Category: Labour

  • A government running out of road still sets the economic weather for higher education

    A government running out of road still sets the economic weather for higher education

    For a party that it’s become fashionable to criticise for failing to have prepared for power, Labour has in fact set an awful lot of ambitious policy machinery into motion over the last 16 months.

    There’s barely been a month go by without some large-scale reform to how the country is governed, organised, and understood as a sum of diverse parts and competing pressures, and we’ve had our work cut out thinking through the implications of each for the higher education sector: from devolution to industrial strategy, from health reform to an explicit tying together of skills and migration (which has barely got started yet), from a new communities strategy to belatedly moving skills policy to the Department for Work and Pensions.

    Whatever your views on the merits and mechanics of these, and the many other initiatives that different departments have launched, they are all downright interesting – and pose a plethora of questions for how higher education fits in and demonstrates value.

    But all need time. The overall ambitions of devolution are still on their starting blocks as councils pitch their ideas for new geographies; the industrial strategy was explicitly badged as bearing fruit in 2035; the NHS workforce plan that should really have been alongside the 10-year health plan has been delayed to the spring – and so on and so on. No-one involved in pulling together all these long-term reforms did so under the assumption that all the pieces would be in place within one parliamentary term.

    Yet here we now are, with the commentariat consensus being that both Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves are toast, and public sentiment pointing emphatically in that direction as well – though this is not to say the party cannot regain momentum under a new leader. The sector is already asking questions about how to prepare for a Reform government (as discussed in the most recent instalment of our new HE Influence newsletter, I should mention).

    The post-16 white paper presented a somewhat upbeat vision of what the government would like higher education’s role to feel like across the country, but was weaker on any kind of immediate reform, proposing instead that traditionally glacial changes to research funding, a piece-by-piece strengthening of the Office for Students’ remit, and putting FE, HE and business in the same room would do much of the heavy lifting, given time and goodwill.

    All this feels like a recipe for the sector to retreat to more comfortable home territory over the next few years, fighting battles over the international student levy, the size of teaching grants, and the shape of the REF, and gradually giving up on pushing for a central role in the government’s overall vision for the country, given the increasing probability that dreams like a planned and unswerving industrial strategy will all be swept away in 2029.

    Quite what’s to be done about all this is a question for another day – with the Budget looming on Wednesday, and admittedly still three and a half years in office remaining for Labour, the other thing that’s worth reflecting on is quite how much the choices the Chancellor makes around tax, public spending, debt, and general macroeconomics will determine the success – or otherwise – of higher education institutions in England over the next few years. These big tickets items all impact the sector deeply, however much the temptation might be to throw one’s hands up in the air, snipe about a “tax” on overseas recruitment, and start looking at what opposition parties can be convinced of.

    Labour on labour

    There’s a pretty strong case to be made for the most consequential policy decision for universities since Labour came to power being the decision to hike employer national insurance contributions in last autumn’s budget. Clearly it has cost universities a small fortune, and the move also sucked up a sizeable slice of the government’s various funding “boosts” for schools and FE colleges – and the NHS and elsewhere – leaving less putative generosity to go around.

    But perhaps most importantly of all, the ENICs rise has decimated the labour market for young people – in the court of public opinion at least – by making new hires and part-time workers more expensive, all while AI is supposedly making them obsolete.

    The result is that university graduates – and the institutions ever more judged on those graduates’ success – are seen to be in a right old state. The Guardian was the latest to take a run at this last week, with tales of qualified grads banging their heads against the job application wall, accompanied by analysis from the paper demonstrating that almost half of all jobs lost since Labour came to power were among the under-25s. Down in the small print we see that this is driven almost entirely via reduced employment of 16- and 17-year-olds, but the vibes aren’t good, even if less hyperbolic analysis from the likes of the Institute of Student Employers and Prospects Luminate paints merely a concerning, rather than cataclysmic, picture.

    The sad fact is that, longer term, this deluge of negative publicity about the value of a degree – alongside a necessary tailing off of the supposed “graduate premium” as a viable sector talking point as the minimum wage heads ever up – will inevitably move from being fodder for anti-HE journalists to actually driving changes in young people’s decision-making (even if a tight jobs market in the short-term often pushes graduates back towards postgraduate study) and scar the sector’s ability to make its case for its value.

    The result is that keeping a watchful eye on Labour’s economic moves around the costs associated with employment – both on Wednesday and beyond – has become a matter of some importance for higher education. Further increases in the national living wage over the next few years, lower-profile changes to business taxation, and even wildcards like any surprise revenue-raising changes to the growth and skills levy, all hold the possibility of making this problem worse. All while leading to higher costs for universities and making it harder for students to work alongside their studies, despite this being ever more necessary.

    Pound in pocket

    Rachel Reeves finally taking the plunge with an income tax rise, as a good proportion of the Labour backbenches were calling for, seems to have definitively fallen off the table for the Budget – with a handful of consequences worth noting for the sector.

    First, it will almost certainly mean that future spring and autumn statements will be equally fraught, as the Treasury fails to leave clear blue water between its spending plans and its spending rules. By not maintaining a sensible “headroom”, public finances will remain permanently at the mercy of external shocks and OBR downgrades, and we’ll probably be back here in less than six months’ time wondering what levers will need to be pulled. At least at some point in the Parliament, said levers will end up being haircuts to departmental budgets rather than new taxes or further borrowing.

    Following on from this, the use of a basket of smaller revenue-raising measures to partially fill the gap left by not raising income tax increases the likelihood that this shortfall gets filled by employment-related measures – that is, all the issues we’ve been over above, which have serious consequences for universities as large employers who are not quite in the public sector (as may be the case this week if rumoured changes to salary sacrifice rules go ahead).

    And the other effect that an income tax rise would have achieved, which the “smorgasbord” approach will not to the same extent, is bringing down inflation.

    Inflation is arguably the most serious financial threat that higher education institutions face. Even if many within the sector, both in internal conversations and public pronouncements, are often quite happy to let audiences believe that measures like the dependants ban are what’s most responsible for blowing a hole in HE finances, the fundamentals weren’t sound even before the post-pandemic recruitment glut.

    While tuition fees and maintenance loans in England (and, at least for one year, Wales) are now linked to inflation, or more precisely to inflation forecasts – Office for Budget Responsibility predictions on Wednesday will set the levels for 2026–27 – the idea of any measures to compensate for all the shortfalls baked in over several years of rocketing price rises appears to have been permanently nixed.

    And it’s worth bearing in mind that the index link does not mean that either student maintenance or teaching funding will actually keep pace with inflation in the coming years. For one thing, OBR forecasts have repeatedly underestimated inflation, and there’s no corrective mechanism in the system. For student maintenance, even if predictions come true, other features of the system mean that the average, rather than maximum, maintenance loan continues to be worth less each year.

    For teaching funding, it’s important to stress that Labour has in no way committed to keeping the overall package inflation-proofed. While tuition fees are the major part here, other elements such as high-cost subject funding took a real-terms tumble this year, and no-one is predicting that the reforming the Strategic Priorities Grant means upward movement on how much it’s worth – the reverse is far likelier, given DfE’s commitments elsewhere.

    University staff have had a decade or more of below inflation pay rises, and there doesn’t seem any serious capacity or appetite among higher education employers to do fundamental work here – the year-on-year squabbles will continue, and high levels of inflation over the coming years will eat further into staff remuneration and the attractiveness of higher education careers.

    And inflation-linked rises in tuition fees will also change applicant behaviour. One thing we’ll start getting a sense of on Wednesday will be the likelihood of when fees will cross the (supposedly) psychologically important barrier of £10,000. Back in March, the OBR was expecting RPIX to run at 2.7 per cent in Q1 2027, and 2.8 per cent in Q1 2028, which would lead to tuition fee caps of around £9,790 in 2026–27 and around £10,065 in 2027–28. We won’t know for certain until autumn 2026, but the picture will start to come into focus.

    Now the significance of fees being materially above, rather than roughly equal to, £10k is perhaps overstated. But DfE isn’t really sure – it has reportedly commissioned modelling on how students will respond to rises, but the results aren’t due until the spring.

    All in all, there’s a whole host of reasons why Budget decisions and their effect on inflation, as well as the OBR forecasts themselves, have become heavily intertwined with the future behaviour and wellbeing of higher education staff and students.

    Gilt trips

    Perhaps the most overlooked publication of the last few years for really understanding how the Treasury thinks about higher education is the Institute for Fiscal Studies analysis of how the interplay between interest rates and Treasury gilts affect the cost of student loans.

    In a nutshell, it costs far more for the government to borrow than it used to (the 15-year gilt yield has continued to rise since the IFS did its sums in January 2024), and so it’s very reluctant to allow for too much expansion in the student loan book – it’s a far cry from when the broad strokes of student finance were put in place by the coalition government, and this was basically thought of as free money.

    This goes a long way to explain why the government is so reticent to use the student loan book in any radical way – and thus we see things like a real-terms freeze in tuition fees being presented as if it’s an almost saint-like act of generosity to the sector, or the foundering of DfE’s tepid-but-probably-genuine desire to properly boost maintenance loans.

    We’re waiting for the specifics (hopefully) of maintenance grant implementation on Wednesday, but the cost of government borrowing feels like it has played a role in the last year of behind-the-scenes policy deliberations here. In the run-up to last autumn’s Budget, there was plenty of speculation, and government nods to the press, about the potential for movement on the overall maintenance package and grants in particular. Clearly the battle with the Treasury was lost, and DfE was told to come up with an alternate source of funding – hence the international student levy. What we don’t yet know is to what extent grants will replace, rather than supplement, loans – if what we see is a switch from one to the other, the expense to the public purse of borrowing is a likely primary driver, especially given the hidden costs associated with annual tuition fee rises. While the sector isn’t really getting any more money in real terms, this isn’t to say that the government’s finances are not being stretched by indexing fees.

    What this all means is that, unfortunately, the sector needs to keep an eye on the gilts market. The supposed flip-flop on raising income tax has already done some damage here, and the government repeatedly needing to borrow more than it expected to is another issue. There’s a wider question of perceived government competence around balancing the books that drives behaviour too – confidence is in short supply as it is, and it will get worse if the Starmer era implodes. This all equates to longer-term uncertainty about the use of the student loan book.

    Even if you’ve given up on the Labour government in its current form, and are pinning hopes on a future government being more receptive to calls for support and investment in both universities and students, Number 10 and the current Treasury team are still setting the economic weather. While much of the sector will be waiting for the moment Rachel Reeves stops speaking on Wednesday to see the fee levy policy paper – assuming there is one, and the can doesn’t get kicked – there are many reasons to think the wider public finances are a much more important determinant of the future of higher education. And it’s one that isn’t painting a particularly cheery picture at the moment.

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  • What is in the post-16 education and skills white paper for higher education?

    What is in the post-16 education and skills white paper for higher education?

    The government’s post-16 education and skills white paper is jointly fronted by the Department for Education, Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, and Department for Work and Pensions – and is accordingly ambitious in scope.

    Spanning proposals to address the number of NEET young people to widening access to postgraduate study, the plans break down into three key areas: joining up skills and employment throughout the system including through Skills England and funding reform; reforms in the further education/college sector; and reforms in the higher education sector. It’s the last of these we are concerned with here.

    The headlines

    Introducing the white paper in the House of Commons, Secretary of State for Education Bridget Phillipson announced the critical information many have been waiting for: a commitment to increase tuition fees and maintenance loans by predicted inflation for the next two years, and to legislate to make the fee increase automatic in future.

    The white paper arrives against the backdrop of the government’s new target for two-thirds under-25 participation in higher-level learning, but that target itself is fundamentally about the stuff the government has been talking about from the beginning: tackling skills shortages to support growth; and offering more, and broader, opportunities for post-16 education and training.

    Within all of that higher education emerges as a critical “strategic asset” – but nevertheless in need of reform, summed up as follows:

    Our ambition is to have a more sustainable, more specialised and more efficient sector, better aligned with the needs of the economy.

    In practice, if the government were to have its way (and that’s a big if) the outcome would be a fair bit of sector consolidation, with a more stratified sector incorporating fewer highly research-active institutions, operating within a regional ecosystem in which different types of institutions coordinate around an education offer that remains competitive in terms of subject and qualification choice, but attentive to regional skills needs.

    What’s missing, arguably, is the heavy policy lifting to make that real. As the text of the white paper suggests:

    The changes outlined here mark the beginning of a journey. We want to continue working with the sector to consider how best we can support greater specialisation in the future.

    Critically, what is not included here is anything on the pointier end of financial sustainability ie management of institutional insolvency or a special administration regime – the working assumption is that autonomous institutions will be able to identify opportunities to innovate, whether individually or in collaboration. That may be true, but while the risks of specialisation outweigh the prospective rewards, the government can encourage all it wants, but institutions will most likely continue to recruit to the courses that they believe there is a market for.

    What there does appear to be is a generalised vote of confidence in the Office for Students (OfS) – no proposals to tear up the Higher Education and Research Act here. In fact, when the parliamentary schedule allows, OfS is set to get more powers, particularly to crack down on low quality – and will now become the regulator for all provision at level 4 and above. Critically, OfS’ definition of quality will be given teeth both in the form of permission – or otherwise – to increase fees or issue restrictions on growth in student numbers.

    All together now

    In terms of strategic ambition, there are five objectives for the sector: economic growth, a high quality experience, national capability via specific research and skills development, regional impact, and an increase in international standing. International, these translate into global standing, nationally to government goals on growth, security and skills, regionally to meeting skills needs through collaboration, and at provider level, to specialisation and efficiency.

    Providers are challenged to:

    specialise in areas of strength within a more collaborative system, with clearer roles for teaching- and research-intensive institutions with areas of specialist advantage, and stronger access and participation.

    The argument is that too many providers are trying to sustain too broad a base of offering to the same student demographics rather than focusing on their core strengths. From the outset, however, it is clarified that higher education providers are autonomous and “it is not for government to impose these changes.” So institutions will be encouraged to innovate, to specialise and to collaborate rather than obliged to, with OfS tasked with working out what might help.

    The sting in the tail, however, is that the government intends to use research funding to drive some of this differentiation in the form of a “more strategic distribution of research activity,” which essentially means concentrating research funding which will have the knock-on impact that those who lose out will be obliged to revise their business models.

    In theory this could mean greater efficiency in the research system with better cost recovery, and more sharing of grants, facilities, and equipment. The idea here is because of the close relationship between research and teaching specialisation in one will drive specialisation in the other. And, just to be sure, providers are asked to align incentives for academics for research excellence and teaching excellence and to diversify recognition for research performance to include mentoring, peer review, commercialisation activities and public engagement.

    Sustainable footing

    That commitment to inflationary fee and maintenance loan rises – baked in for the first two years, with the intent to make it automatic in the longer term via legislation when parliamentary time allows – covers all provision with the exception of classroom-based foundation years – these will stick at £5,670 through 2026–27 and 2027–28 at least.

    There’s a big caveat – future fee uplifts will be conditional on providers achieving a “higher quality threshold” via the OfS’ quality regime. This isn’t spelled out, but it is reasonable to assume given the recent consultation that this might be new TEF silver and gold.

    The long-standing debate on full cost recovery appears to be tilting in support of costs, which the paper recognises “may result in funding a lower volume of research but at a more sustainable level.” The ask for providers here is effective collaboration and shared resources (again), and a commitment to to cost grants accurately. There’s a wider interest in improving research grant cost recovery alongside this – mostly stuff we already know about (equipment funded at 80 per cent of costs, a higher capital equipment threshold, confirmation that matched funding from providers is not required for UKRI) but there’s also wider research into costs (including on the sustainability of PhD programmes) underway.

    Dual support will remain (QR funding will stay), but there will be a modification of what the government expects in return – the idea for research generally is to stick to three priorities: curiosity-driven, delivering government priorities (missions, the industrial strategy), and targeted commercialisation and scale up support. There’s more on streamlining bureaucracy, including improvements to the way the Transparent Approach to Costing (TRAC) is used for assurance.

    A single line says the government will seek to “better understand concerns” about the Teacher’s Pension Scheme, which is used in providers formerly in local government control and where costs are rising well beyond the capacity of institutions to address them (which the government already knows).

    But again, there’s pro for the quid, in the form of expectations of higher education institutions to deliver efficiency.

    We knew that government was worried about HE governance and its general capability to deliver strategic change and sustainable operating models, and so the white paper confirms, with signals that OfS will consult on strengthening its condition of registration on governance, and endorsement of the current Committee of University Chairs governance review, which will strengthen its (voluntary) Code of Governance.

    There’s a note of thanks to the UUK Efficiency and Transformation Taskforce, endorsement of plans to develop an efficiency maturity model, and a wish to see more visibility for good collaboration practice (hats off to N8 and the Midlands Innovation partnership).

    In turn, the government will help make the Student Loans Company more efficient, foster closer relationships between OfS and UKRI on regulation and the delivery of the broader strategic aims of government, and strengthen OfS financial monitoring of the sector. OfS will be delivering a reformed regulatory framework that is focused on “driving out pockets of poor performance.”

    Access and student experience

    Much of the section on access and participation is taken up with reiterating student finance arrangement – LLE, targeted grants – but there is also a basket of other ideas and proposals, including reform to OfS’ approach to access and participation to be (even) more risk-based, consideration of patterns of PhD participation and access to postgraduate study, and notes on student accommodation, harassment, the extension of the mental health taskforce for another year with a new student support champion, and the existing funding to tackle antisemitism.

    Higher education cold spots and contextual admissions will be the main topics of conversation at a task and finish group to be chaired by University of Derby vice chancellor Kathryn Mitchell bringing together sector experts, charities, OfS, and UCAS.

    There is a recap of the details of the Lifelong Learning Entitlement, with an emphasis that available provision will expand beyond the priority areas in future. As has been widely acknowledged, this removes the distinction between full and part-time study – it will be possible to study multiple courses and modules at the same time. And there is a reminder that even if you have used up your (four year full-time) allocation, there will still be money available for priority courses.

    On that, there are some indications about the relationship between the LLE and the Growth and Skills Levy – the former will allow students to draw down loans to take modular courses at level 4 or above, particularly in FE colleges, while the latter will allow employer funding for “short courses.” Curiously, the only mention of apprenticeships is in relation to a new form of short course provision dubbed “apprenticeship units” designed to tackle critical skills shortages, tacit confirmation, perhaps, that the apprenticeship model may be too unwieldy and too challenging to scale to deliver on those critical areas at the pace required.

    Finally – first announced in 2010 – there is movement on creating an Alternative Student Finance scheme for those who are unable or unwilling to participate in the main scheme (primarily those individuals who consider themselves subject to Sharia law), which will launch “as soon as possible” after the introduction of the Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE) in January 2027.

    About growth

    The strategic priorities grant (which is the bits of OfS funding that currently include the stuff on high-cost subjects) will be reformed – as highlighted in the last grant letter to OfS, and with the groundwork on data collection achieved via the reforms to HESES.

    Those of a certain vintage will recall the ability for students to leave their degree with a certificate (L4) after year one and a diploma (L5) after year two – there’s a consultation pending on making student support for traditional (level 6) degrees conditional on doing something similar. A part of the hope here is allowing transferability between providers, though there is nothing on facilitating this kind of transfer (something that English higher education has traditionally struggled with). This comes alongside the established focus on levels 4 and 5 in higher technical qualifications (HTQs) – the twist here is that OfS will be able to bestow HTQ awarding powers in the same way it does degree awarding powers (or, cynically, foundation degree awarding powers) – with the designation process for HTQ courses becoming more flexible.

    Providers get “clearer expectations” around involvement in Local Skills Improvement Plans (LSIPs), which will cover technical skills needs between levels 4 and 8. This will be supported by a market-monitoring function within Skills England which will spot gaps between supply and demand nationally and locally.

    There’s a restatement of some research announcements in this bit – the protection of overall funding, access to horizon europe, and the protection of curiosity-driven research (UKRI gets a strategic objective year), work with public sector research establishments, and the increase to the maximum stipend.

    On commercialisation and scale-up, some UKRI funding will pivot towards government priorities (as in the industrial strategy) and a rethink of the way innovation funding is used to drive growth. And universities are encouraged to develop civic plans that align with their strengths and priorities.

    Finally in this section we get some lines on international standing – again this is mostly restatement of stuff like the Global Talent Visa reforms, but adding a hint of a refresh to the International Education Strategy. Recruitment must be sustainable and not put providers at undue risk, and there will be tighter enforcement of visa approvals via strengthening requirements on universities.

    Quality

    Teaching quality remains a core agenda, with the paper noting that:

    Among students who found their university experience worse than they had expected, teaching quality was among the most commonly cited reasons. Improving transparency about course quality is essential.

    The government will “consider options” to increase the capacity of OfS to conduct quality investigations, with the hoped-for outcome being that it can respond more rapidly to identified risks. Again, when parliamentary time allows, OfS will gain additional powers to intervene in cases of low quality, including imposing limitations on student numbers.

    The plans consulted on last year, which would make larger franchise providers register with OfS in order to access funding, will go ahead – while OfS will prioritise franchise investigations ahead of getting strengthened statutory powers to intervene “decisively” on this issue including stronger powers of entry, and the ability to make interim sanctions. And there’s more to come on tackling abuse of the system by recruitment agents – sharpening up access to student finance, and reinforced investigative powers for OfS.

    White papers traditionally include a section on improving applicant information, and this one is no different: the government welcomes the offer rates and historic grades on UCAS, and wants to add graduate outcomes information and completion rates from Discover Uni to what is on offer there.

    The time-honoured system of external examiners – where academics from elsewhere assure the quality and standards of provision at a provider – is up for debate, with an evidence base being built on the “effectiveness or otherwise” of this approach to feed into an OfS programme of reform that will also include employer views as part of a wider look at degree awarding powers.

    And there’s a progress 8 style measure (basically something akin to learning gain) in the offing, with the government and OfS working together on this.

    Finally in this section, a section on freedom of speech on campus summarises the changes made to the measures in the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, adding a note on the tension between these duties and a right not to be threatened, harassed, or intimidated.

    What happens now

    There’s a lot to digest in this white paper, with a lot of the proposals themselves requiring extensive action and further development – and we’ve not even covered the broader post-16 skills plans here, such as the new V levels. What’s missing though is a defined legislative agenda or timescale – indeed, this is not a traditional white paper in that it is not presented for public consultation at all. In that sense it is closer to what the Labour manifesto originally promised, which was a comprehensive post-16 education strategy, and it’s probably in that vein it should be read.

    With that in mind, it’s probably best to view the overall direction of travel as locked in – assuming this government can stick around long enough to realise some of its ambitions in practice. But there is still a great deal of work to be done to put flesh on the bones of these various proposals – and while some of these plans may go against the traditional sector grain, figuring out how to make them work in practice offers an opportunity to look again at what bits of higher education are critical to preserve – and what hitherto sacred cows can safely be allowed to slide into obscurity.

    Join the authors and the rest of Team Wonkhe at the Festival of Higher Education on 11-12 November in London where we’ll be digesting the government’s agenda for HE alongside a multitude of sector experts and commentators. Find out more and book your ticket here. 

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  • We know the detail. But what’s the story?

    We know the detail. But what’s the story?

    If you’ve heard Jacqui Smith interviewed since she became minister, you’ll know that she’s been saying that the Skills and Post-16 White Paper has been nearly ready for quite some time.

    It may well be the case that most of the contents of the paper have been pretty much locked in for a good while, with others added to the work in progress as the need became apparent.

    And it isn’t just a Department for Education thing. Every part of government will have had an input, both during the formal “write round” that has just concluded and earlier in policy development. The launch will be in the government’s grid – lines will be agreed across Number 10 and the Cabinet Office.

    And there will be a story to tell. Which is where we find our problem.

    Big P

    The most common criticism leveled against Keir Starmer, by his own party more than anyone, is his inability to sell a big picture. Starmer, like many attracted to public policy and public service, is into details, implementation, and delivery. If five to ten years ago our politics was dominated by grand narratives (Brexit, the whole Boris Johnson thing, Liz Truss’ persecution complex), Sunak and Starmer both came to power with more than a whiff of “the grown ups are back in the room”. Delivery rules, ideology drools.

    There’s any amount of polling that suggests much of the frustration among voters is due to things just not working as well or as smoothly as they should. From getting an appointment with a GP, to getting support for a child struggling at school, to getting a dangerous pothole fixed it can feel like the UK is riven with structures and processes on the point of collapsing.

    A part of this is underinvestment – since 2010 funding for local government (which is responsible for the potholes and the pupil support) has collapsed, while growing funding for the NHS (which is responsible for the GP) has not covered increases in demand and has been blunted by numerous top-down reorganisations.

    But a part of this is an inability to do the hard yards on delivery, something which Starmer and Labour are keen to fix. Admirable intentions, but it is much harder to explain to people that we are at the start of a long, complex, and difficult process of renewal than to make absurd promises, stir up xenophobia, and have people believe that these days you can get arrested and put in jail just for saying you are English.

    Even delivery needs a story. Tony Blair, for all his myriad faults as a human being, was your archetypal get-you-one-that-does-both. But that is a rare skillset. The rest of us flounder making dull but important stuff sound interesting and inspiring.

    And so the story begins

    The opportunity mission in the Labour election manifesto highlighted a focus on improving the life chances of children, right the way through from pre-school to entering the workforce. In government, the formal measure of the success for this area of work is the proportion of young people in education or employment-with-training, and the number achieving higher level qualifications.

    Sounds like a set of indicators in need of a target? It doesn’t take a huge strategic leap to read across from this to the Prime Minister’s announcement at conference: a target of around 60 per cent (or two thirds, it all depends which announcement you read) of young people in higher education or a “gold standard” apprenticeship.

    That’s not a target that, if read strictly by the numbers, has much to do with “widening access” as traditionally described: there’s no sub-targets for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. For that we look at Bridget Phillipson’s preview of the decision to reintroduce targeted grants (ignoring for the moment the plan to fund them via an international student fee levy).

    But this is unlikely to be the only intervention that is aimed directly at widening access. We know now that V levels – a BTEC-esque option that will sit between very academic A levels and apprenticeship-like T levels – will add another option to the choices offered aged 16, hopefully keeping more people in education for longer.

    Even though the opportunity mission focuses on young people, we also know that the government is concerned with what we might call “adult skills”. Over in the economic growth mission is where find all the stuff about Skills England and training providers. What we don’t find – even though it by rights should be there – is the Lifelong Learning Entitlement, a Boris Johnson policy of letting adult learners access student loan style finance which ended up accidentally re-writing the entire basis of student loan finance.

    Another Johnson-era policy that plays in here are the Local Skills Improvement Plans (LSIPs), which help local employers ensure that their prospective employees are given the opportunity to develop the skills they need. Supposedly Skills England adds the national perspective on these local plans, helping to design identified skills needs into wider initiatives like apprenticeship standards and qualification design.

    Universities and higher education don’t exactly jump off the page of either of these missions. Accordingly, policy interventions in the sector have been minimal. The inflationary fee increase was a simple matter of letting existing information work in the way it was originally intended. The changes to implementation of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act was simply a matter of removing the actually insane components of an otherwise largely pointless piece of legislation.

    Vote reform

    But there was another early intervention – a letter from Secretary of State Bridget Phillipson that has become known as the “HE reform” agenda (not to be confused with the “HE reform” consultation from 2022, that almost established student number controls based on minimum eligibility requirements). It was a series of asks for the sector, perceived as a quid pro quo for the return of the inflationary fee increase.

    In essence this had five components. Let’s use the minister’s exact words:

    • Play a stronger role in expanding access and improving outcomes for disadvantaged students
    • Make a stronger contribution to economic growth
    • Play a greater civic role in their communities
    • Raise the bar further on teaching standards, to maintain and improve our world-leading reputation and drive out poor practice
    • Underpinning all of this needs to sit a sustained efficiency and reform programme

    What’s interesting here is the absence of targets. Phillipson wants a stronger role, a stronger contribution, a greater role, a raising of the bar – but how far and how high, and how will she know when she has what she wants? It is a fair guess that we are due some numbers on these aspirations.

    The other thing to pull out here is the relationship between the regulator and the government. In England, most of these HE reform requests involves work that sits under the Office for Students (I’m happy to accept written submissions suggesting that Research England has oversight on elements of economic growth and the civic role).

    A pattern that I’ve recently been noticing is that OfS and DfE to not appear to be moving in sync at the moment – a DfE consultation on franchise arrangements appeared shortly before a largely unconnected OfS consultation on the same topic, OfS appeared to be startled by the appearance of its own guidance letter, and the biggest thing OfS has done recently – the mega-consultation on quality – appears to have blindsided DfE.

    So achieving the HE reform objectives (however loosely specified) also involves regulatory reform. And that regulatory reform appears to be closely tied to the Behan review.

    Quality Behan-cement

    Towards the end of the last government it was open season on reviewing the Office for Students. The Department for Education conducted a (largely unhelpful) legislative review of the way HERA was working in 2022, which spurred the House of Lords Industry and Regulators committee to foreground some of the more egregious failings of the OfS. The Behan review, which built on the findings of both, was one of the periodic reviews of regulators that usually pass without notice – what was notable was that the review author proceeded to take over as interim chair after the sad loss of James Wharton from public life.

    Behan’s review was focused on making regulation work better – focusing on efficacy, accountability, governance, and efficiency. It is the source – for example – of the plans to bring together the Teaching Excellence Framework and the B3 conditions of registration into a single quality assurance system. This modified and expanded TEF will, in future, feed into the eligibility of providers to access certain funds and opportunities – in particular the ability to offer Lifelong Learning Entitlement modules.

    Much of Behan was predicated on changes to primary legislation – the contradictions and confusion within HERA was getting in the way of a streamlined regulatory approach. We’ve been over some of the possibilities of tidying up legislation on the site before – it’s niche stuff unlikely to raise pulses outside of Wonkhe’s most devoted readership. And it would be a brave government that promoted a glossy higher education and skills bill devoid entirely of policy – imagine, given the mess the sector is in, trying to front out legislative proposals that basically amount to letting the OfS board choose the chief executive rather than the secretary of state?

    The question of regulation has also hit the headlines with an onslaught of problems with franchising. Currently students can be registered at one provider and taught elsewhere, with the quality of that teaching (and the outcomes experienced by those students) falling outside of the OfS’ ambit. There are both OfS and DfE proposals designed to address this issue – a DfE consultation required that teaching partners over a certain size needing to be registered with OfS, and an OfS consultation called for new conditions of registration for registering partners.

    The frustration is palpable – with DfE recently called out by the courts for riding roughshod over due process in order to censure Oxford Business College, and the National Audit Office calling on OfS, DfE, and the Student Loans Company to get their act together in addressing instances of student loan fraud. The regulatory toolkit is simply not up to the job.

    Fun with funding

    OfS, meanwhile, has very much been thinking about funding – a quietly radical change to the collection rules for HESES (the means by which we get the student number information that underpins most of the remaining direct OfS grants), adding in some very detailed information on subjects, prefigures a forthcoming consultation on how it uses the money (just under £2bn) it still allocates for high-cost subjects and student premiums.

    Any subject based approach, when it appears, will surely be informed by the government’s own list of priority subjects – found (again) within the eligibility rules for the LLE, and ported across to the eligibility of some students from deprived backgrounds for new maintenance grants. For all the talk of a data-driven Skills England, and detailed information on precise employer demands, the list is broad. We’re broadly in STEM world, plus architecture (but not landscape gardening), nursing and allied health, and economics. And not medicine.

    Meanwhile, university finances have reached the stage where the only reliable source of income is via recruiting international students. This approach took a knock with changes to dependent visas for most students, but now the government has decided that it wants a slice via a levy – which will be used (in part) to support these new maintenance grants.

    With both provider and student finances at breaking point (genuine financial hardship, attrition, job losses, course cuts), there doesn’t appear to be any appetite for a meaningful rethink of funding in either case. Despite everyone yelling about nothing else since the pandemic, it appears to be the one thing that is definitely off the table in the short to medium term.

    Pieces of paper

    A white paper is a consultation – it is a selection box of policies and plans pulled together to present the next chapter of the government’s narratives on opportunities, skills, and the economy. It will certainly contain measures designed to address the knotty technical and implementation issues described above, but it also requires an element of vision.

    On one level, there is clearly a – very broad – skills vision. The language of opportunity, and of parity of respect for academic and vocational routes, is a rich and resonant one. It is no coincidence that every UK government for the past decade as used a version of this narrative, and it has been duplicated (with a few tweaks) across the ideological spectrum precisely because it is so powerful. However, an increasingly prominent component of this story has been positioned as a critique of the current state of affairs, and the plight of our universities and wider higher education sector. Despite the diversity of the sector, it is specifically universities – and a particular, largely inaccurate popular perception of universities – that are being seen as a problem on the way to a skills-led solution rather than an underfunded and struggling keystone.

    While the policies over every party have elements of this counter-narrative too – the Labour variant is perhaps kinder than the alternatives (see, for example, Badenoch). But it is not a full-throated defence of the sector. It is not simple or straightforward to draw together the various things Labour has done in the higher education space and tell a convincing story that includes a theory of change and a desired end state.

    So, while it is fairly straightforward to parse the hints and directions of travel that the past 18 months have brought into a series of likely next steps, the fact that none of these steps do much to inspire suggests that this can’t be the whole story. If it was, we’d be looking at a series of uncontroversial pieces of secondary legislation and some changes to the regulatory framework.

    The format of a white paper demands a little more.

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  • The PM’s announcement on higher level participation is a win for the HE sector

    The PM’s announcement on higher level participation is a win for the HE sector

    You could read “abolishing the 50 per cent participation target” as a vote of no-confidence in higher education, a knee-jerk appeal to culturally conservative working-class voters. But that would be both a political/tactical mistake and a fundamental misreading of the policy landscape.

    To recap: in his leader’s speech to Labour Party Conference on Tuesday, Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that two thirds of people under 25 should participate in higher level learning, whether in the form of academic, technical, or work-based training, with at least ten per cent pursuing technical education or apprenticeships by 2040.

    So let’s start by acknowledging, as DK does elsewhere on the site, that the 50 per cent participation target has a totemic status in public discourse about higher education that far outweighs its contemporary relevance. And, further, that party conference speeches are a time for broad strokes and vibes-based narrativising for the party faithful, and soundbites for the small segment of the public that is paying attention, not for detailed policy discussions.

    An analysis of Starmer’s speech on Labour List suggests, for example, that the new target signals a decisive break with New Labour, something that most younger voters, including many in the post-compulsory education sector, don’t give the proverbial crap about.

    True North

    What this announcement does is, finally, give the sector something positive to rally around. Universities UK advocated nearly exactly this target in its blueprint for the new government, almost exactly a year ago, suggesting that there should be a target of 70 per cent participation in tertiary education at level four and above by 2040. Setting aside the 3.333 percentage point difference, that’s a win, and a clear vote of confidence in the post-compulsory sector.

    Higher education is slowly recovering from its long-standing case of main character syndrome. Anyone reading the policy runes knows that the direction of travel is towards building a mixed tertiary economy, informed if not actively driven by skills needs data. That approach tallies with broader questions about the costs and financing of dominant models of (residential, full time) higher education, the capacity of the economy to absorb successive cohorts of graduates in ways that meet their expectations, and the problematic political implications of creating a hollowed out labour market in which it it is ever-more difficult to be economically or culturally secure without a degree.

    The difference between the last government and this one is that it’s trying to find a way to critique the equity and sustainability of all this without suggesting that higher education itself is somehow culturally suspect, or some kind of economic Ponzi scheme. Many in the sector have at times in recent years raged at the notion that in order to promote technical and work-based education options you have to attack “university” education. Clearly not only are both important but they are often pretty much the same exact thing.

    What has been missing hitherto, though, is any kind of clear sense from government about what it thinks the solution is. There have been signals about greater coordination, clarification of the roles of different kinds of institution, and some recent signals around the desirability of “specialisation” – and there’s been some hard knocks for higher education providers on funding. None of it adds up to much, with policy detail promised in the forthcoming post-16 education and skills white paper.

    Answers on a postcard

    But now, the essay question is clear: what will it take to deliver two-thirds higher level learning on that scale?

    And to answer that question, you need to look at both supply and demand. On the supply side, there’s indications that the market alone will struggle to deliver the diversity of offer that might be required, particularly where provision is untested, expensive, and risky. Coordination and collaboration could help to address some of those issues by creating scale and pooling risk, and in some areas of the country, or industries, there may be an appetite to start to tackle those challenges spontaneously. However, to achieve a meaningful step change, policy intervention may be required to give providers confidence that developing new provision is not going to ultimately damage their own sustainability.

    But it is on the demand side that the challenge really lies – and it’s worth noting that with nearly a million young people not in education, employment or training, the model in which exam results at age 16 or 18 determine your whole future is, objectively, whack. But you can offer all the tantalising innovative learning opportunities you want, if people feel they can’t afford it, or don’t have the time or energy to invest, or can’t see an outcome, or just don’t think it’ll be that interesting, or have to stop working to access it, they just won’t come. Far more thought has to be given to what might motivate young people to take up education and training opportunities, and the right kind of targeted funding put in place to make that real.

    The other big existential question is scaling work-based education opportunities. Lots of young people are interested in apprenticeships, and lots of higher education providers are keen to offer them; the challenge is about employers being able to accommodate them. It might be about looking to existing practice in teacher education or health education, or about reimagining how work-based learning should be configured and funded, but it’s going to take, probably, industry-specific workforce strategies that are simultaneously very robust on the education and skills needs while being somewhat agnostic on the delivery mechanism. There may need to be a gentle loosening of the conditions on which something is designated an apprenticeship.

    The point is, whatever the optics around “50 per cent participation” this moment should be an invigorating one, causing the sector’s finest minds to focus on what the answer to the question is. This is a sector that has always been in the business of changing lives. Now it’s time to show it can change how it thinks about how to do that.

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  • The LLE finally gets a Labour overhaul

    The LLE finally gets a Labour overhaul

    If you still imagined that the Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE) would mean that a student studying any module from any course would be eligible for 30 credits of funding, it’s long past time to disabuse yourself of that notion.

    Under the latest plans, eligibility only extends to short courses dealing with those subjects identified as national priorities – via a somewhat tenuous link to the industrial strategy – along with HTQ modules. Everything else in higher education will be funded by year of study, as is currently the case.

    If you were thinking that this latest round of changes – taking us even further away from the initial dreams of Boris Johnson (or even Philip Augar) – completes the long gestation of the LLE in full detail you will be disappointed. For instance, the credit transfer nettle has yet to be grasped – with a consultation due in early 2026, not far in advance of the September 2026 soft launch. And there are, as we shall see, a number of other issues still dangling.

    It’s a continuation of DfE’s gradual retreat from a universal system of funding that was supposed to transform the higher education landscape. No variable intensity, a vast reduction in modular availability – it just allows some of the short courses that universities and colleges already offer to be funded via the loan system (a measure, lest we forget, of dubious attractiveness to learners).

    A bridge to nowhere

    The Lifelong Learning Entitlement (originally known as the Lifelong Loan Entitlement) was announced by Prime Minister Boris Johnson on 29 September 2020, as a part of the government’s lifetime skills guarantee:

    we’ll expand and transform the funding system so it’s as easy to get a loan for a higher technical course as for a university degree, and we’ll enable FE colleges to access funding on the same terms as our most famous universities; and we’ll give everyone a flexible lifelong loan entitlement to four years of post-18 education – so adults will be able to retrain with high level technical courses, instead of being trapped in unemployment.

    Like most of Boris’ wheezes it was originally somebody else’s idea – in this case Philip Augar. He had a few more specifics:

    The government should introduce a single lifelong learning loan allowance for tuition loans at Levels 4, 5 and 6, available for adults aged 18 or over, without a publicly funded degree. This should be set, as it is now, as a financial amount equivalent to four years’ fulltime undergraduate degree funding. Learners should be able to access student finance for tuition fee and maintenance support for modules of credit-based Level 4, 5 and 6 qualifications. ELQ rules should be scrapped for those taking out loans for Levels 4, 5 and 6.

    But it makes more sense to think of the idea as being 100 per cent Boris in that it was a massive infrastructure initiative that he had no clue how to actually deliver (in all honesty, not much of Augar was deliverable either – perhaps that was the attraction). As has proved to be the case.

    As you were

    Let’s start by looking at what’s unchanged, following the latest revisions. The timeline for getting started remains as was: applications from September 2026 for courses and modules starting in January 2027. This still feels extremely optimistic. Plus – as has been the case for a while – a staggered rollout of standalone modules is planned, rather than an enormous platter of bitesize options spread out to pick from come next September.

    The use of the current plan 5 student loan model, with its 40-year term and nine per cent repayment rate above what is currently around minimum wage, is still there – with all the peculiarities this will inevitably engender. If anyone was expecting a large scale shake-up of the student finance system any time soon, this should serve as an enormous hint that no radically new model is arriving in the short to medium term.

    Also retained from DfE’s planning under the Conservatives is the system of “residual eligibility”, meaning how much loan is available to those who have already, for example, studied one undergraduate degree. You still get the equivalent of four years overall, though with lots of wrinkles.

    The aspiration for each member of the public to have an LLE personal account continues – this will still include, in theory, information on one’s loan balances, an application tracker, and advice and guidance on career planning.

    And in broad strokes the government’s rationale for the LLE persists: more flexible routes through tertiary education, support for upskilling and retraining throughout one’s career, and the promise of more learner mobility between institutions.

    Picking winners

    The LLE is replacing England’s entire student funding system, and so funding for full years of study at levels 4 to 6 – such as degrees or higher technical qualifications – will flow through it. In many cases, though, this is just a shift on paper.

    What’s always been the more significant change is how it will bring the funding of individual modules into scope, along with the resulting interplay between single modular courses and larger programmes of study in a learner’s lifelong journey.

    Modular provision that would be eligible had previously been defined as “modules of technical courses of clear value to employers” – this is now rejigged to:

    modules of higher technical qualifications, and level 4, 5 and 6 modules from full level 6 qualifications, in subject groups that address priority skills gaps and align with the government’s industrial strategy.

    We flagged this link between the LLE and the industrial strategy priority areas when the latter was published last month – and the updated LLE policy paper does say that DfE has worked with Skills England to assess skills priorities, though there is no detail on this.

    What we very much don’t get is a mapping between LLE subjects and the industrial strategy sectors (the IS-8), or the priority sub-sectors and their corresponding links to certain regions or clusters which is, y’know, what the industrial strategy is all about. Arguably the main bone thrown to the industrial strategy is the concept of the government “picking winners” – but note there is no stumping up of public funds to support this.

    So we get a list of which subject groups will be in scope for modular study:

    • computing
    • engineering
    • architecture, building and planning, excluding the landscape gardening subgroup
    • physics and astronomy
    • mathematical sciences
    • nursing and midwifery
    • allied health
    • chemistry
    • economics
    • health and social care.

    Common Academic Hierarchy (CAH) fans will be delighted to spot that this appears to have been done (with the curious landscape gardening exception) at the very top level. These are very broad subject groups, which will contain multiple subjects with questionable relevance to the industrial strategy.

    While on the face of it there is some ambiguity about whether this subject list refers to only level 6 qualifications, or to these and higher technical qualifications (HTQs), the accompanying provider preparation guide makes clear that the subject groups here are for level 6 qualifications only – and provision via HTQ modules covers many other subject areas, which in some cases overlap. This currently includes subjects such as business and administration, education and early years, legal and accounting, and many others – but these will need to go through the HTQ approval route.

    The provider preparation guide suggests that institutions should be looking at their current degree provision, working out where it aligns to the priority skills gaps areas that DfE has identified, and then proceeding from there in thinking about what could be modularised. All modular study, remember, needs to form part of an existing designated full course which the provider delivers – we’re a long way from some of the previous visions of universities coming up with new stand-alone bitesize offers.

    All the other funding eligibility rules for modular provision remain – they must have a single qualification level at level 4, 5 or 6, they must be at least 30 credits (though bundling up modules to meet that minimum is allowed), and a standardised transcript of some form to be determined must be delivered upon completion, to facilitate credit transfer.

    But there is one change to eligibility rules – modular provision must not be delivered through franchised arrangements. This had always sounded like a recipe for disaster. The government has been gradually setting its face against a lot of existing franchising activity, given concerns about quality and reports of fraud.

    Getting approved

    The previous plan for approving modules (outside of HTQs) for LLE eligibility was what was being labelled a “qualifications gateway”, which the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education consulted on last January. This terminology has been scrubbed entirely out of the policy paper now, with just a note that “we will set out details on how level 4 to 6 Ofqual regulated qualifications could enter the market and access LLE funding.”

    But there’s a new approval process in town – providers who are interested in delivering modular provision from January 2027 will need to submit an expression of interest, from this month.

    This process will involve an “assurance check” – seemingly run centrally by DfE, rather than Skills England as might have previously been expected. There’s a wonderful flowchart in the provider guide, which you may or may not be able to read depending on how enormous your screen is:

    That’s right – TEF! Providers with gold or silver will have access to a “simpler and quicker approval process” for modular provision. Those who do not will be asked to provide additional information around “readiness, capability and successful delivery of the parent course.”

    Hang on, you cry, doesn’t the fact a provider is registered with the Office for Students demonstrate that it has “readiness” and “capability” to deliver courses of any type? Well, yes, it does. It is possible that DfE simply doesn’t trust OfS to make this kind of judgement – which would point to a rather larger issue with higher education regulation – or it could be that this is a last gasp attempt to give TEF awards some regulatory relevance.

    This is also the case for those rated “good” or “outstanding” for Ofsted provision – and if Ofsted inspects your skills provision and you have a TEF award, they both need to make the grade. Now headline Ofsted assessments were supposed to disappear from September 2025, which makes this all a bit confusing.

    If you don’t deliver HTQs or appropriate level 6 qualifications, it’s noted that modular provision is anticipated to “gradually expand when appropriate to do so” and so you may, one day, come in line for eligibility.

    Regulatory issues

    One of the areas the previous version of the policy paper promised was further information on the regulation of modular funding. This, rather oddly, is no longer listed under “next steps”, given that the update we do get is relatively slim.

    What we might have expected was a follow-up to the Office for Students’ call for evidence on positive outcomes for students studying on a modular basis – a call for evidence which closed in November 2023, and we’ve heard little of since. As DK set out at the time, the quasi-consultation asked how things like the B3 conditions could apply to individual modules, and the regulator’s initial thinking seemed to be that completion would still be a valuable metric for regulation, as would progression – though exactly how progression was assessed would need to be refined.

    There’s still no news on this complicated issue. The new section of regulation focuses more on registration categories, while noting that DfE “will refine the existing regulatory framework to ensure it is proportionate, is targeted [and] supports a high quality, flexible system.” If you were thinking that a whole new approach to learning would need a new oversight framework, the direction of travel suggests not.

    The bigger regulatory news is that, likely to the surprise of few, the idea of having a third registration category for smaller providers offering level 4 and 5 qualifications has been scrapped. Instead the government will extend the current system of advanced learner loan funding for levels 4 to 6 until the end of summer 2030. This will give unregistered providers more time to apply for OfS registration in one of the two existing categories, though OfS is scheduled to consult in autumn 2025 on proposals to disapply some conditions of registration for providers in the further education statutory sector (which already has a regulator looking after most of this stuff).

    Maintenance chunks

    As expected, student maintenance support will be available on a pro-rata basis (depending on course, location, and personal circumstances) in an equivalent way to the existing undergraduate offer. Because this support is intended to deal with “living costs”, DfE has decided to continue to restrict availability to students attending in person – there’s nothing for online or distance learning.

    Additional targeted grants (most likely this just refers to existing disabled students’ allowance and such like) will still be available – but there’s more to come on this later this year, alongside more guidance on maintenance generally. We can perhaps hope that a forthcoming announcement modifying the decades-old system (or even just the parental income thresholds) is playing a part in this delay.

    That feeling of entitlements

    Another area where things have mostly stayed the same is the personal entitlement for tuition fee funding equivalent to four full-time years (480 credits, currently £38,140) of traditional study – with the welcome clarification that where a provider charges less than the maximum the cash value rather than the credit value will be deducted from the total. Maximum borrowing is for 180 credits a year (which would just about cover a year of an accelerated degree). And for existing graduates (with the frankly wild caveats as before) there will be an entitlement to funding equivalent to unused residual credits.

    But what happens when your balance reaches £0? No more learning for you? Not quite – a “priority additional entitlement” may be available (fees plus maintenance) in order to complete a full course in a small number of subjects (medicine, dentistry, nursing and midwifery, allied health professions, initial teacher training, social work).

    For those who follow career paths that require five years or more of study (veterinary surgery, architecture part 2, an integrated masters in Scotland) there will be a “special additional entitlement” of up to two years, again covering fees and maintenance. There’s also additional entitlements for those who take foundation years, placement years, or study abroad years. It’s by-and-large a smoothing-out of some of the unintended consequences with existing provision where representations had been made.

    Plus, importantly, the government will now play a part in mitigating circumstances – if you are resitting a year because of “compelling personal reasons” (illness, bereavement) you will have the costs of your study covered. And resits on longer courses will be covered anyway.

    The credit transfer question

    “The LLE and modular provision will provide a pathway to strengthen opportunities for credit transfer and learner mobility,” the new version of the paper states. While no-one would deny that the LLE could be a “pathway to strengthen opportunities,” especially given how tepid the phrasing is, there has still been essentially no progress on the thorny question of credit transfer.

    The largely new section on “recognition of prior learning, credit transfer, and record of learning” sets out aspirational areas where the government thinks it can work collaboratively with the sector – to promote pathways between providers, to improve guidance for both incoming and outgoing learners, and to generally square the recognition of prior learning circle despite all the intractable problems therein.

    Interestingly, DfE also wants institutions to embed all this into “broader strategies for widening access”. It’s not immediately clear how this will come off – but we get the note that this year will bring an update on “proposed changes that will start to embed this flexibility and greater learner mobility across LLE funded provision.” This might be a reference to the post-16 education and skills white paper.

    To facilitate all this flexibility, DfE had previously said it would be introducing a “standardised transcript template.” Tellingly, this has now been revised down to “a standardised transcript as part of modular funding designation.” So it appears the plan is now to look at enforcing this standardisation for the (potentially scant) modular provision that the LLE will generate, while sidestepping the much bigger question of how portability between modules and larger qualifications including degrees will work. This is a substantial scaling down in ambition – and yet it’s still a complicated thing to get agreed implemented in little over a year.

    What’s next

    As is probably coming across, there is still an awful lot yet to be confirmed. Secondary legislation to implement the LLE fee limits and funding system still needs to be laid. Fee loan limits for non-fee capped provision are pending confirmation. The Student Loans Company needs to get its systems ready.

    There will be another consultation too, in addition to OfS’ further education one. While it’s not mentioned in the updated policy paper, the accompanying provider preparation guide reveals that the Department for Education will consult on “learner mobility across LLE-funded provision in early 2026” (maybe this will be the moment when credit transfer finally gets sorted out once and for all). Opening a consultation in early 2026 when big chunks of the whole shebang are supposed to be ready to go that September does not necessarily inspire confidence.

    And the drip-by-drip announcements about the policy plumbing of the LLE mean that it’s a long time since the government has really restated its belief that there is demand out there for modular provision, or committed to working to drum some up. Really it’s baffling why this week’s announcements haven’t been packaged up with the skills white paper, as surely they must form part of a wider vision. Some clarity within this about overlaps and interplay with the apprenticeship levy would have been welcome too.

    The provider preparation guide entreats institutions to start thinking about how they will market modular provision, which is a tricky question given the absence of demand that pilots have demonstrated. But one of the examples given is particularly problematic:

    if you seek to target mature students, do you need to start building relationships with local employers and/or recruitment agents, rather than only relying on existing recruitment channels?

    This isn’t a new addition to the guidance – but since the last update, Bridget Phillipson has told Parliament that the government will “take immediate action on the use of agents to recruit students,” adding that “the government can see no legitimate role for domestic agents in the recruitment of UK students,” following the Sunday Times franchising investigation fallout. So DfE is at the same time banning the use of domestic agents – or at least it said it would – while acknowledging that recruitment to modular provision might be tricky without them.

    It’s of a piece with much of the preparation guide – the responsibility to iron out the holes in the LLE’s business case is being passed onto providers. Supposedly over the rest of the year universities and colleges should be reviewing everything from accommodation to wrap-around support, while building up relationships with employers and potentially rewriting their academic regulations. All while plenty remains unclear at the sector level. It would be unsurprising to see providers reluctant to leap into the approvals process right away, and instead assess how others fare.

    Given all this, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the ambition of the LLE has diminished a little bit each time the policies around it have been updated. We’re a long way from where we started.

    Probably the most damning assessment you could make is that, were Labour to have opted to cancel the whole LLE and just allow students to take out loans for a handful of higher education short courses tenuously linked to industrial strategy priorities, the sector would be in a very similar situation to the one it is in now. And – given clear indications of lack of student demand, and common sense assessments of the general public’s appetite for more tuition fee debt wrapped up in confusing bitesize-but-lifelong repayment obligations – few would think it was a good idea.

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  • How Labour’s 10-year health plan for England joins up with higher education and research

    How Labour’s 10-year health plan for England joins up with higher education and research

    The government wants to reinvent the NHS (in England) through three radical shifts – hospital to community, analogue to digital, and sickness to prevention.

    Whether like the chief executive of the NHS you believe Labour’s 10-year health plan for England is about creating “energy and enthusiasm”, whether like the secretary of state you believe this is about building a NHS which is about “the future and a fairer Britain,” or whether across its 168 pages you find the government’s default to techno-optimism, AI will solve everything, one more dataset will fix public services, approach to governance to be somewhere between naive and unduly optimistic, it is clear that the NHS is expected to change and do so quickly.

    This is a plan that is as much about the reorganisation of the economy as it is about health. It is about how health services can get people into work, it is a guide to economic growth through innovation in life sciences, it is a lament for the skills needed and the skills not yet thought about for the future of the NHS.

    Elsewhere on the site, Jim Dickinson looks at the (lack of) implications for students as group with health needs – here we look at the implications for education, universities, and the wider knowledge economy.

    Workforce modelling

    One of the premises of the plan is that the 2023 Conservative long-term workforce plan was a mistake. The NHS clearly cannot go on as it currently is, and to facilitate this transformation a “very different kind of workforce strategy” is needed:

    Until 2023, [the NHS] had never published a long-term workforce plan. The one it did publish did little more than extrapolate from past trends into the future: concluding there was no alternative than continuation of our current care model, supported by an inexorable growth in headcount, mostly working in acute settings.

    A new workforce place is being put together, to appear “later this year” and taking a “decidedly different approach”:

    Instead of asking ‘how many staff do we need to maintain our current care model over the next 10 years?’, it will ask ‘given our reform plan, what workforce do we need, what should they do, where should they be deployed and what skills should they have?’

    The bottom line is that, therefore, “there will be fewer staff in the NHS in 2035 than projected by the 2023 workforce plan” – but these staff will have better conditions, better training, and “more exciting roles”.

    So one immediate question for universities in England is what this reduced staffing target means for recruitment onto medical, nursing and allied health degrees. Places have been expanding, and under previous plans were set to expand at growing rates in the coming years, including a doubling of medical school places by 2035. There were questions about how optimistic some of the objectives were – the National Audit Office last year criticised NHS England for not having assessed the feasibility of expanding places, in light of issues like attrition rates and the need to invest in clinical placement infrastructure.

    We won’t get a clear answer of what Labour is proposing until the new workforce plan emerges – especially as there is an accompanying aspiration in today’s plan to reduce the NHS’ dependence on international recruitment. But there are some clear directions of travel. Creating more apprenticeships gets a mention – though of course not at level 7 – but the key theme is a tight link between growing medical student numbers and widening participation:

    Expansion of medical school places will be targeted at medical schools with a proven track record of widening participation… The admissions process to medical school will be improved with better information, signposting and support for applicants, and more systematic use of contextual admissions.

    This is accompanied by endorsement of the Sutton Trust’s recent research into access disparities. And in one of those “holding universities to account” measures that everyone is so keen on, part of reinforcing this link will be done via work with the Department for Education to “publish data on the relevant background of university entrants, starting with medicine.” If you are thinking that we already did that – yes we did. The UK-wide HESA widening participation performance indicator was last published in 2022 – each regulator now has their own version (for example this from the Office for Students) which doesn’t quite do the same thing.

    Education and students

    Of course, creating more pathways into working in the NHS is one mechanism to grow its workforce. The other is to unblock current pathways that prevent people from getting into and getting on with their chosen careers in health.

    For example, there is a (somewhat tepid) commitment on student support: the plan commits to “explore options” on improving the financial support on offer to medical students from the lowest socioeconomic backgrounds.

    For nursing students, the offer is slimmer still – a focus on the “financial obstacles to learning”, including faster reimbursement of placement expenses, and tackling the time lag between completing a course and being able to start work. This latter measure will involve working with higher education institutions to revise the current approach to course completion confirmation, and is billed for September 2026. The Royal College of Nursing has suggested that these “modest” changes go nowhere near far enough.

    Nursing and midwifery attrition also comes under scrutiny – the government spots that reducing the rate of non-continuation by a percentage point would result in the equivalent of 300 more nurses and midwives joining the NHS each year. But rather than looking deeper at why this is a growing issue, the buck is handed over to education providers to “urgently address attrition rates.”

    Elsewhere the interventions into education provision are more substantial. There’s an already ongoing review of medical training for NHS staff, due to report imminently. On top of this, the plan sets out how the next three years will see an “overhaul” of education and training curricula, to “future-proof” the workforce. There’s lots of talk about faster changes to course content as and when needed, to reflect changes in how the NHS will operate. This comes with a warning:

    Where existing providers are unable to move at the right pace, we may look to different institutions to ensure that the education market is responsive to employer needs.

    Clinical placement tariffs for undergraduate and postgraduate medicine will be reformed – the plan suggests the tariff system currently “provides limited ability to target funding at training where it is most needed to modernise delivery,” and wants to do more in community settings and make better use of simulation. There will also be expansion of clinical educator capacity, though this will be “targeted” (which is often code for limited).

    And course lengths could fall – the plan promises to “work with higher education institutions and the professional regulators as they review course length in light of technological developments and a transition to lifelong rather than static training.” While this does not explicitly suggest shorter medical and nursing programmes – and a consequent growth in provision aimed at professionals – the preference is pretty obvious.

    On that last point every member of NHS staff will get their own “personalised career coaching and development plan” which will come alongside the development of “advanced practice models” for nurses (and all the other professional roles in the NHS: radiographers, pharmacists, and the like).

    Data and (wider) employment

    The plan stretches much wider than simply making commitments on training though and, as the plan makes clear, if the answer isn’t always going to be more money there has to be more efficiency.

    There’s a fascinating set of commitments linking health and work – one of those things that feel clunky and obvious until you note that “getting the long-term sick back into work” has just been a soundbite with punitive vibes until now.

    Of course, everything has a slightly cringeworthy name – so NHS Accelerators will support local NHS services to have an “impact on people’s work status”, something that may grow into specific and measurable outcomes linking to economic inactivity and unemployment and link in other local government partners. And health support in the traditional sense will link with wider holistic support (as set out in the Pathways to Work green paper) for people with disabilities.

    There’s also a set of commitments on understanding and supporting the mental health needs of young people – although the focus is on schools and colleges, there is an expectation that universities will play a part in a forthcoming National Youth Strategy (due from the Department of Culture, Media, and Sport “this summer”) which will cover support for “mental health, wellbeing, and the ability to develop positive social connections.”

    All these joined up services will need joined up data, so happy news, too, for those looking for wrap-around support in transitions between educational phases – there will be a single unique identifier for young people: the NHS number. And for fans of learner analytics, a similar approach (with a sprinkling of genomics) will “tell [the NHS] the likelihood of a person developing a condition before it occurs, support early detection of disease, and enable personalised prevention and treatment”.

    For some time, universities and other trusted partners have benefited from access to deidentified NHS healthcare administrative data via ADRUK – which has been used for everything from developing new medicine to understanding health policy. This will be joined by a new commercially-focused Health Data Research Service (HDRS) backed by the Wellcome Trust. This is not a new announcement, but the slant here is that it will support the private sector – and as such there will be efforts to “make sure the NHS receives a fair deal for providing access”, which could include a mix of access charges and equity stakes in new developments.

    Research, research, research

    In effect, the government’s proposals set out how improving the conditions, configurations, and coordination of the NHS workforce, and the information provided to them and their partners, can improve healthcare. The next challenge then is targeting the right kinds of information in the right places, and this depends on the quality of research the NHS can access, make use of, and produce.

    The health of the nation does not begin and end at the hospital door. As The King’s Fund points out, “we can’t duck the reality that we are an international outlier with stagnating life expectancy and with millions living many years of life in poor health.” The point of this plan is not only about making health services better but about narrowing health inequalities and using life sciences research to grow the economy.

    The plan talks about making up for a “lost decade” of life sciences research. In doing so, it cites an IPPR report (the author is now DHSC’s lead strategy advisor) which demonstrates that the global research spend on life sciences in the UK has reduced and that this has had an impact on life sciences GVA. Following this line of thought suggests that if the UK had maintained levels of investment the economy would have got bigger, people’s lives would have been better and because of the link between poverty and ill health, the NHS would be under less pressure.

    The issue with this citation is that the figures used are from 2011–16 and some of the remedies, like association to Horizon Europe, are things the UK has done. Though the plan makes clear that “the era of the NHS’ answer always being ‘more money, never reform’ is over,” it is in fact the case that the government has ploughed record levels of public money into R&D without fundamental reform to the research ecosystem. The premise that economic growth can be spurred by research and leads to better health outcomes is correct – but it isn’t necessary to reference research carried out in 2019 to make the case.

    This isn’t merely an annoyance – it speaks to a wider challenge within the plan which oscillates widely between the optimism that “all hospitals will be fully AI-enabled” within the next ten years (80 per cent of hospitals were still using pagers in 2023 despite their ban in 2019), and the obviously sensible commitment to establish Health Innovation Zones which will bring health partners within a devolved framework to experiment in service innovation.

    The fundamental challenge facing innovation within health is the diffusion of priorities. There are both a lot of things the NHS and life science researchers might focus their time on, and a lot of layers of bureaucracies that inhibit research. The plan attempts to organise research priorities around five “big bets” (read missions but not quite missions). These include the use of health data, the use of AI (again), personalised health, wearables, and the use of robots. One of the mechanisms for aligning resources will be:

    a new bidding process for new Global Institutes. Supported by NIHR funding, these institutes will be expected to marshal the assets of a place – industry, universities, the NHS – to drive genuine global leadership on research and translation.

    It’s very industrial strategy – the government is setting out big ideas with some incentives, and hoping the public and private sector follows.

    There are some more structural changes to research aside from the political rhetoric. Significantly, there is a proposal to change the funding approaches of the Medical Research Council and National Institute for Health and Care Research to pivot funding toward “prevention, detection and treatment of longterm conditions”. The hope is this approach will drive private investment. Again, like the industrial strategy, the rationale is that the state can be an enabling force for growing the economy.

    Ten years’ time

    The ten year plan, if it is to mean anything, has to be focused on delivering a different kind of health service. The fundamental shift is about moving toward personalised community orientated care. The concern is that the plan is light on delivery, which would tally with reports that a ninth chapter on delivery is missing all together.

    The NHS is stuck in a forever cycle of reform, failing to reform, entering crises, and then being bailed out from crises. The mechanisms to break the cycle includes changes to the workforce, new skills provision, using data differently, and reorientating life sciences research toward prevention and economic growth.

    The higher education sector, research institutes, and companies working in research are not only central to the new vision of a NHS but with the amount of investment placed on their capacity to bring change they are no less than the midwives of it. The government’s biggest bet is that it can grow the economy, improve people’s lives, and in doing so reduce pressure on public services. Its biggest risk is that it believes it can do this without fundamental reform to higher education or research as well.

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  • Your 2025 higher education policy almanac

    Your 2025 higher education policy almanac

    Well, it’s January again.

    The early months of last year were dominated by the Conservatives’ slow swan dive into electoral oblivion, and then we got a general election that saw little serious discussion of the sector’s future, aside from the trotting out of a few old canards.

    And since Labour took power in July, there have been two broad phases: an initial “these things take time” framing in which universities – as well as many other groups and industries – were asked to be patient. In November we got the tuition fee uplift in England (in cash terms, for one year) and news of a bigger reform plan due next summer. A little movement, but in grand terms it was still can-kicking. Even the concrete announcements we’ve had, such as on level 7 apprenticeships, have not been accompanied by detailed policy papers or formal consultations.

    There’s reason to think that 2025 will have more for wonks to get their teeth into. There’s plenty pending, promised, or otherwise pretty damn urgent. So the below is an attempt to reckon with absolutely everything we know is on its way that matters for HE. Please charitably ascribe any oversights to a post-holidays sugar crash on my part rather than wilfully turning a blind eye, and let me know what I’ve missed in the comments.

    Big ticket items

    In Westminster politics, the first half of next year is going to be completely dominated by the spending review, which will set departmental budgets for three financial years (2026–29) as well as lay out a five-year programme of capital spending. It has always been described as being “in the spring”, but recent reports suggest that Labour will fly as close to the summer solstice as they can with this definition, so make sure you’ve got some free time in June to deal with the fallout.

    If what we read in the papers is to be believed, what is – counterintuitively – the default policy of inflation-linked tuition fees will be confirmed for England at this point, taking us up over £10,000 a year by the end of the Parliament.

    This is also when we’ll hear more about the government’s plans for ten-year R&D budgets. Attendees of the 2023 Labour conference may recall science secretary Peter Kyle promising a decade of confirmed funding for UKRI and ARIA – this commitment has been repeatedly qualified since then, partly due to issues of practicality (given that it’s not a ten-year spending review) and partly due to a question mark over whether fixing research spending in this way is really a good idea. It’s likely to be restricted now to “specific R&D activities” – the (much) bigger question will be around levels of investment in R&D. Plus we’ll see to what extent the government really wants to commit to linking research and its missions – last autumn brought only a small pot of cash for this in 2025–26.

    Also due alongside the spending review is “further detail and plans for delivery” for the Lifelong Learning Entitlement – so don’t expect to hear much more before then, though the delayed commencement in 2027 makes the need for information marginally less pressing. And the finalised industrial strategy will also arrive, “aligned with” (and likely published together with) the spending review, laying out specific sector plans for areas like the creative industries, the life sciences, and professional services. Once complete, the idea is that these plans can then inform Skills England’s work, and potentially migration policy – it’s all very ambitious.

    The HE reform announcement in England that we’ve been promised for “the summer” will land – it appears – fairly hot on the heels of the spending review settlements, and any money needed for it will need to have been allocated already, or at least tucked in to Office for Budgetary Responsibility (OBR) projections in some way. On the topic of the OBR, its spring forecast is due on 26 March – there are rumblings that its revised projections could spell fiscal trouble for the government.

    There are also clear indications that the HE reform statement will be preceded, or possibly accompanied, by a review of some kind. There have been rumours of a panel in place, and the indications are that this will fly under the radar somewhat and happen quickly – think Becky Francis’ curriculum review or Lord Darzi’s NHS audit, rather than a grand commission in the traditional “major review” style we have become used to.

    Around the sector

    Part of the Westminster government’s reform agenda is predicated on the sector coming up with ideas itself, which may end up drawing quite a lot on Universities UK’s blueprint from back in September. UUK’s own “efficiency and transformation taskforce” will be busy putting out recommendations on business models and collaboration, with the endorsement of education secretary Bridget Phillipson – “all options are on the table,” we are told, with plenty of policy debate likely to ensue once publications begin to appear.

    With many universities in poor financial shape, the search for longer-term sustainability will likely be derailed at regular intervals by news of redundancies and course closures. National industrial action is a possibility, though there are real questions around the willingness of struggling union members to take action on pay at this point. Local disputes will continue to flare up. Alongside this we have a renewed push for newer English universities to be exempted from the Teachers’ Pension Scheme due to the massively increased costs it is now carrying, a move which would substantially inflame industrial relations if it came to pass.

    And looming over all of this is the possibility of a disorderly market exit, and the question of whether the government has a viable plan in place to step in if a large institution were to hit the wall. All the other policy developments we are highlighting here could be hugely complicated by a sudden shock to the system and what is likely to be a political rather than a strategic response.

    The world of regulation

    There’s a lot to look out for from the Office for Students, from the appointment of a new permanent chair down (interviews are being held this month).

    There’s the ongoing consultation on a new strategy, the continuing fallout from the temporary closure of the register (this should supposedly also bring new proposals on improvements to the registration process), whispers of a more “integrated approach” to quality and whatever that means for the TEF, and a greater regional focus to access and participation.

    We should start getting assessment reports for the second round of quality investigations (where franchising and foundation years will be a focus) as well as the belated release of those grade inflation investigations that were announced on 2 September 2022. We’re waiting for consultation responses on a new approach to public grant funding and even on LLE regulation, though you can’t blame them for waiting to see what exactly the government is planning with this one.

    According to last summer’s business plan, there should also be consultations of potential new initial conditions of registration on both management and governance, and consumer protection. And this year’s National Student Survey will have a sexual misconduct questionnaire appended – though it’s not clear at time of writing to what extent the results will be made public.

    Over in Wales, Medr is taking shape, with a finalised strategic plan due to have been submitted to the Welsh government for approval just before the Christmas break – we should hear more of this soon, along with the consultation response.

    And if all that sounds like a lot, in Scotland we are due a Post-School Education Reform Bill at some point in the 2024–25 parliamentary session, which will make big changes to how the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) and Student Awards Agency Scotland operate. A consultation which closed in September asked stakeholders for thoughts on what the funding agency landscape should look like – we haven’t heard much since then. The sector is keen to stress the importance of universities retaining their autonomy, whatever happens – legislative passage could see MSPs push for new duties on the SFC.

    We’ve been aware for a long time that the Office for National Statistics is undertaking a review into whether higher education should be seen as “public sector” in the national accounts – it’s now been slightly rejigged into a review of the statistical classification of “the transactions in which UK universities engage.” For what is a very technical definition, an eye over the recent travails of the FE sector suggest that there are potential implications for everything from procurement to senior staff pay. The long delayed work will kick off early in 2025.

    The research agenda

    What little research policy we’ve seen come out of the new government so far has been limited to haggling over budgets and science minister Patrick Vallance stressing that ministers should not meddle in university research. There’s no reason to think we will get big policy pronouncements out of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, which feels more interested in the tech and digital side of its remit, both legislatively and aesthetically. But there’s lots going on around the margins that could end up being quite consequential.

    First up we have the appointment of a new UKRI chief executive, where there’s already evidence the new minister has been having a think about longer term strategic direction. While the new roleholder won’t take up office until June, we should get news of the appointment fairly soon.

    In the Research Excellence Framework world, the “modular” approach to releasing different policies on a staggered timetable will see the release of the volume measure policy (imminently) and the contribution to knowledge and understanding policy (scheduled for the summer). The more contentious people, culture and environment pilot will continue throughout the year, with criteria and definitions due for the winter – any slippage on this will likely provoke controversy.

    At UKRI, January will bring an update on its work reviewing how PGR stipends are set (as well as the stipend level for 2025–26). Elsewhere, the ongoing National Audit Office work looking at UKRI grants and loans could be a wildcard – it’s due to report in spring 2025 – and at the very least is a moment where the government will need to comment on how the research funding system is operating. Research England is also thinking about the current state of research infrastructure, via its condition of the estate survey, and how the sector’s financial challenges are affecting research – for both of these pieces of ongoing work, it’s doubtful that much will be shared publicly.

    Further afield, a European Commission proposal for the successor to Horizon Europe is due midway through the year, preceded by an interim evaluation of the current funding programme which will likely give an indication of its plans. We will also get regulations for the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme in the new year – the measures, which will speak to research security, are now expected to come into effect in the summer. It’s been reported that the government is resisting calls to put China on the “enhanced tier” of the scheme, a move that would have greatly complicated UK-China academic partnerships. On a related note, the government has quietly been conducting a “China audit” – this will be released in the coming months, and in theory will spell out the policy areas where closer ties will be permitted.

    Finally, the House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee will be conducting a timely inquiry into regional R&D, which should be a good opportunity for some more insight into how the government’s English devolution-related plans for more mayoral involvement in the research system will come together.

    International

    If you had to pick a policy area that will have the biggest macro impacts on the sector in 2025, you could do a lot worse than opt for international recruitment (you would arguably have been proved right if you’d chosen it in any of the last few years).

    Two big policy items are on their way here: a legal migration white paper, spelling out how the government will fulfil its electoral promise to bring net migration down. And a revised international education strategy (IES), which we’re told is coming “early spring” – whether it will appear before, after, or alongside the white paper remains to be seen, but could be significant.

    The big questions here are whether the government will put a recruitment target on the face of the strategy – the aspiration for 600,000 students in the last one ended up coming back to haunt the Conservatives among their own base – and what the plan for education exports targets might be. But there are other areas we could see movement, such as on post-study work, where some in the sector seem hopeful that a little improvement could be on offer, despite the enormous political pushback the Graduate route has faced over the last couple of years. It feels like an outside bet.

    More important to keep an eye on will be whether some kind of arrangement is arrived at with net migration statistics – we know that the Office for National Statistics is looking at how estimates excluding students could be arrived at, and it’s been on the higher education sector’s wishlist for years.

    If it did come to pass, the devil would very much be in the detail – the Migration Advisory Committee annual report has already been noting the contribution that students make to long-term net migration, and Starmerite think tank Labour Together’s recent proposal is for visa routes such as Skilled Worker and Graduate to have multi-year targets, even if the Student visa does not. Put like that, it sounds like a recipe for universities to recruit pretty freely but for students’ post-study options to remain a political football – the seeming lack of student involvement in the IES review would appear all the more glaring in this case. The Universities UK blueprint did promise a kind of quid pro quo on responsible international recruitment, and it has been notable that government ministers have stressed the importance of housing availability when the question has come up in Parliament recently.

    Whatever comes out of it, it looks clear that the Home Office will continue to toe a careful line on student visas, and continue to implement the last government’s Graduate route review response. The use of “action plans” by UKVI for certain providers will continue, even if there is no substantive public comment from the Home Office about what these are and why they are being imposed. And there will also be a review of English language self-assessment policies over the next few months, “driven by growing concern around underlying reasons for reports of students being picked up at the border or entering UKHE with low levels of English” (in UUKi’s words). It’s unlikely much will be shared publicly about these, but they are items to watch, especially in the event that there is further negative publicity about international students in the media.

    It’s worth stressing that developments in migration and visa policy do not only affect students – the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee is next week highlighting the interplay between visas and international researchers, and there are ongoing issues such as the future of the family visa income threshold where the government will eventually need to take a position.

    And despite all this policy in play, the three most significant factors for future international recruitment with likely be the Australian federal election – where the incumbent government’s attempts to impose number caps have been thwarted by an opposition that wants bigger caps – the Canadian election – which could happen at any minute if Justin Trudeau is forced out, and where the Conservatives are strongly favoured to take power – and the impact of Donald Trump on the USA, where universities are already reportedly asking international students to return before he takes office. All these things have the potential to greatly benefit the UK “market”.

    Skills, skills, skills

    Before we get any HE reform news out of Westminster, there’s going to be policy elsewhere in the post-compulsory system, with Skills England gearing up for action – we’ll learn the appointments of chief executive and permanent chair pretty soon – and various policy pronouncements at this end of the tertiary sector are overdue.

    Probably the most impactful for higher education is confirmation about exactly what is happening with the apprenticeship levy, both in wider terms of the planned additional flexibility for non-apprentice courses (this will be less than the 50 per cent originally proposed… at least probably), and for the “defunding” of level 7 apprenticeships.

    Many universities are big operators in this space, and it appears that most if not all of these programmes will be removed from the levy’s scope (“a significant number” is the most recent framing from the government). Over Christmas the Telegraph reported that the much-feted doctor apprenticeship is now “paused in perpetuity”. We should get the full picture very soon, as well as the much-awaited post-16 strategy, which you would hope would give a decent insight into the government’s wider vision for tertiary education. Though it may not.

    The defunding of level 7 apprenticeships is also relevant for those higher education institutions that have been spending their levy contributions on such courses for their staff as part of their professional development offer. DfE assures us all that employers are more than welcome to pay for them using different funds, “where they feel they provide a good return on their investment.”

    Our world in data

    We’re getting the outcome of the Data Futures review soon! There may be some lessons to learn about programme management and platform delivery, which could play out as a shared commitment to improving processes or as an unedifying multi-agency row. Whatever the case, this year’s HESA Student data will arrive later than usual – “in the spring, earlier than last year’s August publication but later than the January release date achieved in previous years.” Whether this is spring as in daffodils, or spring as in spending review, remains to be seen – but the delay (and issues with data quality as we saw last year) will have a knock on effect on data releases elsewhere, once again.

    At the end of this month we are getting HESA Staff data for 2023–24. The headline figures from last year’s release did get quoted the odd time by the previous government – in answer to questions about the impact of redundancies and cuts, it would occasionally be pointed out by ministers that (academic) staff numbers were still rising when you look at the sector as a whole. These figures won’t show the impact of this academic year’s cuts, however.

    Of course, elsewhere we have the usual releases which make up the HE wonk’s annual working rhythm. UCAS end-of-cycle numbers, at provider level, are due out at the end of January, and further down the line (probably around spending review time!) we have HESA Finance data and the Office for Students’ accompanying financial sustainability report, which will likely once again be a moment of maximum attention for higher education’s bottom line.

    One other piece of data we are getting this spring is a new ONS release on student suicides. This will come alongside the independent review commissioned by the last government, and whatever the findings is likely to generate a lot of press coverage and renewed pushes from campaign groups and opposition parties for a statutory duty of care. Early indications from the current government is that they are happy with the voluntary, sector-led approach to mental health – but things can change.

    Elsewhere in government

    It’s amazing it’s taken us this long to get to it, but probably the biggest, most controversial item on DfE’s to-do list is a decision on the fate of the free speech act and its associated provisions and complaints scheme. The Free Speech Union has its day in court on 23 January as part of a legal challenge over the pausing of the bill’s commencement – it’s just possible that the government will try to get a decision out before then. Or it could all drag on intractably for several more months, very much in keeping with the legislation’s passage through Parliament.

    Another hugely consequential move which we may see from DfE this month is the launch of a consultation on proposals to “strengthen oversight of partnership delivery in higher education” in conjunction with OfS. The department “will be developing options for legislative change, if required,” the Public Accounts Committee was told back in September, with a target date of January 2025 for an update.

    We’re due impact assessments and regulations for the tuition fee and maintenance “increases”, which should also involve a government pronouncement on how much the national insurance increase will cost the sector. And while it’s not higher education business, the soon-to-appear curriculum review (covering the curriculum in England from key stage 1 to key stage 5) will have long-term consequences for the wider education system – as well as likely sparking further backlash among those worried about it recklessly promoting diversity and risking PISA scores.

    Elsewhere in Westminster, the ongoing parliamentary passage of massive pieces of legislation will have big consequences for universities and students. The Employment Rights Bill and the Renters’ Rights Bill will both likely see some amendments, and we’re still awaiting the text of the English Devolution Bill and the promised “Hillsborough” bill. The government’s NHS plan for change – again, due at some point in the spring – and proposed updates to the NHS Long-Term Workforce Plan are important to keep an eye on as well.

    Up in Scotland, one day we may see the fruits of the ongoing review of student maintenance for part-time students. Negotiations over the 2025–26 budget will dominate the parliamentary agenda in the early part of the year, with ministers appearing in front of committees to get into the details of what exactly will be funded and what will not – and then the countdown to 2026 elections begins (all of this sentence is also true in Wales).

    It’s dangerous to go alone – take this

    If you’ve made it this far, congratulations. It feels like there is currently a huge number of moving parts in play in policy-land, all of which will contribute to the future shape and operations of the UK higher education sector in various, often hard-to-predict ways. Some are pretty immediate, others are issues that should have been tackled long ago, and then there are long-term policy changes that will be massive news in the 2030s.

    Here at Wonkhe we try to cover every single policy development that affects the sector, especially in our Daily Briefings (which restart on Tuesday 7 January – my alarm is already set).

    So if you’re interested in following even a fraction of the stuff that’s set out above, do join us for the ride this year. And fair warning, it’s likely that a good number of the most important developments that 2025 has in store for us are not even on this list. We’ll cover those as well, the moment they arrive.

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