BLAIR’S BRITAIN, 1997–2007
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combination of charm and political acumen won over rebellious colleagues and vice-chancellors alike. The pairing was so successful in piloting fees legislation through the Commons against the odds that both won
promotion – Clarke to the poisoned chalice of the Home Office and
Johnson into the Cabinet as Work and Pensions Secretary, a rare advancement for a higher education minister.
By then, the political heavy lifting was over where higher education
was concerned. Ruth Kelly came and went as Education Secretary with
little involvement in university affairs, while Kim Howells enjoyed a similarly uneventful few months as Higher Education Minister before the
2005 election. Alan Johnson made a triumphal return to the department
as Education Secretary for the final months of the Blair era, but left most
university business to his Higher Education Minister, Bill Rammell, who
had effectively swapped jobs with Dr Howells.
After sometimes stormy relationships with ministers during the
Thatcher years, universities and union leaders enjoyed a reasonable
rapport with most of the Blair appointees. Vice-chancellors of the most
prestigious institutions and a select few others with the right political
links would lobby No. 10 directly, but gripes about the Department for
Education and Skills more often concerned its perceived powerlessness
than any refusal to listen. Conscious of its strong focus on schools, the
department belatedly strengthened its higher education directorate in
2003, appointing Sir Alan Wilson, the former Leeds University vicechancellor, as its first Director General. But by then, the key decisions of
the Blair years had been taken.
The early years
Responding to the Dearing Report took up much of Labour’s initial
period in office where higher education was concerned. Its tenth anniversary, like that of Tony Blair’s arrival in office, prompted a spate of
reassessments of the report’s impact. Sir David Watson, in an inaugural
lecture as Professor of Higher Education Management at the University
of London’s Institute of Education, claimed a number of successes for
the committee of which he was a member. They included a more structured approach to partnership between universities and industry, more
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attention to teaching and learning, systematic funding to widen participation in higher education and improved university governance. But
Sir David did not believe that the central idea of the report – that of a
‘compact’ in which institutions would gain increased security in return
for greater accountability and responsiveness to a range of stakeholders –
had been realised. Funding levels have fallen far short of the sums needed
to provide such security, let alone to implement the measures that
Dearing considered necessary to produce a world-class higher education
system (rather than a few world-class institutions).6
The first and most obvious example of this trimming came with the
fees package announced in the government’s response to the report. The
decision to make fees payable upfront, rather than wait up to twenty years
for graduate contributions to put the scheme into credit, at the same time
as completing the transition from student grants to loans, stored up
political trouble. Means-testing had to be introduced to avoid pricing
hundreds of thousands of natural Labour supporters out of higher education and universities were given £40 million for hardship funds for students who had exhausted their loan entitlement. The system was so
unpopular in Scotland that its abolition was a central plank in the coalition between Labour and the Liberal Democrats after devolution. The
Cubie Report,7 commissioned by the new Scottish Parliament, paved the
way for the abolition of upfront fees with a more modest £2,000 total
contribution payable by graduates in instalments. But it would not be
until 2004 that similar measures were agreed in England.
The other pressing concern of those early days was an issue that
Dearing deliberately fudged because of its political sensitivity: that of
college fees at Oxford and Cambridge. The report’s proposed review of the
‘substantial addition to the standard funding for institutions of higher
education’ represented by college fees8 was taken up enthusiastically by
Lady Blackstone, who was accused of anti-Oxbridge bias in a lengthy and
sometimes bitter campaign to preserve the £35 million in extra funding for
tuition. Robert Stevens, the Master of Pembroke College, Oxford, accused
her of setting out to ‘eviscerate’ the universities.9 It was the first example of
the love/hate relationship that was a recurring theme of Labour’s dealings
with the ancient universities. Gordon Brown, an Edinburgh University
16 Whatever happened to the Dearing Report? Professorial lecture, 6 February 2007,
www.ioe.ac.uk/publications.
17 Student Finance: Fairness for the Future, 21 December 1999.
18 Dearing Report, main report, p. 300 (19.46).
19 John O’Leary, ‘Ministers out to Ruin Oxbridge, Says College Head’, The Times, 13 July 2001.
graduate with little time for the pretensions of the English elite, made
his position clear at the 1997 Party conference: ‘When at Oxford and
Cambridge, half of the places still go to the private schools, it is time to
modernise and extend opportunity by redistributing resources.’10 But
Oxford-educated Blair was more sympathetic and a compromise was
found, under which a steadily reducing sum would be paid to the universities centrally for allocation to the colleges.
The row over college fees proved to be the shape of things to come, as
the government in general – and Brown in particular – veered between
steering policy to promote research at the UK’s two pre-eminent universities and pressing them to broaden their admissions. Brown was
prepared to find £69 million, without giving rival universities the opportunity to compete, for a research partnership between Cambridge and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.11 But six months later he would
ignite the greatest single higher education controversy of the Blair years
with ill-informed criticism of Oxford over the rejection by Magdalen
College of Laura Spence, a well-qualified candidate for medicine from a
Tyneside comprehensive. The teenager had been predicted (and subsequently achieved) five A grades, but was said by the college to have interviewed badly in comparison with other equally well-qualified applicants,
some of whom were also from comprehensives. Nevertheless, Brown
condemned the decision as ‘scandalous’ and blamed ‘an interview system
more reminiscent of the old school network and the old school tie than
justice’.12 It was an incident that scarred relations, not just with Oxford,
but with universities generally, who felt themselves being bullied into
complying with the government’s agenda to widen participation.
Universities were already subject to ‘performance indicators’ that
included the proportions of entrants from state schools, from the lowest
socio-economic classes and from areas of low participation in higher
education. Those who lagged furthest
behind national averages were
named and shamed by their funding councils, which offered a 5%
premium (as Dearing had proposed) on those recruited from poor areas.
Yet it was the government’s own policy on tuition fees that was most obviously holding back working-class participation, at least among the
mature students who had flocked to the polytechnics and their successor
10 ‘Oxbridge to be Stripped of Some of its Glitter?’ BBC News, 15 December 1997.
11 Tom Buerkle, ‘Institute will Promote New High-tech Businesses in Britain’ , International
Herald Tribune, 9 November 1999, p. 1.
12 Alexandra Frean, John O’Leary and Philip Webster, ‘Brown Goes to War over Oxford
Elite’, The Times, 26 May 2000, p. 1.
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institutions in the 1990s. While fees had made little difference to sixthformers’ enthusiasm for degrees, the Treasury felt obliged to fund a £68
million package to revive interest among older applicants.
If Brown had left his mark on the higher education debate in the Laura
Spence affair, Blair’s first-term moment had already happened and
was almost equally unexpected. Although there had been discussions in
a small group of ministers, civil servants and advisers about ways of
increasing England’s historically low rate of participation in post-school
education, Blair’s announcement of a new target came out of the blue.
Rather than use the traditional benchmark of participation by 18-yearolds, he set a goal of 50% of the population experiencing higher education by the age of 30, giving universities until 2010 to reach the target.
This had the merit of including mature students, who were in the majority in new universities, but it was such a novel concept that the Education
Department at first could not even give the current position. It turned
out to be 43% and efforts to bridge the gap dominated higher education
policy for years to come.
The 50% target rapidly became a rod for the government’s back, particularly when combined with a requirement to recruit more students
from poor backgrounds. The figure was symbolic and had no detailed
rationale in economic or social terms, but it was sufficiently ambitious to
require concerted action. For all the evidence of similar growth in other
developed nations, public opinion was never convinced of the need for
half the population to go to university, particularly when there was a
shortage of plumbers and other skilled tradespeople. With most of the
growth coming in new universities, which were responding to student
demand with new types of vocational degrees, critics rounded on socalled ‘Mickey Mouse’ courses like surf science and golf course management. Similar debates were taking place in other parts of the world – in
Australia, for example, they were known as ‘cappuccino courses’. In the
UK, media studies became the object of particular scorn, despite burgeoning demand for places and obvious employment opportunities.
With the Tories making political capital on the perceived dumbing
down of higher education, David Blunkett took on the task of setting out
Labour’s vision in a speech at Greenwich University in February 2000. In
a location chosen to echo Anthony Crosland’s famous blueprint for the
polytechnics, Blunkett defended media studies and launched the twoyear foundation degrees that were seen as the engine of further expansion, while setting out higher education’s role in the knowledge economy
and placing it in the context of globalisation. An important part of the
message was that Labour’s expanded higher education system would not
be of the ivory tower variety, but would serve the economy with modern,
vocational courses, many of which would be delivered in the workplace.
Surprisingly, however, Blunkett immediately eclipsed his own speech
with a scarcely coded warning at the subsequent press briefing about
the dangers of top-up fees. They would not be imposed while he was
Education Secretary, he volunteered after ignoring the topic in his
speech, but he would not be Education Secretary for ever. There could
have been no clearer indication of the struggle that was taking place at the
top of government and which would dominate education policy in Blair’s
second term. Blunkett had accepted the inevitability of tuition fees in
1997, but fought a successful rearguard action against taking the next step
towards American levels of payment. He did not believe that universities
or the Treasury could fund bursaries on the scale necessary to preserve
access for students from low-income families. Against the expectations of
many around him, Blunkett even won a manifesto promise that Labour
would not introduce top-up fees in the next Parliament. But the commitment for the longer term would barely survive his departure from the
Education Department and, ironically, it was the unpopularity of the
original fees regime that hastened the arrival of higher charges.
The second term
Blair returned from the 2001 election campaign shocked at the antipathy
that he had encountered towards tuition fees. In another unexpected
intervention, he used his party conference speech to announce joint
Treasury/Education Department reviews of student support and higher
education funding.13 Hasty briefing suggested that among the options was
the return of universal student grants, an indication of the confusion surrounding the announcement, rather than any realistic assessment of the
likely outcome. Months of in-fighting followed, during which the overlapping nature of the reviews inevitably led to them merging and moving in
the direction of top-up fees. The exercise might have started as a response
to student poverty, but concerns for the state and future standing of the
leading universities gradually took over. Andrew (now Lord) Adonis,
Blair’s main education adviser, and Roy Jenkins, Chancellor of Oxford
University and one of the Prime Minister’s mentors, were instrumental in
13 Ben Russell, ‘Review of University Tuition Fees Ordered in Drive to Attract Working-class
Students’, The Independent, 3 October 2001.
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convincing him that there was no alternative to top-up fees if British universities were to compete with their much richer American rivals. And the
fees should be variable so that the best universities could charge more than
the rest and also distinguish between different courses if they chose. The
private returns from a university degree were sufficient to justify a more
substantial contribution from the student, it was argued, as long as higher
education remained affordable for those of limited means.
But the early fee models suggested that Blunkett’s concerns on this
score had been well-founded. Students would continue to pay upfront
and the threshold for fee waivers would be much lower than in the original fee regime. Estelle Morris, who had replaced Blunkett as Education
Secretary, was not opposed to higher fees, but was uncomfortable with
the idea of the state paying more to support some students than others
and worried that the scheme, as proposed, would further limit access. She
warned Blair
that such proposals would be unacceptable to many Labour
MPs and supporters of the party in the country, pressing instead for the
original fee to be doubled and support for needy students to be maintained. When Morris resigned, in September 2002, it was over her own
assessment of her stewardship of her department in the wake of controversies over A levels, individual learning accounts and primary school
tests. But some of her colleagues still believe that fees would have pushed
her to the brink if she had not gone then.
Charles Clarke, Morris’s successor, immediately put down a marker
for what were to be tough negotiations with the Treasury by letting it
be known that he had been ‘attracted’ by the idea of a graduate tax,
although he had an open mind on the subject. Since Adonis and the
No. 10 team had been championing fees, while Gordon Brown was said to
favour a graduate tax, the suggestion was political dynamite. Blair wanted
universities to set their own fees and keep the income, while Brown naturally preferred a system that would keep the Treasury in control. At a
breakfast meeting at The Guardian’s offices, Brown painted top-up fees as
a deterrent to working-class students and expressed doubts about universities’ ability to manage the cash injection that fees would bring.14
Clarke may have appeared to be siding with the Brown camp, but his
real purpose was to ensure that any new system included a switch from
upfront charges to income-contingent repayment after graduation.
Having secured a delay in the promised November publication of a White
14 Patrick Wintour, ‘Chancellor at Odds with Blair over Top-up Fees’ , The Guardian p. 1,
20 November 2002.
Paper, Clarke eventually achieved not only the deferred payment model,
but also a much more generous package of student grants and bursaries.
By the time the White Paper was published in January 2003, the maximum
fee had also been limited to a comparatively modest £3,000 a year. 15 This
fell far short of what some of the more prestigious universities were
demanding – Sir Richard Sykes, Rector of Imperial College London had
told his governors that at least £10,500 a year would be needed for undergraduate courses to break even16 – and even in the run-up to publication