Sean Wallis – London Regional Secretary
After 15 years of seemingly limitless market-led expansion of Higher Education, the UK university sector is facing the biggest crisis in its history. It is worth briefly remembering how we got here. Any solution to the crisis has to talk about how we get onto a stable financial footing, and what that will look like.
The 2010/2011 Willets Plan for English Universities had the following elements:
• Up to £9,000 tuition fees for home students (equating to a profit of some £2,000 per student)
• Abolition or partial reduction of the block grant subsidy (which was calculated on a quota basis per subject area)
• (2014) Abolishing student recruitment caps (apart for regulated courses like Medicine)
• (2017) Changing the regulatory regime from a quality assurance model to a deregulated ‘consumer complaints’ one.
These home undergraduate tuition fees were backed up by student loans costing some ~£20bn a year to the Treasury. Alongside increases in home student fees, unregulated overseas student fees were allowed to soar.
This system initially appeared to work, although not how politicians had imagined. First, nearly all universities found that charging less than £9,000 per student did not help them recruit, so the Tory idea of a ‘genuine’ marketplace with different prices turned out to be a pipe dream. Second, faced with a lifetime of debt, students tended to pick subjects they were confident about. Humanities, rather than maths and science courses, found themselves the main beneficiaries. This meant that students tended to repay their loans at a lower level than Willets and co had planned: over the then 30-year loan period, the Treasury reckoned only half the loan would be paid.
Nonetheless, after caps on recruitment went in 2014, many universities gambled on long-term expansion, taking out 20 or 30-year loans to build new campuses. But that was OK, interest rates were at an all-time low and property prices were surging. What could possibly go wrong?
Then in 2017, Jeremy Corbyn nearly found himself Prime Minister as a leftwing Labour Party programme saw his party surge to nearly beating Teresa May (with 40% against the Tories’ 42.4% of the popular vote) – an increase explained in part by the youth vote and a popular call to abolish university tuition fees. In response, the Conservatives announced a review of HE funding, to which the financier Philip Augar was eventually appointed in
2018.
Augar’s review was delayed by first Brexit and then Covid. Augar’s solution, eventually implemented by Michele Donelan in 2023, was to tinker with the market formula, changing the loans system to a 40-year repayment scheme with an RPI rate of interest, and lower earnings thresholds for repayment. The Institute for Fiscal Studies calculated that working class students would pay back more, wealthy students would likely pay less. Whereas the earlier scheme was closer to a hefty 9% graduate tax, the new scheme was more like a Treasury-backed loan, which students would be made to pay. These changes added at least £30,000 to the cost of education over the student’s lifetime – some estimates put figures closer to £60,000.
What would a sustainable alternative look like?
By 2019 the market system was getting close to failure, for anyone who cared to look. In 2020, a rapidly-convened Convention for Higher Education statement was launched in Parliament during the Covid lockdown. The proposals it put forward did not abolish the market system, but were designed to rein it in and address the social inequalities created by the market. They included:
• Restoration of maintenance grants.
• Resources to tackle inequalities of access (prioritising social groups in disadvantaged circumstances, whether on the basis of locality, socio-economic class, ethnicity or disability; and to unemployed adult returners).
• Immediate reduction in tuition fees by 30%, with the balance made up by the government.
• Restoration of student recruitment caps, backed up by direct public funding to support struggling institutions through a temporary dip in recruitment.
• Senior salaries should be restricted to a 6:1 ratio, and casualised staff given secure contracts.
• Abolition of racist and discriminatory policies towards international staff and students.
• Democratisation of internal university governance.
The Convention Statement was supported by the Labour Shadow Minister for Higher Education, Emma Hardy. Her statement at the launch is worth reading, especially in the light of shallow promises from Bridget Phillipson and Jacqui Smith. The Convention’s broad-based efforts in getting the ear of the Government, Lords and Labour in opposition contrasts with UCU’s so-far feeble lobbying campaign.
The fight we need
We cannot fight redundancies of 10,000 a year on a university-by-university basis. We need to take the fight to Government. When that has been done – as in Dundee – the union has been able to spearhead a defence of Higher Education and marshal the overwhelming majority of public opinion in our favour.
University of Dundee planned to cut 632 jobs – the UCU branch took 3 weeks of strike action in February and March. UNISON and UNITE also balloted successfully. Together they built an excellent campaign with large pickets, general meetings and public rallies involving other trade unionists and politicians from the Scottish National Party, Labour and Green Party. But critically they pressured the Scottish government to act. Consequently MSPs questioned University of Dundee management and the Scottish government stepped in providing additional funding. The fight is not over for Dundee – but it shows what can be
done when the fight is taken to government.
But most of the time our national union is not pushing out to make the big arguments. Instead union branches have been advised to negotiate locally. Branch reps are being asked merely to hand-hold members as they are escorted through notionally ‘Voluntary’ and inevitably Compulsory Redundancy Consultations. Even when branches are allowed to strike, it is often too little and too late.
Making the big arguments means we have to fight for the future – for the defence of subject areas and departments, as well as for universities and access. That’s why we need to spell out short-term demands as well as long-term goals.
We need to mobilise the whole of the union to take UK-wide action in the face of this crisis. At Congress there are several motions in front of HESC which propose slightly different mechanisms to put together a fight to defend jobs and defend the sector. Ultimately which the union decides to back is for HE Sector Conference to decide. But we should not allow differences in tactics to get in the way of unity around a common plan to mobilise branches, to win ballots and to fight to defend the sector.