The media today has been covering the public launch of Pearson College. The new offering from the education publishing giant sees it move into full undergraduate degrees from the HNCs and HNDs it offers through its subsidiary, the examination board Edexcel.
The basic model for the BSc Business and Entrepreneurship at Pearson College is what is known as an articulation arrangement. The first two years’ of study on the programme will be towards the award of a Pearson diploma, an HND that Pearson validates itself. The third year is the ‘honours’ year: the part of the programme that leads to the award of a BSc validated by Royal Holloway. And this final year is available as a ‘top-up only’ option for those with other equivalent experience and qualifications. (Owing to this basic structure, it is likely that the course will be ‘designated’ for student support and access to fee loans).
Beyond the inevitable questions about the further entry of for-profit companies into degree-level provision, and legitimate questions about the structure of the diploma and its relation to broader questions around internships, what is most interesting in the bigger scheme is the changes to the business plan that can be observed since the partnership with Royal Holloway was announced in 2011.
Back then, the idea was that Pearson would not be engaged in teaching but would deliver the programme in conjunction with FE colleges. At the time, I was led to believe that there was no place for academics in the business model. Jump forward to today’s news and we see something quite different: Pearson will be taking responsibility for teaching at its offices in Salford and central London.
Although the main PR campaign began today, the college website was up and running back in June. Even then the site advertised 12 FE colleges as partners available to deliver the final top-up year (see cached version here). Similarly, at that time, five years’ business experience would have counted as sufficient to gain entry to the final BSc year. I would guess that both these elements have been removed so as to comply fully with current regulations regarding validation, with Royal Holloway needing to hold Pearson directly to account over quality assurance rather than allow it to delegate some of those matters to delivery partners.
This overall shift from Pearson as non-teaching to teaching body reflects the problems the government is facing in legislating to grant degree awarding powers to companies such as Pearson. Indeed, back in 2011, Times Higher Education reported David Willetts’s enthusiasm for this decoupling of teaching and degree awarding powers.
In one sense then Pearson’s revised strategy is a hedge: it will build up a teaching track record so as to comply with current regulations in case Willetts cannot deliver on the promise ‘to ensure that barriers to non-teaching bodies are removed’ (Technical Consultation §4.29).
Pearson with degree awarding powers combined with FE colleges offered a rapid rollout of cheaper undergraduate provision. Even if such progress has been slowed for the time being, and Pearson College is really a compromise offering, it is clear this is the ‘new provider’ to watch especially with BSc’s in IT and Engineering to follow in 2013.
The next meeting of Different Class, the philosophy of education reading group, will be on Wednesday 8 August – 7.30pm at the Wheatsheaf.
We will be looking at Walter Gropius’s 1923 essay ‘The Theory and Organisation of the Bauahus’
Further details and a copy of the text can be found here.
I will be talking at the Margate Photo Fest on Saturday 11 August.
Time: 2pm
Venue: Pie Factory, Margate
From September, the new funding regime for higher education will come into effect. Universities and colleges will receive large reductions in direct government grants used to cover the costs of undergraduate providing teaching. As a consequence, students face higher tuition fees and graduates who access the student loan scheme will face much higher debts.
This fundamental financial reform is the precondition for further transformations. This talk will introduce the seven varieties of privatisation under way, while also explaining how student loans place learning into a system of accounts and put a price on knowledge in unprecedented form.
In the past month, there have been a number of developments regarding student loans. Here are four quick points covering terms, the mooted sale and sustainability:
- The Regulations governing loans issued to the cohort of new students in September have only recently been ‘made’ and passed in to law in June.The new repayment threshold of £21 000 is defined in Section 11. Notably, there is no regulation setting out the indexing of that repayment threshold to average earnings. This was the key concession which swung several Liberal Democrats behind the vote in December 2010 to raise the maximum tuition fee.No uprating of the threshold in line with earnings would occur before 2017 so the official line is: no such regulation needs to be written before then. Read that how you will.
- David Willetts, minister for universities and science, recently appeared before the BIS Select Committee (4 July). Parliament TV captured the session.It’s hardly compulsive viewing unless you want to play spot the errors – Willetts is obviously not a details man. One admission is telling: the government is now concentrating on selling the final tranche of the old mortgage-style student loans, the new income contingent repayment loans are apparently ‘not a priority’.Really? The outstanding balances on the mortgage-style loans currently amount to about £0.7billion. The new loans amount to nearly £40billion. Is it a question of priorities or a question of buyers (or the absence thereof)? Read more…
Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts has now published the report resulting from his statutory review of the 2006 Charities Act.
I have not had the chance to read it in full but I did seek out ‘Appendix A: Technical Issues’, which covers charities with Royal Charters (that is, all pre-92 English universities).
1. Royal Charter charities currently require the approval of the Queen in Council to change their Constitutions and the Privy Council to amend their bye-laws. This process can often take significant periods of time and involves a great deal of consultation with the Charity Commission and wider Government. To streamline this process and relieve some of the administrative burden on all involved, the Queen in Council could be invited to consider the following changes:
a. Power to approve changes to the constitutions of Royal Charter charities should be delegated to the Charity Commission, with a requirement that notice of the change is given to the Privy Council;
b. Powers to approve changes to bye-laws should be delegated to the trustees of the charity, with a requirement to notify the Charity Commission and Privy Council; …
These passages should be read alongside paragraphs 4.35 & 4.36 of 2o11’s HE White Paper (and chapter 5 of the accompanying ‘technical consultation’). Making it easier to change corporate form in the fashion suggested by Lord Hodgson is part of a trend to make universities increasingly independent of the state. The processes described are not simply about cumbersome ‘consultation’ but about democratic oversight: what part do the public and its representatives in government have to say about these kind of changes? (And, yes, this may take time. And, we probably do need to have a debate about what the significance of a Royal Charter is under contemporary conditions.)
The next meeting of Different Class, the philosophy of education reading group, will be on Wednesday 8 August – 7.30pm at the Wheatsheaf.
We will be looking at Walter Gropius’s 1923 essay ‘The Theory and Organisation of the Bauahus’
Further details and a copy of the text can be found here.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile Book II:
“Watching children learning their fables and you will see that when they have a chance of applying them they almost always use them exactly contrary to the author’s meaning; instead of being on their guard against the fault which you would prevent or cure, they are disposed to like the vice by which one takes advantage of another’s defects.
“In the above fable children laugh at the crow, but they all love the fox.
“In the next fable, you expect them to follow the example of the grasshopper. Not so, they will choose the ant. They do not care to abase themselves, they will always choose the principal part – this is the choice of self-love, a very natural choice.
“But what a dreadful lesson for children! There could be no monster more detestable than a harsh and avaricious child, who realised what he was asked to give and what he refused.
“The ant does more, she teaches him not merely to refuse but to revile.”
The ant looked at the grasshopper and said, ‘All summer long I worked hard while you made fun of me, and sang and danced. You should have thought of winter then! Find somewhere else to sing, grasshopper! There is no warmth or food for you here!’ And the ant shut the door in the grasshopper’s face.
It is wise to worry about tomorrow today.
Apologies. I am ill with a throat infection so I have had to cancel my talk at Marxism this evening on higher education.
On Wednesday 11th July, we will be holding the next installment of our philosophy of education reading group, Different Class.
We will be looking at John Dewey’s ‘The School and Social Progress’.
Venue: The Wheatsheaf, Rathbone Place, London.
Time: 7.30pm
All welcome!
The new issue of Radical Philosophy includes a comment piece by me on privatisation in English higher education. It distinguishes seven kinds of privatisation in this context articulates the need for a new mapping of the sector.
Elsewhere in the issue Nina Power and Erica Lagalisse write on protests in Britain and Quebec.
Critical Education 