I have updated the page providing an overview of the material on this blog.
New readers may find it useful.
Alfie Meadows faces a trial beginning this Monday (26 March) at Kingston Crown Court despite being nearly killed by a blow from a police baton during the demonstrations outside parliament in December 2010.
A protest in support is organised in front of the court at 9am on the 26th.
More details here. I hope that the CPS sees sense over the weekend and drops this case.
Yesterday’s Budget Statement had a bit to say about universities.
The headline stories will be about funding for research and innovation including a centre for research in aerodynamics, two new catapult centres for Transport Systems and Future Cities: “These will bring together world leading IT companies, innovative SMEs and leading universities to commercialise technologies that will increase efficiency and improve the quality of life for transport users and city residents.” There is also £100 million for new university research facilities designed to attract ‘co-investment’ from the private sector (§2.32). This may tie-in with January’s announcement from David Willetts about new private postgraduate and research ‘universities’ .
Tucked away in the passages on VAT reform are two further references which are likely to have more profound long-term implications.
One is familiar:
2.191 VAT: cost sharing – Following the announcement at Autumn Statement 2011 the Government will introduce a VAT exemption for services shared between VAT exempt bodies including charities and universities.
The other is not:
2.186 VAT: providers of education – The Government will review the VAT exemption for providers of education, in particular at university degree level, to ensure that commercial universities are treated fairly.
The first relates to shared services exemption from VAT which is likely to drive further outsourcing in the sector. The second signals changes to the rules governing VAT exemption on educational services and should be read alongside the commitment to amend UK law governing the status of public bodies ‘to ensure that there is clear transposition of EU agreements relating to the VAT treatment of public bodies carrying out their statutory duties in competition with the private sector’ (2.192).
HMRC provides a complex document on the VAT status of Education and Vocational Training (June 2011).
The key word ‘commercial’ heads up section 4.2, ‘Commercial providers of education’. These are private providers who do not enjoy charitable status. In the terms of the document, they ‘distribute profits’. Currently these providers are unlikely to be VAT exempt and so that cost must be included in the fees they charge for their training.
We should note that the Budget Statement therefore misuses the protected title, ‘university’, since by definition universities in the UK are not commercial in the sense meant here. As the document states, any education or training provided by a university or a university trading company is exempt from VAT. Similar exemptions apply to schools, sixth form colleges, FE colleges etc.
What the budget is then proposing is either to abolish VAT exemption at degree level, unlikely, or to allow ‘commercial’ providers the same exemption.
This is a further example of the government aiming to ‘create a level playing field’ for private education providers.
It creates conditions on the ground that erode the taxation advantages that non-profit operations enjoy and thus boosts the competitive challenge of new for-profit provision at degree level. We know that private equity groups and hedge fund lobbyists are keen to open up the English HE system as an investment opportunity. This change makes it more likely that established universities will seek to convert to alternative corporate forms.
There is one main advantage that profit-making companies enjoy: they can take equity investment (you cannot buy a share in a charity). What that means is that there can be no level playing field between charities and for-profit operations: if all other differences are erased then the game is rigged, with only those charities which can raise large donations (ie Oxbridge) unthreatened.
Update
Creating Publics, a new initiative, will be launched next week at the Open University.
Whether it is from the ‘top down’ (by funders or government) or from the ‘bottom up’ (from activists and scholars), the issue of how publics are formed and how the public role of social science research should be understood and enacted are ones that continue to rise up the HE agenda. Creating Publics is a new three-year CCIG project that is supporting collective discussion, experimentation, new thinking and practice around these issues. You are invited to join us to draw out the contemporary stakes and futures of public engagement. The event takes place at the Berrill lecture theatre at the OU in Milton Keynes, but you can also participate online via the live webcast.
Anyone interested in the workshop we have scheduled with Professor Grossberg the following day (10.30-13.00, 27 March), email Sarah Batt (a.s.c.batt), as there are still a couple of places left.
Venue: Berrill Lecture Theatre, Open University, Milton Keynes.
Time: 2.00-4.00pm
Banner Repeater have uploaded the video of Saturday’s event , ‘How it’s kicking off everywhere’. In discussion: myself, Paul Mason & Nathan Charlton.
The National Student Survey (NSS) is a key element of neoliberal proposals to transform higher education into a marketable commodity. The NSS naturalises the idea of students as ‘customers’ and staff as ‘service providers’ and further embeds a culture of ‘measuring’ and ‘…ranking’ inside our universities. Come to this open workshop to discuss how we can resist the NSS and develop meaningful and democratic forms of student evaluation.We hope to get students, lecturers and trade unionists from across London together to start organizing a big campaign that will continue into next academic year. Please join in and spread the word!
6pm, Wednesday 21 March, Room 3C, University of London Union, Malet Street, London WC1.
Speakers include John Holmwood (Campaign for the Public University), Arianna Tassinari (SOAS), Sean Rillo Rackza (ULU) and many others.
A slight departure from normal.
I’ll be appearing at Banner Repeater on Saturday 17 March.
How it’s kicking off everywhere.
Discussion with Paul Mason, Nathan Charlton, and Andrew McGettigan.
1-3pm Saturday 17th March, 2012.Discussion between Paul Mason, financial journalist and economics editor for Newsnight and recent author of “Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere”, Nathan Charlton, technologist and director of Big Ideas, and Andrew McGettigan, author of the blog Critical Education and the book “The Great University Gamble” (Pluto, forthcoming)also of the Big Ideas team. We will be considering how the technology that facilitates the vast consumerism of capitalism is at some core level, implicit also in our ability to act politically, and how that affects our understanding of what it is to be politically engaged, with respect to older hierarchical structures and former traditions that may come into question as a result.
Having been a bit hard on Hefce regarding the process for determining the marginal places, I should say that the new consultation on “Student Number controls and teaching funding for 2013/14” contains much of interest and some measures which would mitigate the problems I previously identified in the 2012/13 regime.
This consultation was published last week and the deadline for responses is Friday 25 May. This is effectively the delayed “Winter 2011” consultation mentioned in earlier blogs.
There are a number of measures in the document but I want to concentrate on two: funding for London institutions and a proposed rebanding of degree subjects.
In an essay last year for Afterall, I suggested that the lack of anything resembling London weighting in the white paper was a problem. A Higher Education Institution in London is bound by the same tuition fee cap as those in cheaper areas, but provision had been made through the block grant to grant additional resources.
In particular, for 2012/13, it was difficult for London institutions, given their higher salary and overhead costs, to set fees below £7 500. I had believed this was a deliberate measure given the government’s proximity to the think tank, Policy Exchange, whose report “Sink or Swim?” argued that London was over-supplied with HEIs.
Hefce is now proposing to rectify the issue from 2013/14.
255. For 2013-14 onwards we propose to create a separate allocation for providers in relation to new-regime students attending courses in London. This will apply to price groups A to D. We expect this supplement to be at broadly comparable rates to those that applied in 2011-12.
It envisages setting aside £47million of its budget in 2013/14 for this purpose (rising to £66m by 2015/16). Its proposed rates per student per year will be approximately.
| Price group | Inner London rate | Outer London rate |
| A | £1,174 | £734 |
| B | £499 | £312 |
| C1 and C2 | £382 | £239 |
| D | £294 | £184 |
As is indicated by the table, Hefce is also advocating a new division within Band C subjects. Using TRAC data (see Annex C of the consultation), it has determined that some subjects require the restoration of some grant because they are ‘thought to cost more than £7 500’ per student per year to run.
The new class, C1, includes Archaeology, Design and Creative arts, IT & software engineering, Media studies. These subjects will receive £250 per year in grant for full-time undergraduates and £1350 per year for full-time postgraduates on taught courses. That means that C1 subjects in inner London, including art & design, could see the restoration of grant totalling over £630 per student.
C2 subjects, include those from the current Band C without those elevated to C1, example subjects include mathematics and modern languages. They will receive no undergraduate grant (as is the case in 2012/13) and £1 100 per year for postgraduates.
These both look like positive measures, especially given the pressures on art and design, and would go some way to mitigating the problems of the new regime. Whether the government is on board is another matter, so weight of support for the consultation may count.
Thanks to an FoI request, Hefce have released to me the membership of the panels overseeing the decisions on ‘bids to the margin’. Tenders for the extra 20 000 places were to be assessed on ‘quality, demand and price’. Hefce received applications for 35 811 additional places from 201 institutions (34 of which were higher education institutions, the rest were from FE colleges).
On the initial decisions made at the end of January, around half of those places went to the FE colleges.
I understand there are appeals in process by affected universities. Most appeals succeed by querying the process by which decisions were made. Here’s how Hefce did conducted the exercise.
An internal panel comprising a handful of Hefce officers made the initial sift of applications. Each bid was read by two assessors who operated a ‘triage’ system recommending ‘approve’, ‘reject’ or ‘further consideration by expert panel needed’.
An…
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