Former minister David Willetts has lauded foundation years as being “instrumental in improving life chances.”
The UK’s first professor of social mobility Lee Elliot Major describes foundation years as “one of most promising social mobility vehicles we have at our disposal.”
Likewise, Secretary of State Bridget Phillipson, in her House of Commons speech on Monday, claimed that she “recognises the importance of foundation years in promoting access to HE.”
So why has she decided to press ahead with implementing the previous Conservative government’s plan to reduce foundation year fees?
Foundation years can be many things
Foundation years, which provide an additional year of undergraduate study to support students – often from socio-economically and educationally disadvantaged backgrounds – to access higher education, are often assumed to be homogeneous, but they’re not. They are a diverse group of academic programmes that have emerged organically over at least thirty years in response to the strategic, academic, and social contexts of the students, institutions, and subjects they serve. They are, when students are both registered and taught within a high quality university context, distinctly HE: with pedagogic approaches that are firmly located in higher education. Staff working on foundation year delivery in these settings are full, active and contributing participants in the HE academic community, undertaking valuable scholarship and research to enhance and improve HE provision.
This matters, because as the Foundation Year Network told the DfE, high quality foundation years are not just about teaching academic skills; they are about supporting students to embed themselves in a new and often very alien environment, with unfamiliar practices and expectations that less privileged students may be ill prepared for. In this form, where students are registered and taught within a high quality university context, foundation years have a long history of being highly effective, with the government’s own data showing that foundation years outperform alternative routes into HE for disadvantaged groups.
The other side of the coin
Perhaps Phillipson was not thinking of these foundation years when she decided to continue with the last government’s policy of reducing funding to further education fee levels. DfE data shows that the overall number of entrants to foundation years rose from 8,470 in 2011, to 69,325 in 2021 at an average rate of over 20 per cent per year, and that a significant proportion of this growth appears to be located in low or non-tariff providers. The same DfE data also notes that completion rates for foundation students studying at low or unknown tariff institutions in 2021 was 46 per cent, which is understandably concerning.
There is a lot of informed speculation that much of that increase has been amongst courses where provision is franchised, with students taking their foundation year outside of the university which awards their degree. If the government knows the extent of foundation year franchising, which you’d hope they would, they aren’t sharing: but that might help explain the fee cut.
Choosing to reduce foundation year fees from HE funding levels, to FE funding levels, might make sense if your goal was to remove large profits for providers who charge £9,250 for a nominally university level course and then deliver it more cheaply through a further education college. Of course, the downside to this is that you would also reduce funding to the rest of the sector in the process – and research commissioned and published by DfE has confirmed that high quality foundation years are no cheaper to deliver than other levels of study in the same institution
The case for consideration
High quality foundation years are arguably more relevant and valuable than ever, both for students and for higher education providers. That’s why new integrated foundation years continue to be developed even in the most prestigious of universities. In reducing foundation year fees, Bridget Phillipson may have misunderstood the full scope of foundation years and why they matter. She may have focused on solving a problem that exists within a minority of foundation year providers in the UK, and in so doing is (to borrow a phrase from Wonkhe’s own Jim Dickinson) about to “throw the baby out with the bathwater”.
It isn’t too late to put this right: the required statutory instrument has not yet been laid and Labour could take some time to add nuance to the implementation of this Conservative policy. More likely the fee reduction will be made, despite the harm it will cause.
For the sake of the thousands of students who would not otherwise be able to attend university, we can only hope that despite the additional pressures this places on already stretched finances, universities will be willing to continue delivering the valuable integrated foundation years that have already done so much for access, participation, and social mobility.
This article is adapted from Stephen Leech and Sarah Hale’s book Foundation Years and Why They Matter – which was published on 7 November by Emerald Publishing.
