Image: EU2017EE Estonian Presidency [CC BY 2.0] via Wikimedia Commons
Former science minister derides universities’ request for numbers cap next year and defends the TEF
Jo Johnson has warned that universities have scored a “spectacular own goal” in asking for a student numbers cap, as it could now stay in place for several years.
Speaking at the University of Buckingham’s online Festival of Higher Education, the former universities and science minister said that universities had made an error by asking for a temporary student numbers cap to see them through the worst of the coronavirus crisis. In May, the government revealed a package of support including a student numbers cap that had been requested by vice-chancellors’ body Universities UK.
He said he “would bet almost any money that student number controls that are in place this year will be in place next year and the year after that and the year after that”.
“It’s a spectacular own goal,” he said, stressing that the cap—which means universities in England can only recruit their predicted number of UK and European Union student numbers plus 5 per cent in 2020-21—was “so broad as to not achieve its ostensible objective” of limiting harmful competition for students as the coronavirus pandemic starts to affect recruitment.
The government has also capped the number of England-domiciled students that universities in the devolved nations can recruit, though this was not asked for in the UUK proposals.
Johnson warned that universities had “given the government the tools which higher education sceptics would like to have to limit the future growth of the sector in coming years”. He said the social sciences, arts and humanities would be worst affected as funding would be directed towards science, technology, engineering and mathematics subjects.
His comments come after universities minister Michelle Donelan said in a speech that universities had “taken advantage” of students—particularly first-generation university attendees—by expanding “popular-sounding courses with no real demand from the labour market”, and that too many students were studying on university courses that “do nothing to improve their life chances” or help with their careers.
Universities are widely expected to face serious economic difficulties as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the Institute for Fiscal Studies warned on 6 July that 13 institutions were at particular risk of going bust. Johnson said that while he had “no doubt” the government and the Office for Students would step in to save struggling universities during the pandemic, higher education had “no right to be preserved in aspic”.
“There have always been mergers and consolidations, exits and entries, and that’s got to continue,” he said. Otherwise, universities would “ossify”.
On the Teaching Excellence Framework—the creation of which he spearheaded—Johnson said it was a “basic hygiene test in return for considerable sums of public money”. He scolded universities for being so unwelcoming of it.
“If the sector had embraced the TEF, it wouldn’t now be facing the prospect of student number controls restricting funding on much worse metrics than the TEF was ever proposing, namely raw LEO [Longitudinal Education Outcomes] data,” he said.
“By refusing to engage with it, and calling into question its very right to exist, I’m afraid the sector has risked bringing onto itself something that will be far worse—namely, student number controls and the rationing of funding based on some pretty ropey ways of doing it, namely LEO data.”
A spokesperson for Universities UK told Research Professional News it was “vital that the admissions process remains fair, consistent, and in the best interests of all students and it is right to have stability measures at this unprecedented time”.
They added that “it will be necessary to review how long this stays in place early in the next admissions cycle to ensure universities have the flexibility needed to effectively respond to the continuing impact of Covid-19, and in the best interests of students”.
Elsewhere, Rachel Wolf, co-founder of the think tank Public First and a former Number 10 policy adviser, told delegates she was “not convinced…that degree apprenticeships are the core route by which we achieve this rebalancing” of skills. She said she was “not at all convinced that either degrees or full apprenticeships are the majority of what we will need” as a country.
“I think degree apprenticeships in many areas can be very important, but I think there is also a bit of a risk that it becomes yet another way in which we think that the only way you achieve great skills education is to pretend it’s like great academic education,” said Wolf, who co-authored the 2019 Conservative Party general election manifesto.