In an internal announcement last week, the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) told staff that it was altering its group structure as of 1 August 2013 and had applied to the Secretary of State, Vince Cable, to dissolve its current corporate form, a statutory ‘higher education corporation’, at that point and move assets, undertakings and staff into a new company limited by guarantee, UCLan Group. Hefce have also been informed of the intended changes. Last summer a similar process was used to dissolve Leeds College of Music into Leeds College of Music Limited a subsidiary of Leeds City College.
Around 20 higher education institutions in England use the private form of a company limited by guarantee, including London School of Economics, London Metropolitan (tellingly) and indeed all the former polytechnics that were under the aegis of the Inner London Education Authority.
Technically, though, this is privatisation. A quasi-public corporate form, a higher education corporation, is being replaced by a private company. The telltale sign that UCLan is quasi-public is that it does not have the fundamental right of ownership – the ability to dissolve itself. That power rests by statute with Cable, who is obliged to consult with the current governors and approve the statutes and articles of the ‘successor company’.
Since this move is consistent with the 2011 Higher Education White Paper there is unlikely to be any hold-up at that end. That this can be sprung on staff and students without consultation is one clear example of the democratic deficit at the heart of the governance of many English universities.
UCLan is primarily looking to achieve a more streamlined, business-like structure, the better to manage its overseas expansion. The current vice-chancellor, Malcom McVicar, will become the Chief Executive Officer of the Group, his role being the strategic development of the overseas campuses (in Cyprus, Sri Lanka and Bangkok) and the development of the Group overall as a commercial operation. The university in Preston will be repositioned as a subsidiary of the group with a new vice-chancellor to be appointed shortly.
This all tallies with the analysis I published in a recent article for UCU Left’s, Another World is Possible: “… vice-chancellors increasingly act as chief executives who in the absence of any clear owners have even fewer limits on their powers than the equivalents in other sectors. Institutional autonomy may translate into the freedom to act autocratically without regard to the constituencies that the organisation originally set out to serve.” Read more…
I am delighted to be interviewed in the launch issue of We are not Rats – Scotland’s Students’ Left Review. So far, I’ve managed to read the editorial and the contributions from Ferdinand von Prondzynski and Terry Brotherstone.
For those who might be confused by the title, it relates to Jimmy Reid’s Rectoral address to Glasgow University students in 1972.
To the students I address this appeal. Reject these attitudes. Reject the values and false morality that underlie these attitudes. A rat race is for rats. We’re not rats. We’re human beings. Reject the insidious pressures in society that would blunt your critical faculties to all that is happening around you, that would caution silence in the face of injustice lest you jeopardise your chances of promotion and self-advancement.
This is how it starts, and before you know where you are, you’re a fully paid-up member of the rat-pack. The price is too high. It entails the loss of your dignity and human spirit. Or as Christ put it, “What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his soul?
Yesterday’s publication inflation measures covering the year to October 2012 show the Consumer Price Index moving to 2.7 per cent (from 2.2 in September). As suggested by my report for Intergenerational Foundation, and, more recently, by the Higher Education Policy Institute, part of this increase is attributable to impact of the higher tuition fees that came in this academic year.
Today’s Financial Times covers the story under the online headline, ‘Tuition fees endanger BoE inflation target’. It attributes 0.32 percentage points out of the 0.5 rise to the new fees policy – this is higher than the earlier Office for Budgetary Responsibility estimate of 0.2 percentage points.
Official government response here is very unclear: ranging from denial to ignorance. As the FT points out, we could expect a similar impact from tuition fees as two further cohorts arrive in 2013 and 2014.
What many are concerned about is how this increase affects the welfare budget, since CPI is now used to calculate the annual increases to benefits and public pensions. The significance is that any saving achieved to the higher education budget could be lost through the knock-on effects to that other, much larger budget from April 2014. Again, there is no government statement on this matter.
I will be speaking at Royal Holloway on Thursday 15 November 2012 alongside its Principal, Paul Layzell, Kelly Temple, NUS Women’s Officer and Kevin Paul, who is visiting from Quebec.
Venue: Founder’s Main Lecture Theatre
Time: 7pm
I will be participating in an event at Raven Row to accompany its exhibition on the Artist Placement Group.
Inspired by APG’s working practices, a Think Tank has been meeting at Chelsea College of Art and Design to convene a Sculpture. Given the drive to instrumentalise all aspects of creative education, the possibility of ‘not knowing’ (inherent in APG’s formulation of the ‘Open Brief’) seems increasingly radical, subversive and productive. Education: Not Knowing will be a vibrant afternoon of discussion and exchange unfolding through five key APG themes: Placement, Education, Not Knowing, The Contract and the Gallery.
The intention through this discussion is not to dwell on the history of APG, but to reinstall the Group’s ‘DNA’ in the present.
Venue: Raven Row, 56 Artillery Lane, London. E1 7LS
Date: Tuesday 13 November, 2012
Time: 2-6pm
John Thompson and Bahram Bekhradnia of Higher Education Policy Institute have just published a new report, The Cost of the Government’s reforms of the financing of higher education.
It provides substantial support for some of the issues I raised in ‘False Accounting?‘. In particular, it provides a more robust assessment of the impact of tuition fees on the Consumer Price Index and reviews the current assumptions about future graduate earnings. Their conclusion is that as a result of hidden costs and unrealistic assumptions, the government’s claimed savings of £1.3billion will be closer to £0.3billion on their most conservative estimate.
The Independent covered the report on their front page: ‘Unishambles’.
I will be addressing the Art Education Forum on Wednesday 31 October.
I intend to return to the themes of two articles for Afterall last year, Ten things everyone working in or studying art should know about the 2011 HE White Paper and Art Practice and the Doctoral Degree.
Venue: Exmouth Arms, near Euston station.
Time: 6.30pm to 8pm
The other speak is Mia Morgan who will:
talk about developments in the Academy schools system, that are negatively impacting art education. With particular regard to partisan sponsorship, and the employment education model. For discussion he will ask how art educators can redefine themselves, in an increasingly corporatised climate.
All involved in art education welcome.
In light of the £350million public bond offering by the University of Cambridge, here are the links to two articles written by me in September 2011 for Research Fortnight.
The first, ‘Demand would be enormous’, is a history of UK university bond issues, including information on private placements and bonds issued by special purpose vehicles for student accommodation developments (two aspects ignored in the mainstream coverage). It also includes some discussion of the Cambridge bond, which has been under consideration for a couple of years.
The second, ‘Borrowing Greatness‘, looks to the US and the University of California to see what a mature university bond market looks like. Bond financing there depends on the ability to raise tuition fees at will.
Bond boosters abound – but there are risks and they need to be discussed.
Martin Lewis is head of the Independent Student Finance Taskforce and has put together a ‘mythbuster’ about student loans on his website. He has recently dealt with two issues which I believe require a bit more comment and detail.
The first relates to the government’s ability to change the terms on repayment; the second to whether we should replace reference to ‘loans’ and ‘debt’ with ‘contribution’. I’ll offer my thoughts on each in turn.
The ‘Mythbuster’ has changed recently to add a final question, Question 23: ‘Can the system be changed once I’ve started?’
The early days of this blog I covered a discussion between Martin and myself on whether this question needed to be addressed. I’m glad to see that this question is now treated explicitly.
The ‘mythbuster’ website states:
It’s important to understand Parliament is omnicompetent. In other words, it’s completely free to make and change rules made in the past. This means there is no 100% guarantee the system will remain unchanged for the 30 years until you’re clear. It’s worth being aware this is a risk factor.
This point is further developed on a blog post entitled, ‘Once I’ve got a student loan can the government change the terms?’
There is no way to bind a future parliament. So the best we can do, and indeed what NUS is calling for, is to ensure that this must be done via legislation (ie, parliamentary vote) rather than delegated legislation (ie, a minister allowed to make decision with authority of parliament, without a vote).
If this were in place it would certainly slow down changes and make it more difficult, and that wouldn’t be a bad thing.
Now I agree with both these points but we need to be clear.
Changes to terms and conditions on loans do not require Parliament to implement new legislation. Such amendments are executive matters – the government of the day, in most cases the relevant Secretary of State, has been granted the powers to set these terms and conditions using secondary legislation. (This distinction depends on differentiating Parliament and its legislative function, from the government and its powers to make operational or executive decisions). Read more…
I will be speaking at the Education Activist Network conference on Sunday 28 October 2012.
Venue: SOAS, London.
Time: 11am-5pm
Other speakers include: Alfie Meadows, Peter Hallward, Priyamvada Gopal and Jim Wolfreys.
On a related note, Alfie Meadows faces a retrial at Woolwich Crown Court on Monday 29 October 2012. Details of solidarity demonstration can be found here on facebook.
Critical Education 