Post-18 Education and Funding Review

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, I first declare an interest as a member of the panel that produced this review. I thank the Minister and other noble Lords for their kind words. Obviously, I hope that the Government will implement our recommendations but I start by commending them for recognising that post-secondary education is, increasingly, for and about everyone, not just a small part of the population.

This is the first English Government-commissioned report, since Robbins in 1963, to look at post-18 education overall. Media coverage, predictably, has focused on universities; I have to say that the Minister’s opening remarks rather did so too. What matters for this country now and in the future, in my opinion and that of my fellow panel members, is the overall system. We have tried to produce a system of interlocking recommendations, which should—please—be treated as such, as far as possible.

In my limited time, I shall highlight three overarching conclusions which drove our very long list of specific recommendations. Before doing so, I emphasise that our terms of reference excluded any significant increase in total spending. We had to consider post-18 education as a single system, without some vast funding increase to make things smoother for everybody. We took that very seriously because we felt it was a realistic position: it was sensible to assume that there would not be much extra spending and to look at priorities and choices in that context.

Turning to our first and most important conclusion, I have to agree that the further education sector badly needs attention. Further and adult provision has been grievously neglected. Some of our headline numbers have, fortunately, been widely quoted: more than £8 billion was committed in 2017-18 to 1.2 million English undergraduates; in the same period, 2.2 million adult further education students received a little over a quarter of that amount—£2.3 billion—from public funding. Our undergraduate numbers have soared; we have one of the highest university participation rates in the OECD. Yet the total number of people in post-18 education has actually declined.

We think this is shameful and short-sighted, and the remedy is not some emergency bailout but to create —to recreate—a high-quality network of non-university provision. We inherited in this country a nationwide set of institutions closely linked to their communities. Every town of any size has a further education college, once commonly known as “the tech”. If we truly want to serve the whole community in the future, those colleges must again take centre stage.

While 18 year-olds can move away from home for three years, adults cannot; while 19 year-olds can study full-time, no adult with a family and a mortgage can do so. Small businesses create the majority of new private sector jobs in this country. They are at the heart of any successful apprenticeship system and an enormous part of our economy. They can work with and relate to a college, but there is very little opportunity for them to engage with a large university. While our universities are indeed world-class—I forgot to declare my other interest as a full-time employee of a fine university—we have created a walled dead end for anyone not university-bound. That is not merely half of our young people; in parts of the country it is well over half. In England today, the overwhelming majority of those not academically successful at 18 never progress to higher qualifications. That should be a source of deep national shame.

Further and adult provision has been underfunded and subject to short-term government contracts and endless micromanagement. But high-quality provision needs to be run in a stable, well financed way. A good comparison is with medical education, which is equally vocational. Most of what colleges do post-18 is workplace-oriented, vocational and technical. We would never run medical schools the way we have run further education. All this provision needs to be stable, expert, well resourced and based in institutions. That is why we made this issue such a major part of our review.

My second point concerns our very first recommendation. It has received rather little attention but we put it first because we thought it so important. I have to disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and with the Guardian: our review promises quite significant change, and this first recommendation is fundamental. The recommendation is to introduce a single lifelong learning allowance for adults, set at the same level as the loan entitlement that people currently have for a degree but giving individuals far more control over when and how they use it.

Our system at the moment tells young people, “Yes, you have an entitlement. You can have one full-time degree —once. Take it or leave it”. They very rationally think they should take it, and higher education, very rationally, sets out to make an offer that is, overwhelmingly and increasingly, for a full-time full degree. The level 4 and 5 technical qualifications have simply been disappearing, in spite of well-documented skill shortages and employer demand.

Students have a lot of choice of subject but very little choice over mode of study. A lifetime learning allowance of the sort we are advocating would enable and motivate people to split their education. They could take a technical qualification aged 18 or 28, then 10 years later take another, or perhaps at that point go on to a degree. This would give them a strong incentive to hold some money back and a strong incentive to part-fund when they can, because they could keep the money for when they need it. It would give a strong incentive to do some of their higher education in a college and then move to a university later. We believe it would also give a very strong incentive to institutions to develop a more varied set of offers. We put this recommendation first because we think it really matters.

My third and final point comes back to university funding, which will of course be a source of considerable debate. I should like to make two points on this. I do not want to get too involved in progressive versus regressive, except to say that we looked at this as a system—as a set of interconnected proposals. It is the proposals as a whole that we should consider when we talk about whether this is progressive. We believe that something that shifts resources to the 50% of the population who have been grievously served of late, is intrinsically a progressive set of recommendations.

My second point is that we were taken aback by how far funding and costs seem to have become divorced, and how universities have a complex set of cross-subsidies. You always cross-subsidise a bit, but it has become extraordinarily opaque—Heath Robinson would be proud of it. For example, and centrally, since this current system was introduced, the value of teaching grants, with which the Government top up student fees for high-cost subjects, has been comprehensively and progressively eroded. Unlike those in other countries, including Scotland, our universities now receive very little more for a science degree than they do for one in business studies. The funding for physics since 2011 has grown by a mere 6%, but for leisure studies it has grown by 40%. We find it hard to believe that the cost of teaching English has increased so much faster than the cost of teaching chemistry.

More importantly, a system so transparent and divorced from cost is not one that is stable or rational, or that can endure. Therefore, we made some serious suggestions for changing the nature of the funding regime, to make it clearer and recognise costs, because any regime for funding higher or further education must take proper account of both differential costs and the financial incentives that these create for institutions. At present, ours does not, and I hope noble Lords will consider the review and its recommendations with this, and our other general conclusions, in mind. I thank noble Lords.