Andy Cook: Higher education still fails our poorest students.
This article first appeared on Friday 16th February as part of the CSJ leader column series
Last week former Skills Minister and chairman of the Education Select Committee Rt Hon Robert Halfon MP, came to the CSJ to set out his vision for education reform.
In a speech designed to challenge the sector he laid out some very particular questions for higher education.
“We have become obsessed with full academic degrees in this country. We are creating a higher education system that overwhelmingly favours academic degrees, while intermediate and higher technical offerings are comparatively tiny.”
He rightly pointed out that the labour market does not need an ever-growing supply of academic degrees and that between a fifth and a third of our graduates take non-graduate jobs, with the ‘graduate premium’ varying wildly according to subject and institution.
“Existing universities that do not provide a good return on academic courses could reinvent themselves as centres of technical excellence,” he suggested. “And FE colleges, which are ideally placed to offer flexible and local options for those who need this, could be better supported and incentivised to deliver intermediate and higher technical courses.”
Whatever the mechanism he urged that funding be redirected towards courses and degrees that have a technical focus: “We can be creative about blending technical and academic education. Degree apprenticeships are a remarkable example of a vehicle that does just that. Degree apprenticeships could be the crown jewel in a revamped technical offering.”
His words were not pie in the sky thinking. They are important and timely: next week the Government is expected to launch a review of post-18 education and funding.
Much of the focus on this so far has been on the interest rates of student loans and the level of fees students pay. Far too little attention has been given to the progress of our poorest through this system.
While uptake is improving, too few of our poorest students are given the real opportunity to go to a top university. Getting on for £1billion is spent on outreach but it is not yet working.
Too many students on Free School Meals arrive at university and are unable to maintain their studies. Almost one in ten fails to complete their first year compared to one in 20 from wealthier backgrounds.
But most importantly, Mr Halfon is right, the way we fund academia is overwhelmingly weighted towards the academic. Many of our students will never go to university at all and it is high time that the obsession with academic qualifications gave way to the importance of vocational and technical qualifications for these students.
The skills deficit in this country is a social justice deficit and if we fail to tackle it in this review of post-18 education, we consign some of our poorest students to the scrap heap.
