of the White Paper, £5,000 a year was a live option. Behind-the-scenes
advice from the Higher Education Funding Council for England was that
£3,000 a year was unlikely to produce the market that Blair desired, but
this was considered to be the most that Labour MPs would support.
In the event, both judgements proved to be correct. Both the
Conservatives and Liberal Democrats opposed the proposals at the
heart of the Higher Education Bill, while more than 100 Labour backbenchers eventually signed an Early Day Motion condemning variable
fees. The Lib Dems had opposed fees in all their guises and, while many
Conservatives found their party’s stance opportunistic and inconsistent
with its free market principles, few Tory MPs were prepared to help save
the government’s skin. There followed months of explanation, argument
and arm-twisting in the Labour ranks. Backbenchers disliked the principle of top-up fees and, although the scheme would not be implemented
until the following parliament, many felt that the Bill breached their
manifesto commitment. A number of concessions were made, including
the proposed establishment of an Office of Fair Access to protect the
interests of low-income families. Although cast as a politically correct
ogre on the Tory benches and in the press, Oftoff (as critics labelled the
agency) proved to be a distraction, making almost no impact on the way
in which fees were introduced on the ground.
Although feelings over fees ran high in the Labour Party, there is no
doubt that anger over Iraq helped stoke up opposition to the Bill. The
issue became a proxy for wider political concerns as prominent allies
of Gordon Brown – some with little track record of involvement in
education debates – emerged among the leading rebels. Brown made
an eleventh-hour appeal to his supporters to back the Bill and was credited with saving it when Nick Brown, the former Chief Whip and close
15 The Future of Higher Education, Cm. 5735, p. 9.
16 Rebecca Smithers, ‘Leak Reveals University Plan to Levy £10,500 Fees’, The Guardian,
18 October 2002.
’
confidant of his namesake, switched sides on the morning of the vote.
Even then, the result could hardly have been closer. Clarke made one
more concession (a review after three years) and Alan Johnson delivered a
crucial handful of waverers with a well-judged closing speech. But Hilary
Armstrong, then Chief Whip, warned Blair that the vote would be lost
and, even as MPs filed through the lobbies, the Prime Minister was consulting Johnson on which of them would call for a subsequent vote of
confidence. Victory by only five votes for a party with a majority of 161
was so precarious that even the committee stage and final reading could
not be taken for granted, although the Bill was never in such danger
again.
Top-up fees were no panacea for the hard-pressed universities, which
were required to hand back up to a third of the extra income in bursaries.
Those with high research costs dismissed them as a drop in the ocean,
while even Clarke put the total income from fees at only £1 billion a year
when Dearing had put higher education’s funding shortfall at £9 billion.17
But an important principle had been established and Brown also guaranteed that fee income would be in addition to the normal increases in government grant, set for the first year at 6% in real terms. When the fees
were finally introduced, in September 2006, applications dropped – but
only in comparison with the unusually high figures in the previous year,
when many mature students brought forward their study plans to avoid
the higher charges. By the second year of the scheme, new records
were being set for applications and even some of the critics had to admit
that students were taking the change in their stride.18 The 50% target
(now reduced to ‘working towards’ this level) was still a long way off and
the policy of widening participation among under-represented socioeconomic groups was no further forward, but neither had it been blown
completely off course, as many had predicted. As revolutions go, top-up
fees proved less than earth-shaking, but the battles of 2004 may turn out
to have long-term significance.
Beyond fees
From outside the university world, it may feel as if tuition fees and the
expansion of student numbers were the sum total of Blair’s achievements
17 House of Commons Education and Skills Committee , Oral Evidence, 14 January 2004.
18 Peter Knight, ‘Why We Should All Think like 17-year-olds’, Education Guardian, 17 April
2007.
in higher education – and they certainly were the dominant themes. But a
few other initiatives – some successful and others not – deserve at least
passing examination. Like other areas of public policy, higher education
was by no means exempt from the spin and exaggeration for which New
Labour became notorious. In this field, however, the more grandiose
the description, the more prone it was to failure. Three governmentsponsored ‘universities’ were created, for example, but none survives in
its original form. The University for Industry – more a creature of Brown
than Blair – never focused on university-level courses and only became a
mass provider of adult education when it switched to the ‘learn direct’
rubric. The lesson was not learned with the NHS University, which was
wound up in 2005 after a brief attempt to expand and coordinate health
service training. In between came the UKeU, an e-learning consortium
announced in David Blunkett’s Greenwich speech, which closed in 2004
after spending some £50 million and attracting a mere 900 students
worldwide.
To some extent, the same could be said of foundation degrees, another
feature of the Greenwich speech. Much more like Higher National
Diplomas than degrees, they were a further example of the misconception
that changing an educational label could transform the status of unglamorous products. By April 2007, there were more than 40,000 applications
for foundation degrees, but many were for courses that were substitutes
for diplomas. Although growing in popularity and consistent with the
government’s desire to expand workplace learning, foundation degrees
would not make the contribution originally anticipated to meeting Blair’s
50% participation target.
The institutional map continued to change as well, although less dramatically than under the Tories’ promotion of the polytechnics. Charles
Clarke created a new category of teaching universities, dropping the traditional insistence on research and allowing smaller colleges to apply for
enhanced status. By 2007, almost a dozen colleges had joined the universities’ ranks and more were poised to follow. They included the first universities for more than 100 years to have formal religious associations, in
former Church of England teacher training colleges.
Some of the other higher education initiatives of the Blair years
remain works in progress. A rash of committees followed the 2003
White Paper, on subjects such as fairer admissions, reducing bureauc
racy, and boosting universities’ endowments. There was some progress
subsequently in reducing red tape and encouraging more systematic
fundraising by universities, but the centrepiece of admissions reform –
’
post-A-level applications – was watered down and still had not been
finalised when Blair left office. Overall regulation certainly increased
over the decade, although a lighter touch was applied in some areas –
notably quality assurance, where published reports on every subject
area were discontinued in England and Northern Ireland when the
first round was completed in 2001. Wales had already taken this
step, while Scotland continued with less burdensome reports, demonstrating the increasing differences between the home countries after
devolution.
In two areas of higher education policy that were particularly important to Blair, however, there was a UK-wide approach. The first was even
given the title of the Prime Minister’s Initiative when it was launched in
1999, challenging universities and further education colleges to increase
the number of students from outside the EU to 75,000 by 2005. The target
was met a year ahead of schedule and a second phase, seeking another
100,000 students, was launched in 2006. Although the sums of money
committed to the initiative were relatively small, Blair’s involvement sent
beneficial signals to overseas governments and immigration authorities.
While the policy may have tapped into a global trend, increased reliance
on overseas student fees represented a significant change in the economy
of UK higher education during his period in office.
The other major concern for both Blair and Brown was the ability of
leading UK universities to compete internationally in research. This, both
men agreed, could only be done effectively by further concentrating
research funds on a small proportion of universities. Labour inherited
the Research Assessment Exercise, which involved panels of senior academics sitting in judgement on their peers’ work. Although expensive, it
had the effect of channelling researchers towards the leading departments, which were rewarded with both the status and the funding to
recruit the best before the exercise was repeated. Charles Clarke would
have taken concentration still further, identifying a small institutional
elite, rather than allowing departments from all universities to compete,
but his White Paper instead demanded a (short-lived) extra category of
sustained excellence. Throughout the Blair years, the RAE was accused of
distorting universities’ priorities because no similar pool of money
existed to reward good teaching. But it was not until 2006 that the
Treasury, which had protected research funding to a surprising degree
and promised much more for science, intervened to demand a less cumbersome system.
The Opposition
However moderate the achievements, there was a certain consistency in
Labour’s higher education policy in the ten years following 1997.
Successive models of tuition fees established the principle of co-payment
by graduates for degree courses, expansion of opportunity was a constant
demand and research funding was protected and concentrated. The same
could not be said of the Opposition, at least where the Conservative Party
was concerned. The Liberal Democrats stuck by their promise to avoid
fees through taxation – initially from their planned extra penny on
income tax and later from enhanced rates for high earners only –
although they wavered over the desirability of further expansion of
student numbers. The Conservatives, by contrast, had three different
policies in four years and were heading for another as Blair retired from
office.
Having (like Labour) avoided the need for a detailed policy in 1997
by subscribing to the Dearing Review, the Tories went into the 2001
election promising large sums to endow an unspecified number of
universities and set them free from state control. Credited to Michael
Portillo, as Shadow Chancellor, the plan was to use the income from
the sale of mobile telephone licences and future privatisations to
provide as many endowments as could be afforded for universities that
would agree not to raise fees. Since this was the very freedom that most
of the likely contenders wanted, and there was no certainty how many
universities could be released from the shackles of the state, the
approach did not survive long into the next parliament. By May 2003,
Iain Duncan Smith was promising to scrap fees altogether, call a halt to
expansion and purge ‘Mickey Mouse degrees’. Michael Howard, as his
successor, was expected to drop Tory opposition to fees but, perhaps
because of the perceived popularity of the party’s stance among
middle-class voters, set about modifying it instead. The Conservatives
went into the 2005 election still promising to halt expansion, scrap the
Office for Fair Access and abolish fees, but admitting that interest rates
on student loans would have to go up instead. Only when David
Cameron arrived as leader did the party accept top-up fees and recognise that limiting access to higher education conflicted with Tory principles of freedom of the individual. Although still to be finalised,
Conservative policy – as in schools – began to look remarkably similar
to Labour’s.
’
Blair or Brown?
The two dominant figures of New Labour may have fallen out over topup fees and had different priorities for the expansion of higher education, but there was more consensus over the general direction of policy
than in many areas. Although he has declared that education will be the
‘passion’ of his government, Brown’s public pronouncements on the
universities have been few and far between. There have been notable
exceptions, such as his intervention in the Laura Spence affair, but in
most respects he can be judged on actions rather than words. While
access to higher education has been an important part of his agenda for
social justice, scientific and medical research has been his priority – with
a predictable accent on the contribution to economic prosperity. From
the review of science and engineering skills that he commissioned from
the late Sir Gareth Roberts to Richard Lambert’s report on universities’
links with business and industry, Brown has acted independently, but
without suggesting a likely departure from the direction of travel over
the past ten years. Indeed, he conceded at the launch of a pamphlet by
Lambert on European universities that the 1.1% share of gross domestic
product spent on higher education would have to rise. With the proportion in the US already at 2.6%, he was prepared to ‘enter debate’ on
increasing public funding and to consider an increase in the £3,000 cap
on top-up fees after 2009.19
Blair, by contrast, has set out his vision for universities on several occasions, notably in a speech to the Institute for Public Policy Research on
the eve of voting on the Higher Edu
cation Bill. This perhaps came closest
to explaining why he was prepared to risk everything for top-up fees.
Higher education, he said, was ‘as important to our society and economy
as the big “extractive” industries of the past – and just as important to
our nation’s future in providing the raw material, in terms of skills and
innovation, that individuals and whole industries will require to
succeed’.20 Explaining away the contrast with Labour’s 2001 manifesto
pledge not to introduce top-up fees, he described a ‘learning process’
that had taken place over the previous two years, ignoring his responsibility for the sector over the four years before that. However, he did admit
that he had been wrong to reject Dearing’s proposed package of grants
and fees.
19 Toby Helm, ‘University Fees Likely to Rise, Says Brown’, Daily Telegraph, 6 June 2006.
20 Tony Blair, ‘A Fair Future For All: Labour’s University Reforms’, 14 January 2004.
Blair’s emphasis on universities’ central role in the knowledge
economy was characteristic of his government’s largely utilitarian view
of higher education. Charles Clarke became embroiled in controversy
after suggesting that universities could no longer rely on the ‘medieval
concept’ of a community of scholars to justify substantial state investment and now had to demonstrate that they were contributing to
national prosperity. Once Blair had been convinced that a step change in
funding was necessary to unlock the potential to make that contribution
effectively – and that variable fees represented the only feasible route –
what he saw as Old Labour opposition only stiffened his resolve. He
might not have persevered if he had known that the risk of defeat was
quite so great, but the influence of Iraq made such fine margins almost
impossible to predict accurately. For all the delays, there was never a point
at which he considered withdrawing the reforms.
The legacy
For many in higher education, whether students or staff, the Blair years
were a disappointment. Students felt betrayed by the imposition of
tuition fees, while staff felt undervalued and expected more investment,
particularly in the early years of Blair’s premiership. But, although there
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