Fiona McIntyre speaks to Mary Curnock Cook about the pandemic’s repercussions, admissions and lifelong education
There isn’t any need for a drawn-out introduction: Mary Curnock Cook—a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her uncountable services to higher and further education—will already be a familiar name and, in many cases, acquaintance.
Her appointments have spanned global education companies, think tanks, charities and higher education providers, and her campaigning has tackled thorny issues for universities including participation rates for white working-class boys and admissions reform.
Curnock Cook is currently chair of Pearson Education and the Dyson Institute, and she holds senior non-executive roles at the London Interdisciplinary School, the Open University, the Student Loans Company, Education Cubed, the Student Room and the Higher Education Policy Institute.
However, she is probably still most commonly referred to as the former chief executive of the admissions service Ucas—a position she left half a decade ago. Research Professional News asks if that ever gets annoying.
“I think if I got annoyed about it, my blood pressure would be through the roof, because that seems to be the label that I’m stuck with,” Curnock Cook says. “And to be perfectly honest, I love and adore Ucas. It’s given me a platform from which to do what I’m doing now, which would have been much harder if I hadn’t had the profile and the interaction and the networks that I created while I was there.”
As we reported in Playbook earlier this week, the current hot admissions topic is the now unlikely introduction of a post-qualification admissions (or application) system. Twelve months ago, fast-tracking such a system was the talk of Westminster—but education secretary Nadhim Zahawi has reportedly U-turned and reform now seems unlikely.
Curnock Cook has written for us before about how post-qualification admissions might not be quite the silver bullet that some perceive it to be. We asked her this week (the rest of this interview took place a few weeks ago) for her view on the government’s apparent change of heart.
“I don’t think post-qualification admissions will ever go away completely, but it does feel like it’s run out of time just now,” she says. “Moving to a system entirely reliant on achieved grades when those grades are not steady-state following the pandemic just layers more risk onto an already risky change. I suspect the government has other hills to risk dying on at the moment.”
Supporters of post-qualification admissions argue that it would create a fairer system as students could apply to university with their final grades, an issue that was highlighted by the chaotic admissions during the first year of the pandemic. Others point out that the majority of students go to their first-choice institution anyway, and they say that a form of post-qualification admissions already exists in the clearing system.
“Sometimes I think I’m just the wrong person to ask about that,” Curnock Cook says, arguing that she is “too inured in the Ucas system” to come up with a better alternative.
Then again, nobody else has managed it either. “It does worry me that every time we try to reinvent admissions in higher education, I’ve never met anyone who is able to think from zero-based principles,” she says. “It’s always: ‘How do we tweak the Ucas system?’”
Post-pandemic picture
The pandemic has had major repercussions for higher education. Today’s first- and second-years have had a bumpier ride to university than any cohort had when Curnock Cook was leading the admissions body. As chair of the UPP Foundation’s Student Futures Commission (another of her many titles), she has seen how the closure of schools and colleges during the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic shattered students’ confidence, meaning they often felt unprepared for undergraduate study.
It didn’t help that they couldn’t sit their exams, relying on their teachers to decide their grades. Some school leavers told the commission that they felt they were “the cohort with the fake grades”, which she says “practically made me weep”.
The commission’s final report was published on Monday (as we reported). Curnock Cook says that despite the serious disruption facing students and universities at the start of this academic year, higher education staff have dealt with the challenges admirably and she is “incredibly optimistic” about the future of higher education.
Perhaps that’s just as well, given her roles at the London Interdisciplinary School and the Dyson Institute. They are both part of a cohort of institutions encouraged by the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, which the government hoped would help new and alternative providers to “disrupt” existing provision.
But since then, several institutions have struggled in the setup phase. The New Model Institute for Technology and Engineering, another post-2017 institution, suffered delays to its opening, while plans for a university in Milton Keynes have been pushed back after the funding needed to get the MK:U institute off the ground was left out of chancellor Rishi Sunak’s budget in October.
Curnock Cook says she was buoyed by the government’s support for new providers, and she even considered setting up her own.
“When I left Ucas, I did have a fantasy that I was going to start a new university—I genuinely thought about it, and what sort of model it would be, and literally five minutes later I realised there is just no way,” she says. “It’s very tough to get new institutions going.”
‘A marked change’
Sometimes the best things take a little time, though. After all, we are still awaiting the government’s response to Philip Augar’s review of post-18 education, which was published almost 1,000 days ago in May 2019. It is due, we have repeatedly been told over the past three years, “in due course”.
When it does come, the response could be in the form of a higher education white paper for England—one that might finally answer questions about whether minimum entry requirements will be introduced for students to access public loans, and whether tuition fees will be lowered in a bid to tackle the spiralling cost of higher education for taxpayers (while potentially crippling university income).
For her part, Curnock Cook feels the current payment system is “pretty good” as there is an “appropriate balance” between public subsidy and the learner paying for their education.
However, she hopes that there will be “a marked change in the language that we use” around the student loan system as a result of the Augar review. “I really regret and abhor the way the language around debt and so on has potentially frightened people off going to higher education,” she says.
After tuition fees were tripled in 2012 to £9,000 a year, the numbers of part-time and mature students taking part in higher education crashed. They have not yet recovered. Conservative peer and former universities minister David Willetts, who was behind the reforms, has spoken about his regret at the unintended consequences of hiking tuition fees, admitting at a Research Professional Live event in London in 2020 that he “never thought that [increasing] fees and loans was going to hit mature students in the way it did”.
This is something that could have affected Curnock Cook personally. After leaving school at 16, she became a typist and went straight into work. She rose through the ranks and went on to hold senior leadership roles in several sectors.
But it was while she was working at a professional body for the pub industry that Curnock Cook felt she wanted to go into education. She describes how she saw “grown men—many of whom had left school at 14 or 15, never got any qualifications at all—overcome with emotion” when they received their professional qualification, “because it was the first time anyone had ever recognised their achievement and their professionalism”.
“And I suddenly realised not just how important education is but also how important qualifications are,” she says.
To get into the education sector, Curnock Cook realised that she needed a degree. At 41 years old, she returned to education and studied for a master’s degree at the London Business School.
The government is keen to make it easier for more workers to take a similar path and retrain later in life, although it particularly wants people to go into areas with skills shortages. Plans for a lifelong loan entitlement were originally included in the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill but will now require separate legislation.
Curnock Cook is optimistic about the lifelong loan entitlement, although she stresses that universities must decide how it will work in practice. And once they have, the former head of Ucas could experience the admissions process from the other side.
“Who knows? When I run out of things to do, I might even start studying again myself,” she says.
A version of this article was originally published in the 8am Playbook. To find out more or subscribe, please contact sales@researchresearch.com.