Purnell: funding and access cuts risk ‘public policy disaster’

Higher education’s social purpose needs to be “unleashed” in the post-pandemic era, but instead government moves to cut funding and access could revive “old inequalities” and create a “public policy disaster”, according to the University of the Arts London vice-chancellor.

James Purnell, a former Labour minister and director of radio and education at the BBC, delivered a pointed critique of the current Conservative government’s approach to the sector in a speech at the Higher Education Policy Institute’s annual conference on 24 June.

This is the “single most important moment for education policy since the Second World War,” said Mr Purnell, who took over at UAL in March this year. The advent of the post-pandemic era brings for universities the “opportunity to serve society in a totally new way”, he continued.

The transformation of universities’ digital teaching capabilities in the pandemic brings new possibilities to widen access dramatically at home and overseas, while students were in greater need than ever of help to get the jobs they want or build businesses, and there was a chance to “work with others” to tackle major issues such as racism and climate justice, he said.

UAL will be offering 30 new courses online, including short 12-week offerings in AI and computer animation as well as courses for fashion business leaders, allowing the university “to reach more students than ever”, Mr Purnell said.

Plus, cities have been “changed forever” by the pandemic and in UAL’s central London location “many offices will never return”, he continued. “There will be more commercial space available than in living memory…Universities can play a huge role in filling that space, in bringing life back to the centre and helping our towns and cities recover from the pandemic.”

Many of UAL’s courses are oversubscribed, but there is now scope to “offer more physical places to students than ever before”, he added.

Yet just as there is a chance to “expand access to higher education like never before”, and with higher education essential to productivity growth, “so much time is spent trashing it”, said Mr Purnell.

“This should be a moment we unleash higher education’s full potential, but too many seem to want to shackle it,” he went on, warning against a return of student number controls or declining investment per student “diminishing quality”.

Mr Purnell said that former Labour prime minister Tony Blair’s target for 50 per cent of young people to enter higher education – which education secretary Gavin Williamson recently said he was “tearing up” – had “expanded access to millions”. And “it was the Conservatives, in power from 2010, that completed Labour’s commitment: that anyone who wanted to go to university should be able to go to university”, he added.

But now “we are in danger of going back in time”, said Mr Purnell, highlighting suggestions the government could cut fees and funding, which he said would mean fewer places for students and reduced resources for those who did get a place.

A 2018 Hepi report said that a demographic bulge would create demand for 300,000 extra higher education places in England by 2030.

Given that demand, Mr Purnell said, reducing access to higher education would “risk creating a ticking bomb, where the sector ends up having to turn down thousands of promising young people. And one in which old inequalities, long since banished, return.

“In public policy terms, it’s hard to think of a bigger disaster than that.”

The government’s planned lifelong loans were a “huge breakthrough”, said Mr Purnell. But he added that funding those loans must not “lead us down a cul-de-sac of cuts and caps”.

Mr Purnell concluded by hoping that 2021 could be the year that higher education finds “that higher social purpose”, by showing “we can level up by opening up”.

john.morgan@timeshighereducation.com