Labour government ‘would have to consider student number caps’

A future Labour government would have to consider introducing student number controls in England, according to a former Conservative adviser, while another former Tory adviser described the idea as aiming to “block people’s access to education”.

Iain Mansfield, former special adviser in the Department for Education, kept the debate over number controls rumbling on with a report for the Policy Exchange thinktank calling for legislation to cap numbers to rebalance funding from higher education into vocational education.

That led to some lively exchanges on X, formerly known as Twitter, with Nick Hillman – a former Tory special adviser in the Cameron government when it abolished student number controls – saying it was “incredibly unimaginative and regressive” to push for a return of number caps.

Mr Mansfield pushed for controls in his time in government, ultimately resulting in prime minister Rishi Sunak’s announcement of a crackdown on “rip-off degrees” – recruitment limits on courses falling below the Office for Students’ quality thresholds.

In a report on Policy Exchange’s agenda for the King’s Speech, he has advocated a far wider higher education bill that would “impose a duty upon the education secretary to…determine the total number of undergraduate university places that would be funded for the following academic year”, and would “allow the government to ensure that numbers could be frozen, or sustainably shrunk, with contraction focused on those providers with the poorest outcomes”.

Mr Mansfield told Times Higher Education that he thought even a future Labour government would eventually have to consider ideas to deal with pressure on maintenance funding and the unit of resource in teaching, even though shadow ministers have declared opposition to number controls.

“The relentless and uncontrolled expansion of higher education, much of it on courses of dubious quality, has led directly to a major fall in funding per student and to the erosion of maintenance support,” Mr Mansfield said.

“There is only so much money available. Any government, regardless of party, that wishes to reverse these trends will need to consider some means of controlling numbers.”

Mr Mansfield noted in his report that entry rates to higher education have risen “particularly sharply” since student number controls were abolished, a policy announced in 2014 by the Conservative-led coalition government.

Mr Hillman, who was adviser to then universities minister Lord Willetts at the time of that policy move, said: “I profoundly disagree with Iain [Mansfield] on all this.”

He invoked the Robbins principle – established in the landmark 1963 Robbins report on higher education – that “courses of higher education should be available for all those who are qualified by ability and attainment to pursue them and who wish to do so”.

This principle applied for “much of the post-war period”, said Mr Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute. “But once the costs of expansion came to seem unaffordable, then limits were imposed and these – quite literally – blocked people’s life chances and were, rightly, controversial as a result…I did not enter the world of education policy to block people’s access to more education and it always surprises me when other people in our world do argue for that.”

He added: “The implicit deal between society and the Treasury is, ‘We’ll accept fees if you ensure higher education continues to move towards a universal service so everyone who can benefit from it has fair access to it.’ Having tight number caps with high fees and loans would be a nonsense because it would break that deal.”

john.morgan@timeshighereducation.com