‘Blue Skies Thinking’ Shows ‘Two Brains’ May not be as daft after all!

 

Patrick Ainley reviews

Blue Skies: New thinking about the future of higher education – a collection of short articles by leading commentators edited by Louise Coiffait, published by Pearson Centre for Policy and Learning     http://pearsonblueskies.com 

 Campaign for the Public University  www.publicuniversity.org.uk

 A  sorry collection

Under New Labour ‘Blue Skies Thinking’ or ‘Thinking the Unthinkable’ was code for floating outrageous free-market ideas to simultaneously frighten people and draw out the opposition to Blair’s ‘public sector reforms’. So, crazy notions like running primary schools with just one qualified teacher supported only by teaching assistants first crawled out from under their stones.

Under the Coalition, the tradition continues only moreso since, as David Willetts – whose first chapter heads this collection – makes clear, today’s fearless Tory leaders regard New Labour as hopeless fudgers. Willetts makes clear he intends ‘to end the fixed, yet illogical, link between degree-awarding powers and teaching’ by reinventing what he mistakenly thinks the Council for National Academic Awards did, examine degrees taught by the polytechnics. ‘This means students at new institutions can obtain degrees or other qualifications from prestigious and well understood institutions. Employers, in particular, are likely to value such clear signals. This is behind my support of initiatives like Pearson’s exciting new BTEC degree [the immediate occasion for the23/5/11conference launching the publication] which will enable people to prove they have higher-level vocational skills.’

Willetts was supported – and sometimes mildly criticised – by various academics and others, who doubtless vied for the opportunity to be considered ‘leading commentators’. These even included some, like James Ladyman, Professor of Philosophy atBristolUniversity, who have opposed ‘the Impact agenda’ for research – though not fees, on this occasion at least.

Digging a hole for himself or for the Vice-Chancellors?

Vice Chancellors had been congratulating themselves on their own cleverness at their near universal move to raise undergraduate fees to (in most cases) very near the new maximum permitted £9000 cap in 2012. (This has the added advantage that no one ‘looks cheap’ and maintains the fiction that all degrees are still equal in quality, as arguably they once were.) VCs did this before to stimey Charles Clarke’s 2003 ‘basically free-market reform’ – as he had hoped it would be but it wasn’t because there was no market since nearly all charged the maximum £3000 then allowed. This time government would have to fork out even more immediate funding in loans for more students on higher fees and have accepted they won’t get it all back. The long-promised White Paper was repeatedly delayed to dig Willetts out of this hole. However, perhaps it was a hole that Willetts had dug for the VCs, predicting exactly what they would do!

Like Schools Minister, Michael Gove, who has been cutting funding for the pseudo-vocational qualifications criticised by Alison Wolf in school sixth forms and sixth form and FE colleges (as reported by Philippe Harari in Post-16 Educator 63 May-June 2011), leaving only academic subjects and science in line with a similarly traditional E-Bacc at 16, Willetts proposes diverting all those working-class students who he and Gove plainly believe should not be in ‘real’ HE, into ‘Apprenticeship-Degrees’ at 18+ (the new school-leaving age in 2015), delivered in FE through the good offices of Pearsons/Edexcel/Longmans.

While the Association of Colleges may have backed away from this particular commercial tie-in, the idea of a ‘standard qualification’ for FE that was once held out for two-year Foundation ‘degrees’ plainly appeals to FE bosses. Especially as it promises ‘degree’ awarding powers for FECs independent of franchising HE-approved HE in FE = c. one-in-ten of all undergraduate students, including F‘d’s.

More importantly for Willetts, he can do the two things he needs to dig himself out of his hole: reduce HE student numbers and reduce fees. We may call the likes of the new BTEC qualification, ‘Apprenticeship-Degrees’ (because they may top up ‘apprenticeships’ that begin for what Chris Woodenhead called ‘the naughty boys sent to college’ at 14 or 16 and even be topped up in turn by those few who complete them by one-year conversion courses in ‘real HE’. ‘Apprentices’ might even be sponsored and possibly paid to do this by employers – or, more likely, by state subsidies for their cheap labour, replaying 1980s Training Without Jobs.

No more ‘fudging’!

At c.£2000 p.a. such a ‘degree’ would certainly attract applicants from the Million+ former-polytechnics and the 94Group of mainly campus universities, perhaps forcing them to reduce their exorbitant fees for the same old academic modules mixed with varieties of Business Study that HE proposes to continue to offer alongside the Science, Technology Engineering and Medicine universities will still be funded for. And/or go into the business of selling their own two-year degrees, as other contributors suggest, by teaching over four terms instead of the current 100 days in three terms a year undergraduate average.

VCs had hoped their just-below-the-Russell Group max would attract students who may prefer to stay local and play safe, instead of chancing their arms on getting the 1st or 2.1 needed to have any hope of secure employment. (The Russells meanwhile can charge what they like and only await their chance to do so in a completely free market, as recommended by Browne but reportedly vetoed by the Lib-Dems – more ‘fudging’, as far as Willetts-Gove are concerned!) Competition with ‘FE degrees’ would also force HE institutions to renegotiate their relations with their ‘partner colleges’ to give them more of a share in remaining HE in FE fees.

Certainly, undergraduates are not going to go on paying through the nose for what one of the conference papers describes as ‘a middle class shibboleth…leave home and explore yourself through study, extra-curricular activities and revelry; meet a circle of friends with whom you’ll make the transition into stable, well-rewarded and connected professional careers; get drunk with those university friends and possibly marry one of them.’ (Matt Grist and Julia Margo of the ‘Think-Tank’ Demos, another of the main movers behind the Conference, as they were behind much of Bliar’s ‘Blue Skies Thinking’.) One, there are very few ‘stable, well-rewarded and connected professional careers’ and, two, like many other young victims subsumed by the alcohol and mass entertainment industries, school-leavers can go out from home to binge – if they can afford it!

Meanwhile, the other grouping of ‘Alliance’ universities, also touted their brand at the conference by claiming to be ‘the UK’s leading business-engaged universities’. Presumably, they think their ‘links with industry’ will attract students wanting to earn as they learn – or at least volunteer for unpaid work placements and internships as part of their courses to escape the qualified-but-inexperienced graduate Catch-22. (Just as University Technical Colleges re-run Kenneth Baker’s 1980s City Technology Colleges with little more chance of success but at least promising a route for school science sixth-formers to progress to STEM subjects in their sponsoring universities.)

For True Believers like Willetts and Gove, all this opens up possibilities of a real market in HE in which ‘diverse quality’ is reflected directly in price. Private providers can also come in, including mass-market publishers like Pearsons/Edexcel/Longmans providing standardised e-texts and tests to the unqualified instructors who pass them on to their students – the Open University (as was) this is not! Thus, studentless Marie Celeste colleges and universities (public or private and all points between) will offer distance-learning from franchised virtual hubs to on-line students working part-time and hoping to secure para-professional employment at best.

Just as with the proposed health service reforms, government promises a service ‘free at the point of delivery’ – you pay later if you can afford it so that the fee is a defacto voucher and not so different either from the graduate tax that Labour and the NUS favour. Meanwhile, Gove’s talk of ‘fair funding’ for schools will soon see a voucher for ‘bog-standard’ provision that parents who can afford it can add to and so buy into competing and increasingly privatised provision – as they do now through private schools, tutors and still more cramming. (Even Keith Joseph could see this would end up with the state subsidising the private schools but the ideologues driving Coalition policy don’t care any more!)

Supposedly, all this competition will restart social mobility – so that we are being sold academic selection of ‘bright working-class children’ and a return to grammar schooling as progressive policies. Society will then revert to Gove’s good old days when everyone knew their place and education kept them there, before Robbins disowned the eugenics inherent in the 11-plus and started the expansion of HE, while comprehensive schools and progressive primaries also tried to change society through education.

A few flies in the ointment

Only there hasn’t been any real upward social mobility since the end of the post-war boom in the 1970s and the proffered professionalisation of the proletariat through widening participation to higher education is now seen to be as illusory as – in the wake of the Credit Crunch – the dream that home ownership could secure middle-class status for all. Employers who are busily outsourcing, downsizing and deskilling, don’t want apprenticeships and the youth labour market has ‘imploded’, as Wolf says three times in her report. So, in a world that is oiling its way to self-destruction, the old social democratic nostrums – ‘expand GDP and become better educated, trained and qualified’ – no longer apply, even as Ed Miliband seeks to revive them in his pledge to the nation of a better future for successive generations.

That this is not going to happen has been grasped by the more radical of the student resistance, infused with the tactics as well as the ideology of the alter-globalisation movement and the climate camps. They recognise that the only future is in no-growth and they have begun to think for themselves with those of their teachers who will join them of an alternative to the more of the same represented by the ‘Blue Skies Thinking’ of the free-marketeers.

Two-Brains Speak with Forked-Tongue

Patrick Ainley

Post-16 Educator  Issue 63  May/June 2011 www.post16educator.org.uk

 ‘Two-brains’ Willetts, the Tory HE Minister, is schizophrenic. One brain acknowledges that from 2012 an undergraduate borrowing £9,000 a year plus maintenance loans ranging from £3,575 to £5,288 (depending on their family’s income) could end up, once they earn over £21,000, indebted up to £83,000 at current rates of interest on their fees and loans for those earning above average incomes. This is by any other name a graduate tax, which the new NUS leadership has again joined Labour in supporting. It will wipe out most of the purely speculative £100,000 lifetime earning ‘graduate premium’ over non-graduates that new entrants to HE mortgage their futures in hopes of obtaining. But Willetts’ other brain declares this is ‘by and large a good deal’! (BBC News17/3/11).

 Meanwhile, as in 2003, Vice Chancellors again congratulate themselves on their cleverness in raising fees to the max so there is no market and government will have to fork out even more immediate funding for HE. The long-promised White Paper has been repeatedly delayed to dig Willetts out of this hole. Will all prospective students pay though? Or only those who are rich enough not to need loans and for whose parents £9,000 a year is cheap compared with private school fees?

 The latest High Fliers’ research report (April 2011), covering only what The Times listing calls the ‘good universities’, records over half of the 12,658 final-year English undergraduates surveyed saying ‘they would not have come to university if their tuition fees had been £9,000 per annum’ and ‘a third would have been put off doing a degree by fees of £6,000 per annum’.

The (by implication) ‘not good’ universities may hope these students will attend locally at them instead – but not on fees of near £9,000 they won’t! Perhaps they will go part-time so more staff work evenings and weekends on short-term contracts in case the courses don’t recruit. Continuing professional development by increasingly virtual distance learning could also be part of this race to the bottom, as may two-year degree courses taught over four terms annually – if students will pay more for less! Or they could be attracted by ‘FE degrees’, whether as two-year Foundations for access to para-professional occupations such as teaching assistants, carers and policepersons, or if FE and other providers are given degree awarding powers instead of franchising from their HE partners.

 Or, instead of uni’, school-leavers (at 18 in 2015! 17 in 2013!) might do the apprenticeships that all the political Parties – and Alison Wolf’s March 2011 report on vocational education – talk so much about. These will predictably be offered in FE in competition with private training agencies since most employers – especially private sector ones – don’t need apprenticeships, even if subsidised by the state to run them. In ‘a youth labour market that has imploded’ as Wolf says (three times in her report!), it will soon be clear that these are ‘Apprenticeships Without Jobs’, replaying the Training Without Jobs of the 1970s and ’80s. Similarly, their graduate equivalents – internships, offered by the Coalition’s new attention to ‘the squeezed middle’ (rather than New Labour’s previous focus on the NEETs – those Not in Education Employment or Training), also do not guarantee employment.

 Perhaps this is where Willett’s madness has method as Nina Power reports on Facebook (24/4) that behind its new pay-wall The Times on-line reports private companies ready to run failing universities and colleges as HEFCE will no longer be allowed to bail them out. Unprofitable courses will then be scrapped and running costs drastically reduced as vice-chancellors and principals pay private providers to take control ‘under contracts lasting ten years or more’.

 These developments will redraw the binary line, only higher up the system since – in a drastic resolution of the arts-science divide – funding from 2012 will be increasingly restricted over four years only to the STEM subjects of Science Technology Engineering and Medicine, leaving Arts and Humanities to wealthy overseas students and others seriously rich enough to pay for them at surviving campus universities and reduced Russells. As the Campaign for a Public University said in its submission to the House of Commons Select Committee on Business Innovation and Skills, ‘a new divide in education will emerge, with universities increasingly responsible for creating a division within the middle class by distinguishing an upper layer from other, lower middle-class positions’.

 Despite the inevitable impending closures and mergers, at most universities an air of unreality clings to the so-called community of scholars. Many academics in the ‘good universities’ seem to believe they can carry on regardless, while most in the ‘bad’ are so ground down they can’t afford to look far ahead. All therefore continue with ‘discourse as usual’ – writing papers, attending conferences and meetings, marking and teaching while applying for research funding there is no chance of getting, without noticing the pointlessness of so much continued frenetic activity as inordinate hopes are invested in the assurances of vice chancellors that all will be well if we all ‘keep calm and carry on’. It won’t be!

 Clearly, the Tories have the view that too many working-class kids have got into higher education. So, as I have written before, ‘The government’s reception of the Browne Review in the context of the Comprehensive Spending Review, soon to be codified in the White Paper, marks the end, not only of higher education as it has developed since the war but – more broadly – of the whole effort [from the official introduction of comprehensive schools in 1965 on] to reform society through education.’ Now education from primary to post-graduate schools is returned to its post-war purpose of keeping society as it is, not trying to change it.

The worst case is if parents and young people buy into this fantasy – paying more for the empty qualifications that a privatised system will sell them. However, what else are school leavers expected to do? The answer to this question remains the strongest argument against raising fees, scrapping EMAs and for returning to free post-compulsory education for all.

OXBRIDGE REDIVIVUS

Patrick Ainley 

Post-16 Educator (No 62)   www.post16educator.org.uk

Introduction: Social immobility

What is the point of different forms of indirect democracy if MPs do not represent the electorate anyway, viz. Clegg – fees? And if government and opposition are both headed by male Oxbridge humanities graduates – Cameron, Clegg, Miliband, Balls and Osborn? No wonder celebrity politics focus on trivialities since the popular view is ‘they are all the same’.

A spate of media programmes point to this situation worsening with the idea that a return to grammar schools will restart social mobility and is therefore progressive. It’s true that the official introduction of comprehensive schools in the UK from 1965-on was coincident with the ending of the period of limited upward mobility that occurred during the 30 years of post-war full employment. But that it was not the cause of it can be seen from a comparison with the USA’s comprehensive high schools feeding similarly limited mobility that ended at the same time.

Since then in both countries there has been only illusory social mobility as non-manual service employment has expanded at the expense of manual labour, benefiting mainly women who now pursue careers before having children in their 30s. These new opportunities have been presented as professionalising the proletariat but in reality many of these para-professional occupations are being rapidly proletarianised – teaching and lecturing a case in point.

Bringing back grammar schools would only cement this new social situation since the only mobility remaining for increasing numbers is downward. And the eugenic thinking behind thus ‘saving the bright working-class child’ from this fate is as evident now as it was in 1944, though without (as yet) any coherent ideology of ‘IQ’ to support it. However, what is defined as ‘bright’ is equally narrow performance in repeated tests of largely literary ability functioning from the earliest age as proxies for more or less expensively crammed cultural capital.

The majority are thus failed at every fence and, more importantly, made to feel that they are failures. This principle of academic selectivity has re-imposed itself ruthlessly, marginalising residual republican notions of entitlement, along with any other ‘effort as worthy as that dignified by the name of scholarly study within the noblest of colleges’, as Hardy’s Jude the Obscure saw it.

Now the market in universities competing on price for various specialist options becomes the model for schools and colleges. As the former follow further and higher education into a centralised system of ‘fair funding’, it can be anticipated that vouchers for a basic entitlement may be introduced so that parents who can afford it top up their voucher at independent schools as private providers are subsidised to bid into the state system. The academic predominance of ‘The Great Public Schools’ with their long-standing links to Oxbridge Colleges exemplified by Winchester and New College, Eton and Christ Church, is thus also reaffirmed.

‘Nosseled in the grossest kynd of sophistry’

Gillian Evans’ twin histories enable us to understand how this has happened. She has long been a thorn in the side of successive Cambridge Vice Chancellors’ aspirations to turn that institution – at which she holds a doctorate as well as one from Oxford – into a business park. She is dedicated therefore to ‘preserving the medieval democracy which has served it for more than eight centuries’ (p. 76).

The priestly vocation in which this originated was later joined by lawyers and doctors, though not without dispute, for instance over the dispensation of what would now be called dangerous drugs between apothecaries, physicians and the state – a battle that continues on all three fronts to this day. The question is whose knowledge and how is it to be defined. As in the public disputations that remained the Oxbridge method of examination until the mid-nineteenth century, ‘both sides of the question’ had to be presented in a manner that is tediously familiar in today’s journalistic ideal of ‘objectivity’.

Similarly, today’s students are expected to defer to authority but have their own point of view in a debate that is open but which you have to be an expert to enter. These paradoxes confuse the uninitiated and are only ‘assimilated’, as Bourdieu said, as a matter of ‘style’ by those who are already ‘converts’.

In the Medieval period such dangerous knowledge was guarded as Mysteries by Guilds whose disciplines demanded a Master work to demonstrate initiation into the craft with students taking a peregrinatio academica around Latin-speaking Christendom, just as journeymen stonemasons and other apprentices toured Europe’s cathedrals.

 

However, Evans begins her history of  ‘Modern Oxford’ by saying that it was ‘shaped by the generation born as Victorians who broke off their studies to go and fight in the First World War, survived the carnage and lived on through another World War to become the generation of aged dons…’ typified by the Inklings (Lewis, Tolkein et al). ‘Straddlers between Victorian and modern Oxford they may have been, but not includers of a wider social world, or of women’ (pp. 11-12). They coped with the grim conditions by withdrawing into a fantasy life, ‘writing stories and designing languages for elves’ (p. 14).

From the enthusiasm of John Betjeman’s Oxford for this Middle Earth of pseudo-medieval flummery and eccentricity – or ‘a particularly Oxford form of “celebrity”’ (p. 43), Evans turns to ‘our second Oxford “guide book” to the century’ (p. 48), Masterman’s 1952 To teach the Senators wisdom. This contains such jolly gems as ‘There has been no greater mistake made in Oxford than the abolition of compulsory chapel, except of course the admission of women and the abolition of compulsory Greek’ (quoted on p. 27).

Nevertheless, Evans sees Oxford’s mission embodied in the figure of Roy Jenkins – ‘an Oxford Chancellor without a privileged background, who had no trouble with “access”, went on to run the country, and came back to enjoy late summer of his life in Oxford’ (p. 77). Jenkins’ port-filled self-parody in those later years was a reinvention of character in the opposite direction to that taken by the Bullingdon Boys who now run the country but who have also disguised their earlier avatars. Yet both – and the long list of Oxford-educated Prime Ministers, such as Bliar, ‘a typical Oxford lawyer, completely superficial’ in the estimation of Peter, now Lord, Hennessey – show the University’s subservience to state and church which Evans’ subsequent chapters trace from its origins in the twelfth century.

In her Cambridge volume the Tudor monarchy drew upon that university at the time of the Reformation, following ‘The custom of looking to the universities for likely academics who could be used in the service of the Government [that] was now well established’ (p. 149). Thomas Cranmer, for instance, rewarded with Archbishopric for justifying Henry VIII’s divorce, was described by a contemporary biographer as ‘nosseled in the grossest kynd of sophistry’ at Cambridge (p. 148).

Playing off church against state, the academic Guardians asserted their special selection of the powerful through an extension of the unctuous laying on of hands by a priestly caste. The two English universities (as compared with five in medieval Scotland), also enforced a monopoly of defining what was recognised as valid knowledge first noted by the historian Edward Gibbon (p. 199). They ruthlessly snuffed out rivals like Lincoln and Northampton, or Durham University founded under the Protectorate; also other competing centres of legitimation, such as the Inns of Court and later Learned Societies, Royal or Lunar, Dissenting Academies and Mechanics Institutes.

Trahison des clercs

25 years ago Oxford students and academics petitioned and voted against Margaret Thatcher’s honorary Doctorate. Now the academic ideal that even the Gove-approved John Dryden regarded in his day as ‘crabbed and subtle’ (p. 210), has re-asserted its dominance. It is no wonder therefore that many Oxbridge students and staff are now so totally ‘up themselves’, as other students put it, as to place their self-interest above any residual dedication to public sector higher education.

That this trahison des clerks is true to form Evans shows in her judicious account that illustrates in critical episodes and individuals (More, Wolsey, Cranmer, Thomas Cromwell, Laud) the struggle of ‘an organised body of professional teachers to provide for its own perpetuation’, as Durkheim says of the Paris University Guild in his History of Pedagogy in France.

At least Cambridge, nurtured by the puritan ethic of East Anglian trade and property relations, was represented in Parliament by Oliver Cromwell. Thereafter, in the antinimonies of the national culture embodied by the Boatrace Universities, Royalist Oxford since the Restoration has endorsed the social ideal of the ruling class, while puritan Cambridge and a few Oxford colleges – such as eighteenth century Exeter, Merton and Wadham, as ‘Whigs’ amongst a ‘Tory’ majority – afforded a second eleven to be fielded as required, like New College’s influence on the1945 Labour government.

Nevertheless, even at eighteenth-century Oxford, a ‘more plebian and puritanical’, if not ‘middle class’ (p. 193) undergraduate intake necessitated provision that went beyond religion and aristocratic pursuits such as hunting. This turned halls into colleges and raised the age of admission from 15-16 to 18-19. ‘Oiks’ acted as servants to gentlemen students in superior caps. At Cambridge gradations between students were marked by separate dining arrangements. In contrast to Doctor Johnson, whose ‘Oxford career was brief because of shortage of family funds’ (p. 197), many a student was there ‘to say in later life that he has been to university’ (p. 199) or ‘comes here as a commercial speculation’ to increase his earning power (p. 306).

In the same period, Cambridge became ‘duller and more second-rate’ (p. 240) but, in what that volume describes as its ‘nineteenth century transformation’, Cambridge redefined the academic pursuit, following the Victorian Henry Sidgwick, as ‘one whose study is the chief interest of his life’ and who ‘alone can keep the machinery of teaching ever on a level with the advance of knowledge’ (p. 87 in the Cambridge volume). The University was thus well positioned to cater for the alliance of industrial capital and middle-class professions it helped to form against surviving landed aristocracy pursuing more character-building preparation for leadership at Oxford.

Cambridge was also more open to the development of science, putting ideas to ‘the test of Sense’ and moving ‘out of the gentleman’s study and the Royal Society’ (p. 285) to find a home in de-facto university research centres organized ‘through faculties and Departments and not by the Colleges’ – partly because it was too expensive for them. Science was therefore ‘fundamentally different from the tutorial system of the arts and humanities’ (p. 47), though making use of existing botanical gardens and museum collections. It followed the Humboldtian model of the professor leading his fellow scholar-researchers that was imported by the new universities of London and the industrial towns as they gradually wrested themselves free from Oxbridge tutelage. By contrast, in Newman’s revival of the tutorial system, ‘A student’s task was to read. His [college] tutor’s role was to direct his reading’ (p. 247).

The gap between Snow’s two cultures of art and science was thus preserved and extended within each institution as well as being reflected elsewhere, particularly through A-levels introduced in 1951 to prepare a minority for specialist study. Abandoning any attempt to overcome this divide, government has now withdrawn state funding for the arts and humanities leaving them as frivolous pursuits for those rich enough to afford them.

Conclusion

In the 1960s the Cambridge economics Professor Joan Robinson said, ‘The leading characteristic of the ideology which dominates our society today is its extreme confusion. To understand it means only to reveal its contradictions.’ Since then the academic fashion for postmodernism, first floated in ‘post-structural’ form at Cambridge – ever more open to foreign ideas even if silly ones, has made a virtue of this deconstruction without acknowledging the need for the reconstruction which Robinson implied. The resulting fragmented ‘discourse’ is the obverse of traditionally narrow and arbitrarily subdivided empirical subject specialisation. Neither academic form of knowledge allows for generalisation capable of questioning the purposes to which it is put or the society which uses it.

 

The University of Oxford, A new history by Gillian Evans, Tauris, 2010, pp.356, £35.00 (hbk), ISBN 978 1 84885 114 6.

The University of Cambridge, A new history by Gillian Evans, Tauris, 2010, pp.382, £35.00 (hbk), ISBN 978 1 84885 115 3.

(References are to the Oxford volume unless otherwise stated.)

                                                                                                                     

Of our elaborate plans, the end

Patrick Ainley and Martin Allen

Society for Research into Higher Education (News) 

http://sociologicalimagination.org

The Coalition’s reaction to the Browne Review of student fees complements their slashing of 40% of higher education funding. Their new hard cap of £9,000 a year on fees leaves unfunded arts and humanities to be paid for only by those who can afford such frivolous pursuits at elite and surviving campus universities – mainly overseas students and others who are seriously rich. For the rest, a market dedicated – like surviving HE research – to the interests of the private sector will offer vocational courses in the STEM subjects of Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine as the remaining universities and colleges collapse and merge into a range of local e-learning hubs offering part-time and distance provision.

This marks the end, not only of higher education as it has developed since the war but – more broadly – of the whole effort to reform society through education. If carried into legislation, it will close a phase of progressive reform that began with the official introduction of comprehensive schools from 1965. These freed primary schools for child-centred education and prepared the way for expansion of further and higher education, including the polytechnic experiment. Battling on the uneven playing field of examinations in traditional academic subjects with the surviving private and grammar schools linked to the antique universities in a polarising labour market, it is remarkable that these successive reforming efforts were as successful as they were, especially for young women. In future young people will be expected to mortgage their futures for vocational courses and apprenticeships without jobs in the competing and variously specialised HE institutions now presented as a model for schools and FE to follow. Differentiated fees will heighten the existing social hierarchy in which, as a general rule, the older the university, the younger, whiter, more male and posher its students.

Meanwhile the FE colleges may be swallowed up by this vocational HE become FE. Unless they get two-year degree awarding powers, their only remaining role could be delivering the Apprenticeships Without Jobs that will replay 1970s and ’80s YOP and YTS. FE still has the majority of NUS’s membership, plus one-in-ten HE students and, together with their teachers, F&HE students are well aware that loss of EMAs and raised fees are an attack upon the entire so-called ‘Lost Generation’, as the Wednesday 10^th November demo showed. In fact, the strongest argument against raising fees and fully funding F&HE is: what else are school and college leavers supposed to do?

Lost Generation? Paying more for less

Patrick Ainley and Martin Allen

With customers queuing to get into HE, it would be irrational from a business point of view for government not to raise fees as high as it can. It is therefore almost inevitable that – urged on by the Russell Group – the recommendations of the Browne review will be accepted and fees raised for 2011 entry variably by course and institution to create a free market in undergraduate HE to match that already existing for postgraduates and overseas students. This is notwithstanding the previous anti-fees policy of the Lib Dems for whom so many students apparently voted………….

  http://sociologicalimagination.org/posts/patrick-ainley-and-martin-allen/lost-generation-paying-more-for-less/

The cruellest con of all

     

 

Patrick Ainley 

 

Times Higher Education Supplement  07/02/08

 

 

 

Widening participation is a cruel con but the people academics fool the most with it are themselves.  The government target of 50 per cent of 18-30 year-olds entering higher education by 2010 presents itself as a professionalisation of the proletariat but it disguises a proletarianisation of the professions.  Not only the academic profession but the professions which many graduates will enter – if they are lucky. 

 

                                                                                                          

Occupations of all sorts now calling themselves professional (not merely in the sense of doing a good job and being full-time as opposed to amateur, like footballers or criminals) have expanded with the decline of industrial labour and the expansion of service and office employment, especially for women.  These occupations have also professionalized themselves by their association with higher education.  Teachers were a case in point, moving from the teacher training colleges to Departments of Education in universities.  Now teacher education, as it briefly became, has once again reverted to teacher training in competences dictated by the central government Training and Development Agency, even though still nominally within higher education. 

 

                                                                                  

Widening participation on a reduced unit of resource was also a recipe for turning higher into further education.  Without the extra support necessary for ‘non-traditional’ students, ie. those without the top A-level grades guaranteeing their preparedness for traditional HE, it is impossible for them to reach the standards of academic literacy and numeracy demanded by the unchanged HE that lecturers persist in inflicting on the new mass of students. 

 

 

Meanwhile, the selecting elite have used widening participation to cream ‘bright working-class’ applicants in the way the grammars used to do.  As has been pointed out many times, this only makes the situation worse for the rest of us. Academics have only themselves to blame for this.  Partly we were arrogant in thinking that what we had to teach was what everyone else wanted and needed to know.  We did not recognise that knowledge is not power and that most of our students are not in the personal, social or economic situation to be empowered by it.  Partly we were stupid in not seeing that our eagerness to enlighten the masses entailed levels of support that are unavailable to us.  

 

 

Worse, since the polytechnics – as Tyrrell Burgess wittily said at the time – were allowed to become universities to disguise the fact many universities had become polytechnics, there is now no surviving alterative to academic HE.  Instead, all new and old universities compete on the uneven playing field of a traditional curriculum. 

 

 

When academics belatedly realise that ‘more means different’, our only option is to ‘dumb down’ towards competence-based programmes like many of the two-year Foundation ‘degrees’. 

 

 

This is the likely future for the vocational diplomas and apprenticeships government is conjuring up.  Since no schools want to run the dips and employers aren’t going to pay for them, they will predictably be picked up by desperate FE and then passed on as F‘d’s to what are becoming the training universities. 

 

 

 

Dropping selection? UCL and the Camden Academy

Patrick Ainley  

Letter   Education Guardian   27/11/07 

 

Malcolm Grant, provost of University College London and chair of the Russell Group of universities, is sponsoring a non-selective mixed academy in his borough of Camden as a way of widening participation to elite higher education (A university is the best kind of sponsor for an academy, Education Guardian November 20)       

http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/story/0,,2213577,00.html

 

I take it, then, that UCL will now be dropping its use of specially selective super academic pre-U tests and similar for medicine, law and other subjects. Or will the new University of Camden London run in parallel to the existing University College London?