Cuts to Disabled Student Allowance

Posted on May 30, 2014 by mikehamlyn

Last month a written ministerial statement from David Willetts (not widely reported) outlined changes to the Disabled Student Allowance. A brief reference to this was reported to our Learning Teaching and Assessment Committee. In future I anticipate we will be considering the wide-ranging impact this will have, on recruitment, on student satisfaction and on budgets.

This change potentially has serious impact on the individual educational experience of many students, has a potential legal impact on universities, and at a more local level, a possible impact on university and faculty or school budgets.

From the ministerial statement:

We will look to HEIs to play their role in supporting students with mild difficulties, as part of their duties to provide reasonable adjustments under the Equality Act. These are partly anticipatory duties and we expect HEIs to introduce changes which can further reduce reliance on DSAs and help mainstream support. However, we believe that HEIs are better placed to consider how to respond in many cases, including giving greater consideration to the delivery of their courses and how to provide support. The need for some individual non-medical help (NMH) may be removed through different ways of delivering courses and information. It is for HEIs to consider how they make both anticipatory reasonable adjustments and also reasonable adjustments at an individual level.The key changes are set out below:We will pay for higher specification or higher cost computers where a student needs one solely by virtue of their disability. We will no longer pay for standard specification computers or the warranties and insurance associated with them. We will no longer pay for higher specification and/or higher cost computers simply because of the way in which a course is delivered. We are changing our approach to the funding of a number of computer equipment, software and consumable items through DSAs that have become funded as ‘standard’ to most students.Students with Specific Learning Difficulties will continue to receive support through DSAs where their support needs are considered to be more complex.We will fund the most specialist Non-Medical Help. HEIs are expected to consider how they deliver information to students and whether strategies can be put in place to reduce the need for support workers and encourage greater independence and autonomy for their students.The additional costs of specialist accommodation will no longer be met byDSAs, other than in exceptional circumstances.

In the Guardian, Sarah Lewthwaite writes:

Willetts stresses universities’ role in bridging the gap in DSA support. However, universities will receive no monies to cover the financial gap at a time of economic stringencies and pay freezes.Willetts emphasises the importance of new technologies for anticipatory inclusive teaching and learning within the established frame of “reasonable adjustment” required by the Equality Act (2010). However, technological solutions are limited. University eLearning environments cannot ensure universally accessible educational opportunities without (DSA funded) assistive technologies deployed by students, among a raft of other measures and costs. In the short term, at least, prospects for disabled students experiencing cuts to DSAs are bleak.Concerns do not end here. Proposed changes to DSA funding may fundamentally redefine disability in higher education. Students with Specific Learning Difficulties (SpLDs), such as dyslexia, dyspraxia and ADD/ADHD, have been singled out for the largest cuts, and there is a real danger that their needs become invisible.Willetts has chosen to restrict focus to more “complex” SpLDs and those requiring “most specialist” support. This betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between a medical diagnosis and the support requirements that students may have. Indeed, it is ironic that the one group singled out for cuts to academic support are those whose disability explicitly affects learning.

So for students with some of the more common learning disabilities – and we have subject areas where this affects large numbers of students – there might be no more support from the DSA, and universities will be expected to make up the gap.

<rant>

It might be argued that some of the technologies currently provided (eg computers) are those that we expect all students to already own when they arrive at university. This unfortunately ignores the fact that some disabled students will be those who are also from the most disadvantaged backgrounds, and so are least likely to be able to buy such equipment.To me these proposals are to provide support for “those who deserve it”. Not unlike our changing benefits system that is moving from being one of universal benefit when needed, but one that is only for the deserving poor.

<rant>

There are different responsibilities for universities here too – the use of the Equality Act and how this could be interpreted to make changes to delivery of courses is an interesting proposition. Smita Jamdar of Martineaus has provided an excellent blog piece on this very subject. She identifies:

Clearly, once the changes take effect there will be less support via the DSA and there are obvious risks to participation levels among students with disabilities, but it is also likely that HEIs will be asked to fund a greater amount and diversity of adjustments once this support stops.

She identifies 2 significant aspects of the ministerial statement:

HEIs are expected not to think reactively about how a particular student’s needs can be accommodated in a particular course, but rather proactively about how their entire portfolio of courses might be made accessible to students with a wide range of disabilities thus obviating or substantially reducing the need for further specific support.
From 2015 it is intended to instead adopt the Equality Act definition of “a physical or mental impairment that has a substantial and long term adverse effect on a person’s ability to carry out normal day to day activities”. HEIs may find themselves in debate more often with students as to whether or not their condition meets the definition of a disability, if only to give students support to apply for DSA

Smita identifies that disability discrimination represents the greatest number of student discrimination cases that her law firm deals with, and that “the changes to DSA are likely to increase the pressure from students and campaign groups alike for greater focus on this area from HEIs.”

So in conclusion, we have a change to policy which will save a tiny fraction of the overall benefits bill. For universities though we need to consider the following:

how do we proactively change our courses to make anticipatory adjustments?
how do we learn to use the Equality Act to determine what support might be needed?
how do we minimise the opportunities for legal cases?
how do we manage our internal budgets to cover the increased costs that might be coming our way?

HEPI/HEA Student Experience Survey

Posted on May 27, 2014 by mikehamlyn

This year’s HEPI/HEA Student experience Survey has been published, and can be downloaded from here.

The key outcomes highlighted are:

Full-time undergraduate students in UK universities express high levels of satisfaction with their courses: 86% are fairly or very satis?ed with their course
While 50% of students experiencing classes of between 1 and 5 other students
?nd them ‘a lot’ bene?cial, the ?gure is only 10% for those with classes of more than 100 students. On average ?rst years have 3.0 of their weekly contact hours in classes of over 100.
Undergraduate students in their ?rst and second years have an average of 14.2 contact hours per week during term time and complete another 14.3 hours of private study on top
Those with between 0 and 9 contact hours are notably less satis?ed than those with between 20 and 29 contact hours
More than four out of ten full-time undergraduate students (44%) think they are receiving very good or good value for money, compared with one-quarter (25%) who consider they are receiving very poor or poor value for money
When asked about their top three priorities for institutional expenditure, 48% of undergraduates chose ‘reducing fee levels’
However, four further clear priorities emerge, each chosen by over one-third of students:
• more teaching hours (35%);
• smaller class sizes (35%);
• better training for lecturers (34%); and
• better learning facilities (34%)

Digging further into the report, then differences appear based on which mission group universities are aligned to, and also by subject discipline.

I was particularly interested in some of the information presented around contact hours, and specifically why students chose not to attend sessions (bearing in mind the current narrative of students as customers who are paying up to £9000 a year where one might expect 100% attendance).

Students wanted more contact hours, yet many times don’t attend for the following reasons:

Looking at the top two reasons for failure to attend raises questions –

How do we make the classes more relevant and unmissable?
Does putting notes online reduce the need to attend a lecture?

With regard to having notes or slides online – this can only be a good thing for those students who genuinely miss a class, or who want to read in advance of attending class. Online learning materials should be more than just the lecture handouts.

On student workload, it’s notable that many students appear to be engaging with fewer learning hours than is expected by QAA. As a possible way to remedy this, do we really think enough about what self directed study entails? Are we, certainly for level 4 students, providing enough guidance on what they should be studying, reading, engaging with, outside of the scheduled time in class? Can we make a very simple change of spelling this out in module handbooks and guides to ensure our students learn in the way that we would like them to and that we manage their expectations of how much work they should be doing?

Not surprisingly, under expectations of value for money, students are less satisfied with what they feel they are receiving.

When asked what their spending priorities would be, students replied as:

As identified in the report, after fees the priorities are: “increasing teaching hours: decreasing class sizes; better training for lecturers; and better learning facilities (as
distinct from better buildings, which is not ranked so highly). It is notable that the higher ranked areas relate to improving the quality of teaching and learning and the lower ranked areas relate more to extra-curricular and environmental issues such as sports facilities and better security on campus. Giving academics more time for research was not ranked highly despite the promotion of ‘research-led teaching’ in many institutions.”

I think there are some interesting areas for further discussion here, with implications for different constituencies:

For the university:

How do we make sure we deliver the right kind of learning in small groups?
Can we manage expectations of workload better?
How do we provide a focus on student experience?
How do we explore the reason students don’t attend ?(do we know if they are not attending?)
What could we do to make class sessions unmissable?
Can we square the circle of providing more smaller classes, with greater contact hours with better qualified lecturers?
How do we improve our online materials?

For senior staff:

how do we respond to the challenges on spending priorities?
How do we lobby the next government on student and university financing?

Uncapping the Future

Posted on May 10, 2014 by mikehamlyn

A few months ago I wrote a piece here on my views of how the changes announced in the Autumn Statement might affect universities like ours, specifically the impact of removing the cap on student numbers.

Since then, this has been written about and discussed in detail. Until we get throug hteh next two years of UCAS entry then we can’t draw conclusions completely. In the last week or so, two new articles have appeared on this very subject.

One thing to bear in mind is that the next General Election is not that far away, and over on the wonkhe website, Debbie McVitty suggests:

prudent analysts may be withholding judgement pending confirmation that a future government is ready to stand by this commitment and to source the sustainable flow of funding that would make it a reality

She proposes 4 scenarios, based on ranges of supply and demand for HE places, and concludes that:

A more robust approach would be to consider what interventions will best secure a sustainable pipeline of qualified and informed applicants to higher education (significantly enhanced IAG springs to mind) and how policymakers can identify and share the risks of innovation with higher education providers in order to ensure a meaningful social benefit to increased participation.

Over on the Times Higher website, Bahram Bekhradnia (president of the Higher Education Policy Institute) writes:

Recently the pages of THE have been filled with more cheerleaders urging the government to go further and faster. My advice to these credulous souls is that they should be careful what they wish for.

He worries that the market in HE that the coalition government has sought to create does not exist – indeed capping numbers, setting a limit on fees and tinkering with core and margin numbers has had little effect in creating a free market.

At first, the coalition government introduced a pseudo-market, involving competition around “highly qualified students”, but that has had a dysfunctional and erratic impact. The complete relaxation of student number controls appears to be a final and desperate attempt to create a market in higher education where there has been none so far.

It is an experiment that is unlikely to succeed. The additional student numbers will have to be paid for. Given that the sale of the student loan book is unlikely to cover the cost, either the funds will be found by the government itself, which is improbable, or students will pay even more, which is possible. Otherwise the additional students will have to be accommodated without a commensurate increase in funding and with negative consequences for quality and standards.

This last point is worth noting – as costs in universities rise, and while the top end of fees is capped then gradually the money available to support teaching and learning will reduce.

For the financially secure institutions which easily recruit their self-identified quota of undergraduate numbers, removing the student number ca may not be a problem: they will have no new entrants into the “market” to compete against, and will be able to campaign to remove the cap on fees and tackle that contradiction in market philosophy.

Removing the cap on recruitment creates a challenge for those universities who might struggle to recruit in future One outcome might be a further increase in private provision, particularly for low delivery costs subjects, or more delivery of HE through FE and commercial partners. Both of these will create a challenge for some universities. These lower ranked institutions, or those who find to harder to recruit undergraduate numbers, will find themselves more exposed to a market environment, with aggressive competitors who will be prepared to differentiate on price.

In terms of what my university can do to address this challenge, well I’ll return to that in my “we can be better than this” series of blog posts.

Shifts and Trends in UK Higher Education

Posted on April 14, 2014 by mikehamlyn

A new publication from HEFCE, ‘Higher education in England 2014: Analysis of latest shifts and trends’, is an overview of recent shifts and longer-term trends, building a picture of publicly-funded higher education in England in 2014 and a sense of how it got to where it is. It also considers possible further changes and continuities in the year ahead.

Available to download are the main report and key facts sheet, together with the data-set used.

This blog post will not consider the sections in the report on research and knowledge exchange, nor on financial health of institutions, but will focus on student enrolments, subjects and growth and decline of parts of the market. I will also ask why we are not following the trends.

Full Time Student Numbers

The information presented shows a recovery in full time undergraduate numbers in the sector with an 8% increase in 2013-14 compared with 2012-13, however there are significant drops in the numbers of part time entrants and also entrants to undergraduate programmes other than first degrees, with a 38% decline in students on foundation degrees.

Interestingly, there has been growth in students registered on full time HE qualifications delivered in FE colleges.

Part Time Student Numbers

Unsurprisingly, the number of entrants to part time undergraduate awards has fallen significantly, with the biggest decline in awards other than first degrees.

Entry to Postgraduate provision

There has been little significant change in UK/EU entrants to postgraduate provision, as seen in the graph below, but as the report highlights, in 2015, we will have the first potential entry to these awards by students who have gone through their undergraduate programmes under the current fee regime. Since a high percentage of current postgraduate students have no financial support and are funding their own studies, it will be interesting to see how the next generation will view the benefits of postgraduate study. They could be averse to taking on even more debt, or alternatively may be happy to do so, having made an assessment of the benefit of further study balanced against the increased level of indebtedness, much of which may never be paid back.

When considering entry to postgraduate provision, this university needs to be very aware of international recruitment – recent visa changes have potentially had a negative effect on how HE in the UK is perceived. To quote the report:

International students have contributed a great deal to the growth of postgraduate education. They make up over a quarter of all postgraduate numbers, but in certain subject areas they are more than half of the cohort, which makes parts of the sector vulnerable to volatility in this market.

A quick look at the growth and decline of international markets is instructive:

Recent news around visas has potentially had a major effect on recruitment from India and Pakistan, whereas demand from China is booming.

Student Characteristics

The report shows that entry rate has increased for all students, and that for those who are the most disadvantaged, there has been a greater increase. However, there is still a large gap in participation between students from the most advantaged and most disadvantaged neighborhoods, and that students from the most advantaged areas were more likely to enter high-tariff institutions.

Interestingly, the number of facilitating subjects studied at A-Level (where the Russell Group de?nes ‘facilitating subjects’ as subjects that are required more often than others for entry to undergraduate courses. They note that mathematics and further mathematics, English literature, physics,biology, chemistry, geography, history, and classical and modern languages can all be seen as facilitating subjects.) have an effect on likelihood of acceptance to university, and this is exaggerated fro those with lower A-level grades – study of facilitating subjects seems to be of more significance:

So the message here seems to be – choose “traditional” A-level subjects, particularly if you are a “weaker” student.

Subjects

HEFCE clearly supports STEM subjects and others of strategic importance such as modern foreign languages. This report makes comments on both of these, and for us the section on STEM is important.

94. In 2013-14, positive trends in STEM applications translated to 98,000 acceptances via UCAS, the highest level recorded. Engineering and technology acceptances bounced back by 6 per cent (2,000) after a decline, returning to 2010-11 peak levels. Acceptances to computer sciences in 2013-14 were higher than at any point since 2003-04, having increased by 12 per cent (2,000) compared with the previous year.

95. UCAS applications data for the 2014 cycle suggest continued growth in engineering and technology subjects, with applications rising by 11 per cent compared with the previous cycle. Computer sciences have seen the biggest increase in applications, of 13 per cent.

96. Increased entries to STEM subjects at A-level suggest that there is scope for further growth in higher education in the coming years. Although total numbers of A-level entries remained ?at between 2011-12 and 2012-13, the numbers of entries to STEM subjects increased by 6,000 (2 per cent)

As we look to reviewing our portfolio, for me this is a strong message that we need to ensure we are ready to grow in our areas of strength such as computer sciences, and recognise the potential in other science and engineering subjects.

Recruitment by location and tariff

Again, interestingly, this report shows that the West Midlands one of the areas of highest growth (3%) for full time undergraduate entrants to HE, but at the same time saw a significant drop (48%) in part time entrants.

The HEIs which saw significant growth in entrants tended to be specialist institutions or those whose students have high average tariff scores. Declines of more than 10 per cent took place at 28 HEIs and 17 further education colleges. The majority of the HEIs seeing these levels of decline were those where entrants had low or medium average tariff scores.

There is a lesson for us here maybe, as raised in the VC’s Blog this week – do we need to do more work to raise our entry tariff, to compete against the HEIs we think of as our natural competitors, and to have a potential benefit to our league table position?

Conclusion

A detailed and comprehensive picture of higher education in England, which provide some useful points for reflection. My key points (and these are entirely personal, not the views of the institution) would be:

international recruitment – which markets are we operating in?
portfolio review – emphasis on STEM provision?
entry tariff – can we raise this?

Information for Prospective Students

Posted on April 6, 2014 by mikehamlyn

The current narrative about higher education is that we need to provide more information, to students, prospective students, government and other stakeholders. A central plank of 2011 White Paper was that comparable data would be made readily available:

Each university will now make the most requested items available on its website, on an easily comparable basis. These items, together with information about course charges, are called the Key Information Set (KIS) and will be available on a course by course basis, by September 2012,although many of the items of information are already being made available prior to their incorporation in the KIS.

And so we embarked on the work of editing and checking the data to go into KIS, and duly inserted course widgets on website pages. Cue howls of despair, as people started to realise this opened up a few problems. How did some universities honestly say they were teaching that many hours per week? How come the student survey data was not at award level but potentially misleadingly at JACS3? And the same for employability data? Why did the average contact hours drop if you included a placement year?

Anyway, a new report commissioned by HEFCE and reported in this week’s Times Higher, seems to show making lots of information available is not necessarily working. The key findings of the report show:

The decision-making process is complex, personal and nuanced, involving different types of information, messengers and influences over a long time. This challenges the common assumption that people primarily make objective choices following a systematic analysis of all the information available to them at one time.

Greater amounts of information do not necessarily mean that people will be better informed or be able to make better decisions.

(from HEFCE)

From the Times Higher article:

Beth Steiner, a senior higher education policy adviser at Hefce, told a workshop last month that the findings had “raised several questions in our minds about Unistats and how fit for purpose it might be”.

She said that one solution could be a system that allows students to select “different levels of detail” about courses. A Hefce spokesman said the council was not anticipating any changes to Unistats before 2017.

Ms Steiner said that Hefce had assumed that “if you give them [prospective students] lots and lots of information, they will take that information and they will systematically work through it and they will make a reasoned analysis and decision based on that analysis”.

“We fully own up to that assumption, which we have made in the past – but it’s clearly not realistic,”

But is this really that much of a surprise?

Do people always act as rational consumers when making purchase decisions? There is a lot more at play in the decision-making process for potential students: family connection to a university, locality, sports facilities, type of campus. This list could go on, but importantly contains factors that are not readily reduced to simple numbers. This is summarised in the summary of the report as:

Preferences are often partially-formed and endogenous to social and economic context, and people are rarely fully informed utility maximisers

As I posted on Twitter:

This is not to dismiss this work out of hand, there are some important principles in the final summary that anyone involved in providing student information will find interesting. The challenge will be to understand how we can interpret and apply this, at the same time as the market principles that currently underpin higher education dominate the narrative with some not fully formed ideas about how markets and consumers really operate.

It’s all about the money, money, money

Posted on March 30, 2014 by mikehamlyn

It’s been a busy week for publications about funding for universities, student numbers and the winners and losers in the next round of HEFCE allocations.

(from https://www.flickr.com/photos/59937401@N07/5474205269/in/photostream/. Under Creative Commons licence)

As we all know, funding for HE is increasingly tight, particularly with the “miscalculation” that led to significant amounts of loans being made available to students on sub-degree courses at private providers, and the need to support a further 30,000 student places as announced in the Autumn Statement. Andrew McGettigan has provided excellent commentary on the growth of private providers, both on his blog and in an article for The Guardian. McGettigan suggests that the cuts in teaching grants to universities are being made to compensate for the overspend on students at private providers, and that the “major fiscal challenge facing BIS is self inflicted”.

HEFCE has published information on recurrent grants and student number controls.

The overall budget we have set for the 2014-15 academic year is £3,883 million. This budget reflects the third year of the progressive shift of HEFCE grant to the student support budget, to meet the cost of increased tuition fee loans under the Government’s new finance arrangements for higher education. While HEFCE teaching grant is being reduced, the overall resource rate for teaching is set to increase as a result of these higher tuition fee loans. The total HEFCE grant comprises:

£1,582 million for recurrent teaching grant

£1,558 million for recurrent research grant

£160 million for knowledge exchange

£583 million for national facilities and initiatives and capital funding

Linked to this, HEFCE have announced their student number controls for 2014-15 entry (remember the SNC will not exist after this year). As indicated in the Times Higher, Staffordshire University will have its SNC cut by 3% (as a side note, it’s a shame this is one of the rare times that we appear in this periodical). This is not a surprise, but we have to remember that not all of our students fit into the SNC – our portfolio of business is much wider than this, encompassing postgraduate study, work based learning, part time provision and partnership activity.

As well as announcing grants and student number controls, a further letter from HEFCE last week proposed that in future, institutions will need to provide more information to students and others on their income and expenditure.

HEFCE has undertaken (work) at the Government’s request with the British Universities Finance Directors Group (BUFDG), GuildHE, the National Union of Students (NUS) and Universities UK (UUK) to explore the presentation of information on institutional income and expenditure (including tuition fee income). This work aims to support higher education providers in meeting the Government’s accountability expectations, in a way that is mindful of competition between institutions and seeks to minimise additional administrative burden on universities

Institutions are asked to identify a local web-site solution by the end of October 2014, ready to publish information from their 2013-14 audited financial accounts by January 2015.

From the guidance note, the following information is proposed:

This doesn’t seem unreasonable, but I have a few questions.

If this is to minimise administrative burden on universities, then why do it at all?
Why not provide a central resource based on the data already available through HESA?
The proposed infographics look lovely – but will they clearly identify to students the actuality of financing a university
And finally, are students the best qualified to judge the expenditure and income of a complex organisation such as a university?

At no point would I suggest that we shouldn’t provide information to students and other stakeholders, but over the years the amount of data available is increasing (league tables, KIS, Which? university guide) and just providing more does not necessarily allow people to make better decisions.

Differences in Degree Outcomes

Posted on March 29, 2014 by mikehamlyn

A new publication by HEFCE (28th March 2014) looks at degree outcomes of students who entered HE in 2007-08, and shows correlations between various factors, including the correlation between ethnicity and degree classification.

The key findings of the report are:

Students with better A-levels do better in higher education
The proportion of students who gain a first or upper second in their degree studies has risen since 2004
There is significant variation in degree outcome for students from different ethnicities
Female students are more likely to achieve an upper second or higher than male students with the same prior educational attainment
Students from disadvantaged areas tend to do less well in higher education than those with the same prior educational attainment from more advantaged areas
Independent school students enter higher education with better A-level grades than those from state schools
State school students tend to do better in their degree studies than students from independent schools with the same prior educational attainment
In all levels of A-level achievement, state-schooled entrants to HE tend to do better in their degree studies than independently schooled counterparts with the same prior GCSE attainment
Students who have remained in the state school sector for the whole of their secondary school education tend to do better in their degree studies than those with the same prior educational attainment who attended an independent school for all or part of their secondary education
There is a relationship between a student’s level of attainment at A-level relative to the average of the school and his or her potential for success at degree level
Degree outcomes are not affected by the average performance of the school that a student attended

The report has been reported widely in the media, in this country and overseas,, with Aaron Kiely of The Guardian writing:

New figures show that white university students receive significantly higher degree grades than those from minority ethnic backgrounds with the same A-level qualifications. This suggests that higher education institutions are somehow failing black students, which should be a national embarrassment.

Three years ago the National Union of Students (NUS) conducted a study on the experiences of black students. The findings showed that they face a range of barriers in all levels of education, which affect satisfaction and attainment. The figures made for uncomfortable reading. It emerged that one in six black students had experienced racism in their institution, a third felt their educational environment left them unable to bring their minority perspective to lectures and tutorials, and 7% openly labelled their learning environment as “racist”.

This reinforces the importance for universities to address this issue. Although the reasons for the attainment gap are complex, failure to respond appropriately could be a reputational risk factor.

The data shows that allowing for A-level achievement, students who declare themselves as white consistently have a higher chance of achieving a good degree.

Responding to the report, David Ruebain of the Equality Challenge Unit said:

‘HEFCE’s report underlines something that the HE sector has known for some time – there is a persistent attainment gap for minority ethnic students. ECU and other organisations including the Higher Education Academy have been working with higher education institutions to help understand the complex reasons behind these figures and to identify initiatives that make a difference.

Most recent figures show that the overall ethnicity attainment gap has in fact decreased for two consecutive years, but it is clear that HEIs need to fully acknowledge the issue and commit to improving support so that all students are able to achieve to their potential, whatever their ethnicity

– See more at: http://www.ecu.ac.uk/news/the-role-of-race-in-university-success-ecu-response-to-hefce-report#sthash.WNqflhrA.dpuf

Clearly to really understanding the issue of Black and Minority Ethnic degree achievement, we will need to look at a range of factors, and the underlying theme of the report is that there are benefits in universities using contextual data when offering places to potential students. An alternative reading of this is could be that if universities use data about their students more effectively, then they could develop their learning, teaching and assessment approaches to be responsive to their student intake.

Having a better understanding of where our students come form, their previous study (A-level, BTEC, or access course) could mean that those teaching first year classes could be instrumental in leveling the playing field for all students at the start of their higher education journey.

Oops, we got the sums wrong

Posted on March 23, 2014 by mikehamlyn

Interesting times ahead as it became apparent on Friday that the RAB charge has increased again, and that we are now at the point where the cost of running the current funding system for teaching in universities is becoming more expensive than the previous system. This is not going be a palatable story for government, for universities and tax payers (hardworking, of course).

image by freeimageslive.co.uk – gratuit

According to the Guardian

Nick Hillman, who worked for Willetts during the introduction of the policy, made the comments after it emerged that the rate of default on student loans is now so high that the £9,000-a-year tuition fees system could end up producing zero financial reward for the government.

Speaking to the Guardian, Hillman called for action to address the “big funding gap” looming in the universities sector caused by mistakes in the government’s modelling and the fact that graduates are earning less than expected.

Last night, the Universities UK alliance of higher education institutions urged the coalition to open talks with Labour on the issue, saying it was vital to think more carefully about how universities can be paid for.

Clearly the funding system has faults, and needs to be reviewed – the news earlier in the year of the amount that had been spent supporting students on sub-degree programmes at private providers seemed to come as a shock to many.

David Kernohan, at Followers of the Apocalypse provides his own take on this news, suggesting the following plan:

another independent inquiry into HE funding
the need to keep student number controls a bit longer
why does the graduate job sector look so bleak
Nick Clegg should apologise
review the idea of marketisation…..

Not sure the last 2 are going to happen, bu there is merit in the first 3.

And then two days later, this story is published, again in the Guardian:

Willetts told Channel 4 News the government is “committed” to the current tuition fees system, which ministers believe is “far more sustainable than any alternative”. He also dismissed warnings that it will not bring in enough money to fund universities, saying the estimates of how much students will repay are likely to “bounce around” depending on what experts are forecasting for earnings over the next 35 years.

But, pressed several times on whether fees would have to rise or graduates would start having to repay money sooner, he said: “We’ve got a system with a £9,000 fee and a £21,000 [earnings] repayment threshold. That is our system that we are committed to. Above all it means students don’t have to pay upfront… We have fixed the fees for £9,000 for this parliament.

“But we will have to see how the income of universities performs. But we have a structure for £9,000 and £21,000 and that is working.”

Cathy Newman, a Channel 4 presenter, tweeted that she asked Willetts the question again about the possibility of higher fees after 2015 as he was leaving the studio and the minister replied “could be”.

I’m not going to claim that a single off the cuff comment reported on Twitter can be considered a policy announcement, but this would not be a surprise. Some universities are already pressing for the fee cap to be removed, as they don’t feel that £9000 covers their teaching costs. Removal of the cap would satisfy the neo-liberal argument of opening higher education up to “the market”.

Clearly this a time for the various university mission groups and representative bodies to create a consistent and powerful message about how we believe universities should be funded, to ensure that those who can benefit from higher education will be able to do so, and to support the wide diversity of our sector.

Last year, Steve Smith suggested that another avalanche was coming,and that it was financial not the MOOC revolution being promoted by Sir Michael Barber and Pearsons. Looks like Professor Smith was right.

Mike Hamlyn

another blog about HE in the UK

Category Archives: HE Policy