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Labour conference: Andrew Westwood asks what Labour should be saying about universities
Members and activists attending the Labour Party Conference this week will be thinking about the party’s position on a series of totemic policy issues. Higher education is likely to be one of them.
Who should get it? How should we or they pay for it? How do we fund universities and colleges to deliver the best courses and qualifications? What support should students, and parents, get while they study? How do we get and keep the best staff—in teaching, research and in professional services? And how do we best support them in their retirement? How can the sector best contribute to society, to economic growth and recovery from Covid?
These sound largely similar to the questions likely to be asked during the Conservative Party Conference in Manchester next week. That’s inevitable given the forthcoming spending review and promised response to the Augar report at roughly the same time.
It’s an immediate challenge for the newly appointed education secretary Nadhim Zahawi and his new cabinet colleague Michelle Donelan, who is now leading on the whole tertiary agenda—basically all of Augar and a bit more besides.
Even with Donelan’s involvement in negotiations with the Treasury prior to the reshuffle, it feels like a big ask to redesign the entire system before the spending review on 27 October. Further delays look likely, which might lessen the immediate pressure for fully worked up policy responses from Labour too.
But Labour needs to show at least some thinking on the issue, and set up a process through which to answer these questions. It knows from Ed Miliband’s 2011 party conference pledge to reduce fees to £6,000 that, once floated, headline pledges are hard to row back from.
Likewise, that Jeremy Corbyn’s promise of free tuition and a return to grants in 2017 and 2019 only offered answers to the questions he preferred. But although that remains the official policy position for now, it hardly looks locked in for the next manifesto.
So what should Labour be saying and thinking this week? From a purely political perspective, more students are good for Labour. They are increasingly likely to vote for it. Labour might choose to campaign on marginal tax rates and the rising overall tax burden after the health and social care levy and likely increases to the numbers of graduates paying higher amounts if the repayment threshold on tuition fee loans is reduced.
What to do about ‘woke’
But there are other challenges. Campus politics can be a problem. The politics of metropolitan, liberal graduates and of the university campuses can also polarise opinion and support. ‘Woke’ politics and resentment of it are tricky for Labour and can feed further resentment and division, which is why the Conservatives are so keen to draw attention to it.
In his recent Fabian Society pamphlet, Keir Starmer describes the government’s aim as “to exploit divisions, leading to an increasingly bizarre obsession with what happens on university campuses”, but he knows he has to resist such headlines and the political polarisation that follows them.
This takes us to the broader politics of the ‘red wall’—the post industrial and coastal constituencies gained by the Conservatives at recent elections. Here, the immediate challenge for Labour is not the politics of universities and the technical details of how to pay for them but how to win more voters in these places back.
Electorally, Labour cannot afford to be just the party of students, graduates or the big urban economies where they study or work. It still needs a story of how universities and colleges—as well as research and science—can benefit these communities, places and people.
So, as with the Conservatives, there needs to be a convincing offer for the ‘other 50 per cent’, acknowledging for a start that in many parts of the Midlands, the north and in coastal areas this is more like the other 60 or 70 per cent. For both parties this is yet to go much beyond easy slogans or broad-brush support for apprenticeships and technical education.
It is not just about the “other 50 per cent” either. The government is strangely silent about universities in ‘left behind’ places—on Teesside, in the Black Country or in towns such as Huddersfield, Stoke or Preston.
When it criticises ‘low value’ higher education in terms of graduate jobs and wages or attacks the numbers at such universities, it risks undermining one of the few institutions that can make a difference to towns, cities or regions.
Local impact
So Labour must look below the level of system reform—as the government should, but hasn’t so far—at the impact of institutions in particular places like Teesside, Wolverhampton, Grimsby, Oldham and Blackpool.
That would cover the importance of individual universities and colleges to local economies and labour markets rather than more abstract policy about higher or further education funding. I’m not sure there are as many votes in going after low value higher education as there are in supporting the local institution in whichever sector it happens to be.
Tony Blair has already made an intervention along these lines, saying that a new wave of regional universities should be established in ‘left behind’ areas to achieve the same levels of participation seen in more prosperous places.
But he added: “There is no one model of higher education that works best for all young people or indeed for the economy. We need ever greater diversity and innovation. I am particularly keen, as higher education participation rises, to see greater overlap between vocational and university education.”
In simple economic terms, the government risks pulling out income and jobs from the places that need them, destroying capacity and expertise. Politically, it risks telling places and voters that higher education is not for them. Labour can oppose this, while trying to win back the support of voters in these constituencies.
The same can be done in further education—on the Skills White Paper or on plans for apprenticeships or college performance. A test for any proposed reforms that the Conservatives bring forward is do they make colleges and universities in such places stronger or weaker? How will they improve the local economy and increase wages or the number of good jobs? For Starmer, his promise of a ‘New Deal for Working People’ has to work locally if it is to work at all.
Policy priorities
What else can Labour do? It must carry out its own assessment of spending and policy priorities, determining where a new university funding model or more support for further education sits in that list. Just as for government, that will include health and social care, schools and all the post pandemic challenges that we face.
Conversations between Labour’s education and treasury teams are essential—not least because the relative priority of higher and further education reforms will be linked directly to the economic growth and productivity that makes more investment possible.
This will obsess the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, and the shadow treasury team as much as it does shadow education ministers Kate Green, Matt Western and Toby Perkins. But it is also a vital conversation because together they must work out how the higher education funding system in particular should work. After the 2010-11 reforms, that is no longer just the responsibility of the Department for Education or its shadow team.
Most importantly, Labour needs to set a clear course to making eventual policy decisions on universities, colleges, fees and funding, as well as on spending and policy that supports research and development. As Starmer says in his Fabian essay, we need “to make education and training ready for a world of work that will look very different”.
He adds: “That cannot just mean a narrow focus on university education. Higher education is vital to transforming the prospects of so many young people but to be fit for the future we are going to need skills, education and training at every stage of our lives.”
It is fair enough to set this out in general terms at this point in the political cycle. However, at most we are three years from a general election, and according to some, only two so the detailed policy thinking and development needs to follow sooner rather than later. A policy taskforce or commission perhaps? A big conversation with students, vice-chancellors, principals, staff and unions? Or perhaps an inquiry run by a supportive think tank?
Soon the government will be saying more about all of these issues, whether at the spending review or beyond. Labour will need a strategy from which to offer immediate criticism, but also in the medium term, a detailed plan of its own.
Andrew Westwood is professor of government practice and vice dean for social responsibility in the faculty of humanities at the University of Manchester