Read: Higher Education announcements risk a backward step on levelling up
The Government’s response to the Augar review is long overdue, coming nearly 3 years after its publication.
It’s important that young people have real choices as they approach their education and life beyond it. That’s why it is crucial that improvements to further education and skills development are a core part of the Government’s levelling up agenda. However, university education will always be a cornerstone of how Britain delivers its high skill, high productivity, high growth economy of the future. For me, being able to get to university - the first person in my family who did so - was a transformational experience that went way beyond just getting an academic degree. For many young people today, it’s still also that vital step to accessing careers and the opportunities they want for a future life.
However, when it comes to widening access to universities, there are real concerns that today’s Government proposals on minimum entry requirements for students will act as a real barrier to disadvantaged young people being able to continue to higher education and have the same chance as I did to transform my life. The devil is, of course, in the detail, but it looks as if the Government has reached the conclusion that higher education access has become too wide and needs to be narrowed once again. It seems counterproductive to the levelling up agenda. It also comes at a time when other countries are seeking to have more rather than less of their young people educated at a higher level.
Just two weeks ago, the Levelling up White Paper identified that 219,000 children and young people are in schools that have been underperforming for the past 13 years or more. The announcements today mean there is less chance than ever for talented children in those situations, but who have the potential to go on to higher education, to still be able to achieve that. That’s bad for them but it’s bad for the rest of us too. Just a fraction of young people at Pupil Referral Units get good grades in GCSE Maths and English - they’d be some of those barred from accessing higher education under these changes. Yet, as outreach work at the University of York with the Wetherby Young Offenders Institution shows, young men there can see university as the means by which they get their lives on track. Compared to the cost of a future spent in and out of prison, it’s good for the public purse as well as for them.
Whilst overwhelmingly most young people meet the potential minimum entry requirements, the work of many universities, especially those in the Levelling Up Universities Coalition, shows that they can successfully support the most disadvantaged students to thrive once they reach their institutions. It shows how those universities can be the turning point in a young person's life for a better future. Our University Best Practice White Paper shows how many are doing that very clearly. This is something that we should support access to, not restrict.
In relation to the Government reforms to the student loan system, these also seem to go against the levelling up objective that Ministers have set themselves. They are aimed at shifting the financial burden of higher education away from taxpayers so that graduates shoulder more of the cost of the system from which they benefit . However, the way in which this will be achieved, particularly by extending the repayment period from 30 years to 40, as well as changes to the interest rates, mean that it is the lower and middle income earning graduates who will proportionately shoulder much more of the burden than those graduates who end up on the highest salaries. It’s a regressive way of getting graduates to pay more. In fact the DfE Equality Impact Statement judges the changes to mean that the bottom earning 80% of graduates will pay more and the top 20% earning graduates will pay less (page 15). Because the highest paying graduate roles are in London and the south east, it’s the northern graduates that will be picking up the higher future bill for higher education. Of course, those from the most privileged backgrounds who do not need a student loan and are able to pay up front will be able to circumvent these changes entirely.
Far better and fairer would have been to have a graduate contribution that all graduates pay, but in a way that was progressive rather than regressive. Those graduates doing the best financially from university would pay the most, helping to hold down the costs for those earning the least, for example in crucial public sector roles like teaching or nursing. I wrote a blog in 2018 on how this would work.
As a result, the proposals make it harder for the most disadvantaged to get to university in the first place and then, if they do, also places a higher financial burden on them post-graduation. It’s going to hit the most disadvantaged students hardest, as well as the universities in those communities working hard to help them recover their lost ground.
Whilst the work to drive up the quality of further education and the choices of apprenticeships and T levels is absolutely crucial, it won’t happen overnight. To push ahead with these changes to reduce access to university before real progress on vocational education has been made is a backwards step on levelling up for individuals, their communities and, as a consequence, our country too.
By Rt Hon Justine Greening