Five terrifying points from the new higher education Green Paper

The government published a Higher Education Green Paper this morning, just a couple of days after Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell appeared at London’s ‘grants not debt’ student protest.

The new Green Paper will now be consulted on, with public events to be held – we’ll post them here as soon as we know.

Despite some nods to important issues like social mobility, much of the proposals are disturbing. These are some highlights from what the Green Paper proposes should be implemented.

1. Ministers can set tuition fee caps
The Times Higher Education analysis of the paper points out that the universities minister would be able to raise tuition fees through the roof without having to go through all the bother of a parliamentary vote and making a new law. In short, Boris Johnson’s brother would be able to set fees at whatever rate he likes.

2. Everyone and their dog can open a university
The Green Paper supports ‘making it less bureaucratic to establish a new university’ in order to allow new providers to get access to the ‘university’ title and degree-awarding powers quicker. In short, private companies will be given queue-jump passes to set up universities. We’ve seen this before with free schools and academies, which don’t have to recruit professional teachers, don’t have to represent staff and parents at governance level and keep either failing or being run by people who shouldn’t be let anywhere near a school. These private providers are to be given quicker access – not creating a free market, but actively helping the private sector.

3. Course closures seem to be expected to rise
The Green Paper ‘sets out proposals to protect students if an institution exits the market’. It’s nice that if your course closes midway through you’ll be legally guaranteed to get some money back, but it would be nicer if cuts hadn’t caused 70% of courses at one London university to announce closure, and they weren’t getting ready for even more course shutdowns or volatile new private universities at risk of closure.

4. The proposals will set students and staff against each other
Under the guise of the ‘Teaching Excellence Framework’, student ‘choice’ and ‘good quality’ will be used as weapons to increase the level of surveillance on staff, demand higher targets (while lecturers’ pay has seen the longest sustained fall since the Second World War) and bash unions. The ‘outcome-focused’ metrics will measure things such as graduate jobs which have little to do with the quality of one’s education – in short, a good teacher is not one who inspires and educates you about your subject, but who gets you the highest possible salary. These kind of reforms have already made both staff and standards suffer. The parallel ‘Research Excellence Framework’ also could attempt to quantify research according to narrow definitions.

But in spite of this drive for more open data, the paper hints at exempting universities from the Freedom of Information Act which allows people to request information from public bodies,

5. Fees will rise even if the Minister doesn’t use his shiny new powers
Fees are set to rise at least with inflation from 2017, as if pushing them up to nine grand wasn’t enough. The ability to increase fees will be a ‘reward’ for high quality institutions. In short, the best universities get to make themselves even more expensive, while the rest of us are left with the underperforming ones.

No wonder universities minister Jo Johnson refused to answer a question on whether he would send his children to the kind of universities he champions.

http://leadersoftheopposition.com/2015/11/06/five-terrifying-points-from-the-new-higher-education-green-paper/

Anyone who has young children needs to know about this.  I'm glad that, apart from the one just starting uni, my granchildren are out of the system!!!