An Introduction to Education Reform and Resistance

Des Freedman

'REFORM'

A celebrated education reformer noted recently that 'it is only when services are paid for that their beneficiaries really appreciate them and that their employees strive to perfect them. A world in which students pay for their own university education will be a world where the universities are better funded, intellectually freer and where economic justice ensures that the burden does not lie on the taxpayer but on graduates.' Who issued this moving tribute to the market? Margaret Thatcher? Ronald Reagan? David Cameron? Nick Clegg? No, Terence Kealey, vice-chancellor of the University of Buckingham (fees: approximately £9000 per year), the UK's first private university and an institution that is 'proud never to have accepted Goverment [sic] funding, favouring instead our academic independence'.

Kealey's words are significant because they so clearly articulate the ConDem coalition's devastating perspective on higher education policy as contained in the Browne Review on education funding and student finance and the government's own legislative programme of 2010–11. This includes a commitment to withdraw most public subsidies for universities, shift financial responsibility on to students who are now to be treated as customers, increase tuition fees to a level that an emerging market can sustain, re-package student debt and loans as 'deferred payments' and re-designate universities themselves as sites of service provision, consumer activity and commodity exchange. The UK's higher education system is to be transformed into a patchwork of academic supermarkets with, at one end, research-led Russell Group universities continuing to super-serve wealthier customers with a wide range of niche offerings while, at the other end, former Polytechnics in the Million+ group will be forced to clear their shelves of distinctive or idiosyncratic goods and to focus on those products for which there is already a clearly defined (mass) market. All shoppers, meanwhile, will have to pay higher prices.

This will be the state of British higher education in the second decade of the twenty-first century should the ConDem 'reforms' be fully implemented and internalised by universities themselves. It is a picture of renewed privatisation, intensive marketisation, rampant financialisation and a challenge to the very notion of the university as a mechanism for addressing social inequality and facilitating the circulation of knowledge whether or not it has immediate practical consequences. It is the substitution of private economic activity for robust public life. Of course universities are not, and never have been, pristine sites of autonomous intellectual labour – you only have to consider the close collaboration between many universities and the defence and security industries across the world. However, like many other publicly funded institutions which do not always live up to expectations (the BBC and the NHS spring to mind), a strong defence of the principle of public provision carries with it the possibility not only of 'holding the line' but also of invigorating and democratising these institutions. This involves both imagining and campaigning for policies that best express the public interest and most effectively protect it against those who are determined to place all areas of human activity under the discipline of the market.

Responding to the attacks on higher education, however, also requires an understanding of the various contexts behind the 'reforms'. According to the government, the most pressing challenge is the need to secure stable long-term funding for universities in the light of the budget crisis caused by what it describes as an unsustainable deficit caused by the previous Labour government's profligacy. What this means in practice is a decision to shift the burden of paying for higher education from the state to individual students. This is not a victimless crime. Research conducted by UCU has found that the scrapping of all public funding for the teaching of arts, humanities and social science subjects (as part of an 80 per cent cut to the annual block grant to universities), together with cuts of over £1 billion that have already been announced, means that some 40,000 jobs and 49 English universities are at risk. The most vulnerable institutions are those teaching-intensive universities, often former polytechnics with the highest level of working-class students, who do not have the international students, research contracts or established 'brands' to help them withstand the removal of public funding.

This is, of course, only one small part of the government's neoliberal programme of privatisation and spending cuts which will see billions of pounds withdrawn from public services and welfare budgets as well as the devolution of power away from publicly accountable institutions to, for example, GPs in the running of the health service, academies in the provision of secondary education and housing associations in the management of social housing. We are therefore likely to see huge job losses affecting civil servants, NHS staff and council workers at precisely the time when unemployment, by the start of 2011, had already reached nearly 8 per cent with nearly one million young people without work, the highest since records began in 1992. The government's scrapping of the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA), originally aimed at improving participation rates in further education, will only compound the problem of youth unemployment.

Indeed, the government's determination to shrink the higher education budget is utterly counter-productive if it wishes to seek a way out of the recession. The UK already spends a lower proportion of its GDP on higher education (0.7 per cent) not only in comparison with EU and OECD averages...