Higher education was in a pretty good place at the end of the 2000s, though for some it did not particularly feel that way.
At that point higher education institutions were funded through a mixture of student fees and an annual teaching grant. Part of settling the controversy over the Labour government’s introduction and then increase in undergraduate fees was a commitment to review higher education finance, and so a review was duly set up in 2009, with Lord Browne, the former chief executive of BP, as its chair.
The appointment of a business leader rather than an educationalist to review higher education finance fed fears in some quarters about a growing “instrumentalist” approach to higher education prioritising employability, industry links, and economic growth over pure academic value. As evidence critics pointed to where departmental responsibility for universities lay in government: in a new Department for Business, Innovation and Skills that had been created in 2009, formed of a merger between the existing business department and the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (which itself had only existed since 2007). Proposals following the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise to incorporate “impact” into future iterations of the exercise raised similar concerns.
Yet set against the backdrop of a global financial crisis which had begun in 2007 and peaked in 2008 with the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September of that year, the inclusion of universities in the economy-focused government departments speaks to a vote of confidence in the value of higher level knowledge, innovation, and skills in economic recovery. Fair access to university, particularly selective universities, was viewed as an issue of national concern, covered frequently in the media.
A government report of 2009, Higher ambitions: the future of universities in a knowledge economy, captures the mood:
In the last ten years our higher education policy has combined huge new public investment with reform, both of the level of student contribution and the way in which universities engage with the wider economy. This has been a great success. We no longer fear a brain drain – indeed our research universities are competing successfully with the best in the world. No British Government – especially not this Government – will allow that asset to be devalued or destroyed.
We have also successfully expanded educational opportunity far further than it has ever previously reached in Britain, without affecting its quality. Some think wider opportunity is the enemy of excellence: the last decade has proved them wrong. The post 1992 universities have confounded the sceptics, with many justifiably able to claim a badge of excellence for what they do – especially in widening routes to higher skills and providing a new focus for civic pride and urban economic renewal.
The report went on to make proposals to go further on widening access, strengthening links between universities and business, and developing universities’ civic and international engagement. The Higher Ambitions report set out the background for the Browne Review, whose terms of reference were focused very narrowly on the question of higher education finance, especially fees policy, rather than on broader questions of the structure and purpose of HE. And that review was still under way when the 2010 General Election was called.
The 2010 General Election
Poor Gordon Brown. Having been Chancellor since the New Labour landslide victory of 1997 and waited (not all that) patiently for his turn to be Prime Minister, he finally took over from Tony Blair in June 2007 – only to be hit with a global financial crisis. Initially he won public approval with what was viewed as a decisive response to the crisis in the form of rescue packages for struggling banks, but as Britain started to feel the effects of the economic crisis, and Parliament was hit by a national scandal over MPs’ expenses, the initial optimism dissipated. Brown himself was not a naturally charismatic leader, and struggled to keep control of his party. By the time of the election, the political momentum was no longer with Labour.
In May 2010, it was the Conservative Party who sought to establish a youthful, fresh-faced, change-focused mood. Under leader David Cameron, the party has taken a leaf out of New Labour’s book and its 2010 manifesto “An invitation to join the government of Britain” emphasised ideas that it described as “ambitious and radical, as well as modern.” With a strong focus on the collective, the refrain “we are all in this together,” and grand plans about the Big Society, Cameron’s Conservatives blamed Labour under Gordon Brown for its handling of the global economic crisis and the associated increase in national debt and promised the party has a plan for economic recovery and growth.
The Conservative manifesto positioned university research as part of its growth agenda, offering up multi-year science and research budgets to provide a stable investment climate for research councils. Arguing that the only way Britain can compete globally is through “dramatically improving the skills of Britain’s workforce” there are pledges to “promote fair access to universities, the professions, and good jobs” and to provide an additional 10,000 university places “this year”.
Summing up the Conservatives view of higher education, the manifesto says:
Universities contribute enormously to the economy. But not all of this contribution comes directly – it can come from fundamental research with no immediate application – and universities also have a crucial cultural role. We will ensure that Britain’s universities enjoy the freedom to pursue academic excellence and focus on raising the quality of the student experience.
The statement is followed by a commitment to delay the implementation of the Research Excellence Framework to review the robustness of the proposed impact measures, and to “consider carefully” the outcome of the Browne Review.
One of the innovations of the 2010 General Election was televised leaders debates. This gave Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg a golden opportunity to raise his profile and that of his party and “Cleggmania” raged briefly on the relatively new social media platforms post-debate (before subsiding again for the actual vote).
The Liberal Democrats had made a virtue throughout the 00s of opposing tuition fees, and 2010 was no exception. The Liberal Democrat 2010 manifesto pledged to “scrap unfair tuition fees” and create a new National Bursary Scheme, as well as, in a tertiary turn, replacing the Skills Funding Agency and Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) with a single Council For Adult Skills and Higher Education.
An NUS campaign calling on all parliamentary candidates to pledge not to increase tuition fees was therefore a no-brainer for Lib Dem candidates courting the student vote, and many duly signed the pledge. This was to come back to haunt them after the election.
Labour, meanwhile, adopted as part of its education proposals in the 2010 Labour manifesto an updated version of its 50 per cent HE participation target, with a pledge that fully 75 per cent of young people under 30 should enter HE or complete an advanced apprenticeships or “technician level” training, underpinned by a promise to raise the participation age in secondary education to 18.
In parallel to the promise of a boost in autonomy for FE colleges, expansion of apprenticeships, and paid internships for students seeking careers in professions like media and law, Labour commits to “continue the expansion of higher education, widening access still further, while ensuring that universities and colleges have a secure, long-term funding base that protects world-class standards in teaching and research.” There is a guarantee of mentoring and support for low-income applicants to HE and an endorsement of the use of contextual information in admissions, and a commitment that all universities will be “required clearly to set out how they will ensure a high-quality learning experience for students.”
It’s notable that Labour’s expansion plans were focused on specific areas rather than expansion entirely driven by student choice:
In the coming years, priority in the expansion of student places will be given to Foundation Degrees and part-time study, and to science, technology, engineering and mathematics degrees, as well as applied study in key economic growth sectors.
Despite the sanitised and socially conscious Conservative momentum during the campaign, David Cameron’s party was unable to secure an overall parliamentary majority in 2010, and entered a coalition agreement with the Liberal Democrats. This ensured that when the Browne Review reported recommending an increase in undergraduate fees as the best means of securing the financial health of higher education, the Liberal Democrats found themselves in the sticky situation of having to rescind in government the promises they had made on tuition fees during the election campaign.
The 2015 General Election
The Conservative/Lib Dem coalition government oversaw a radical generational change to higher education: discuss. Or alternatively: the Conservative/Lib Dem coalition government’s reforms to higher education followed along the same broad trends towards expansion of HE that had been established since the Second World War.
By the time of the 2015 General Election undergraduate tuition fees in England had been set at £9,000 a year (amid a certain amount of controversy), the teaching grant had been radically cut to scale back the cost to the state of providing HE, some provision had been made for new and private HE providers to access the student loan book, there had been a white paper “Students at the heart of the system” but no HE legislation to translate all this into a new regulatory architecture, and Chancellor George Osborne had announced the removal of the cap on student numbers. Incidentally, out of this frenzied few years of higher education policy Wonkhe was born, though surprisingly that doesn’t show up in any party’s manifestos.
The explicit goal of Coalition policy was to facilitate a thriving market in higher education, broadly agnostic on the size and shape of provision because it would be driven by student choice rather than the state directing things. Accompanying this broad ideological position with a fee increase that in the early years of its implementation actually increased the overall funding settlement for universities generally found favour with the sector. This was aided by the thoughtfulness and obvious interest in the welfare and success of universities by then-minister David Willetts.
This general policy attention to higher education from the Conservatives in the early part of the decade fed through into the opening statement of the 2015 Conservative manifesto which claimed the party had “a plan for every stage of your life” including lifting the cap on university places.
Elsewhere in the manifesto the Conservatives include a reminder of their choice to ringfence the science budget when other areas were facing austerity-driven cuts, and pledge to invest £6.9bn in new research infrastructure, and direct investment towards the “Eight Great Technologies” that David Willetts had identified as areas where the UK could be a world leader.
In the chapter “Giving your child the best start in life” the manifesto celebrates that universities are now admitting over half a million students annually, commits to “ensure the continued success and stability” of the funding reforms, and promises to roll out a new postgraduate loan system. Some elements of subsequent HE legislation and policy can be seen here in a promise of more data on career paths of past graduates, efforts to ensure universities offer value money, and “a framework to recognise universities offering the highest teaching quality.” And a section titled “We will ensure our universities remain world leading” references the Nurse review of research councils, and supporting the development of online education (possibly an oblique reference to the contemporary debate over what role if MOOCs would have in the future of higher education provision).
A more stringent note in the section on controlling immigration revealed the tensions within the Conservative party on the issue: a hasty pledge from Cameron to “reduce net migration to the tens of thousands” caught international students up in its web. Thus began the long sector fight for international students to be removed from official government numbers, a position supported by those in the party who championed universities’ global reach and standing and the impact on GDP, and those who believed in reducing immigration of all kinds, despite the costs. As Home Secretary, Theresa May had announced a number of punitive measures aimed at international students in 2011, including shutting down the post-study work visa, later reintroduced as the Graduate route. The manifesto promises to “clamp down” on satellite campuses in London, review the highly trusted sponsor system and “reform the student visa system with new measures to tackle abuse and reduce the numbers of students overstaying once their visas expire.”
Labour, under the leadership of Ed Milliband, had famously promised in 2011 to reduce fees to £6,000, much to the consternation of vice chancellors who worried that the party had no specific plan to replace the lost income with public funds (for more on this, see Mark Leach’s account of being a Labour advisor when it all unfolded). The debate was clearly considered sufficiently important to be referenced in Milliband’s foreword to Labour’s 2015 manifesto “Britain can be better” which argued that “young people are taking on a mountain of debt to go to university.”
It was Milliband’s Labour party, however, that popularised the question of “the other 50 per cent” ie the substantial numbers of young people who did and do not progress to HE, and for whom there were (and are) limited options. The manifesto reiterates the £6,000 fees pledge in the section “Supporting the next generation” but devotes the bulk of this section to promising “gold-standard” apprenticeships primarily at level 3 and above, and the creation of “Technical Degrees” as the priority for university expansion.
The section on the economy cites world-leading universities and an outstanding science base as being among Britain’s key strengths, and promises to “introduce a new long-term funding policy framework for science and innovation, providing the stability and continuity that our companies and research institutes need to succeed.” There is also a nod to spin-outs and the formation of high-tech knowledge clusters around universities, and the manifesto promises to support the knowledge cluster model especially outside the South East.
Milliband’s Labour Party was similarly divided on immigration as the Conservatives, but for different reasons: the divide was between those working in or representing those on lower wages who saw immigration as a threat to pay and public services, and the well-heeled socially liberal graduates of the cities who welcomed the openness and diversity (and economic flexibility) that immigration brought. In relation to students Labour’s manifesto seeks to triangulate between the two poles:
Our economy and our society benefit from the talent and investment of people who come here, including university students coming to study. But the system needs to be controlled and managed so that it is fair… Short-term student visitor visas have dramatically increased, so we will tighten the system to prevent abuse, whilst welcoming overseas university students who bring billions into Britain.
The Lib Dems, though bruised from the rough and tumble of governing, sought to make a virtue of their time in coalition in the Lib Dem 2015 manifesto – and indeed, polling did predict a second hung parliament. Policies promised included expansion of advanced apprenticeships, “offering vocational education on a par with academic qualifications” and doubling innovation and research spending across the economy. A section on “A world class university sector, open to all” takes credit for the new loan scheme for “graduate degrees” and promises further work on widening participation, a universal credit transfer framework, and a review of higher education finance in the next Parliament to consider the impact of the 2012 reforms on access, participation and quality.
The result of the 2015 election was a surprise Conservative majority, albeit of only ten seats. Labour increased its vote share but lost seats, particularly in Scotland where the Scottish National Party was in the ascendancy. The Lib Dems shrank to only eight seats.
And everything after…
Most of us will recall what happened next: having won a majority Cameron was obliged to go through with his promise to hold a vote on EU membership in 2016, a vote that resulted in a majority in favour of leaving the EU. Cameron resigned and was succeeded by Theresa May as Prime Minister, who called an election in 2017 in hopes of securing a larger majority that would give her a mandate to implement Brexit. Instead, she failed to secure an overall majority, and was forced into a confidence and supply arrangement with the Democratic Unionist Party.
Having repeatedly failed to secure a parliamentary majority for her version of Brexit, (but also having overseen the 2017 Higher Education and Research Act and commissioned the Augar review of post-18 education) she resigned and handed the reins to Boris Johnson who secured a decisive victory in the 2019 General Election and (up to a point) Got Brexit Done only to be faced with a global pandemic that ultimately led to his downfall, the brief and catastrophic succession of Liz Truss as Prime Minister for a mere 49 days, and the ball stopping in the absence of any better options with current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. Labour took a swerve towards the radical left with the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader and any kind of sense of there being a political centre around which pragmatic policy agendas could coalesce departed the arena for a time.
The 2010 and 2015 manifestos represent something of a high point for higher education – literally to some extent, as these years saw two of the highest number of mentions of universities or higher education or graduates than any post-war election year. While immigration is clearly a sore point for the two main parties, there remains, as there had been since the war, a strong political consensus in favour of expansion, widening access, investment in science and research, and the mobilising of knowledge capital for wider economic benefit.
None of this practical appreciation for the importance of universities and higher education went away in the second half of the decade, but it’s situated in the context of a much more fractious politics that didn’t necessarily automatically see higher education as part of the solution to the country’s problems.
The Conservative 2017 manifesto is a curious beast, with plenty of warm words about world-leading universities, but with a strong undercurrent that what is implied is a subset of the sector. There are policies on university sponsorship of schools, and building R&D capacity through the development of investment funds, and funding for schemes to get graduates from “Britain’s leading universities” to enter public service roles. There is also the pledge to launch a “major review of funding across tertiary education as a whole” (the Augar review) set much more in the context of building up technical education provision than in ensuring the success of universities. The 2017 Labour manifesto notoriously pledged to create a National Education Service that had nothing to say about higher education other than that it should be free, and that maintenance grants would be restored. And the 2017 Liberal Democrat manifesto under leader Tim Farron essentially copies, pastes and tweaks the 2015 one even down to the heading: “A world class university sector, open to all.”
The 2019 Conservative manifesto rehearses the familiar mantra of the UK’s strength in having “many of the best universities on earth” in its introduction. There is a shift under Johnson towards greater openness in student immigration with the adoption of the Graduate route and immigration system that billed itself as focused on the “best and brightest.” “Civic” also entered the lexicon in 2019, with a manifesto promise to “work with local universities to do more for the education, health and prosperity of their local areas.” Acknowledging the publication of the Augar review in May 2019, and (implicitly) the lack of formal government response by the election in December, a section on “world-leading universities” promises to “strengthen and maintain our global position” but also focuses on the familiar issues of grade inflation “low quality courses,” and free speech.
Labour, still led by Corbyn after doing much better than expected in 2019, reiterated its National Education Service pledge, alongside a promise to nationalise pretty much everything else. But we can’t parse it out here because it’s been removed from public record, presumably because the current Labour leadership finds it too embarrassing.
And the Liberal Democrats, now led by Jo Swinson, and with a laser-like and surprisingly unpopular focus on rejoining the EU, pledge in the Lib Dem 2019 manifesto to help universities by stopping Brexit, as well as the familiar pledges from the last two manifestos on a funding review, maintenance grants and widening participation, mixed in with a developing focus on mental health and pledge to legislate on a student mental health charter. The theme of mental health shows up strongly in the 2024 Liberal Democrat manifesto and is worth remembering if, as some polls suggest, in the unlikely event that the Lib Dems end up being the official opposition.
So that brings us to today, with the caveat that if you want to find out more about any of the policy agendas galloped over here there is always the Wonkhe archive to explore, bringing you nerdish hot takes on higher education policy since 2011 (and formally since 2014). But if we have learned anything it is that in the great sweep of post-war history the period in which universities seemed to fall out of favour was extremely brief, probably about the politics of Brexit, and wasn’t actually at a high politics/manifesto level, all that serious in that even the most notionally sceptical Conservative administrations have still acknowledged the immense value of university knowledge, innovation and skills in their manifestos.
The 2010s did see a clear turn mid-decade towards the technical and higher level skills agenda and a desire to bring technical skills onto a par with academic/university provision but false dichotomies aside, that speaks to the way that universities have seen decades of sustained investment and development while other providers and sectors have not. That at times being inside the detail and communications gaffes of those policy agendas had felt uncomfortable for the sector in the last decade shouldn’t dissuade it from engaging in continuing that work in the next, hopefully in a more constructive policy environment.
