2014/15, almost a decade ago and before all undergraduate cohorts in England were on the higher fees introduced in 2012/13. Yet the absence of an up-to-date picture is not a good reason to ignore the reality of life for students, who are taking on more paid work and are increasingly worried about having to drop out for financial reasons.
If young students feel the Government has not stood by them, they will be less likely than their predecessors to become Tory voters once they’ve moved into the labour market and settled down. So the electoral punishment of getting higher education policy wrong now could be long-lasting.