In late 2015, following their re-election, the Conservative Government decided it was time to introduce laws to regulate the Higher Education £9K tuition fee market they had imposed in England in 2010 in coalition with the Lib Dems. They drafted a ‘White Paper’ (a precursor to a Bill).
The Bill, when eventually published, had four main aspects. It abolished HEFCE and replaced it with the Office for Students, it introduced the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) and weakened upfront Quality Assurance, it allowed ‘private providers’ to gain Degree Awarding Powers and even University name, and it introduced a provision to let universities to go bankrupt, weakening the requirement to teach courses out to completion.
These were radical changes to HE. They created a policy framework for the Higher Education market. If you allow private companies to claim to be a University and abolish most upfront quality controls, then anything goes!
Quality assurance means ensuring that a student enrolled in engineering or medicine gets taught to an agreed standard. Tunnels don’t collapse, and patients get treated. The TEF, by contrast, is pure market-oriented after-the-fact metric scoring. The TEF rates courses by three factors: student retention figures, student satisfaction scores (NSS scores) and graduate employment salaries. This was a recipe for incentivising the lowering of educational standards and promoting courses based on perceptions of employability. And if junior doctors earn low salaries, scoring a medical degree programme accordingly.
Although ostensibly English HE-only, the ramifications went much further. We have since seen fees introduced in Further Education, and a college-less fee scheme called the ‘Lifelong Learning Entitlement’. What they all have in common is tax-payer backed loans to fund education, where funds may be channelled into private companies.
Building on the Brighton Convention, which had taken place a few years earlier, a loose coalition of colleagues formed a planning committee for a Second Convention for Higher Education which took place in UCL in Central London in the following February.
I was asked to convene this group because I was the UCL UCU branch secretary and London HE regional secretary – and because I was prepared to do it!
At UCL we also had a loose-knit local campaign led by colleagues who had fought to democratise our Academic Board over a number of years. Many of us learned from the ‘Campaign for UCL’ which had been instrumental in stopping an infamous merger with Imperial College in 2002.
The one-day conference was very broad, involving representatives of professional associations and campaign groups the Council for the Defence of British Universities (CDBU) and the Campaign for the Public University (CPU), as well as many UCU reps and activists from across the UK.
The main result of this Convention was a response to the Government’s White Paper, which we called The Alternative White Paper. John Holmwood, Tom Hickey, Rachel Cohen and I were editors, and I contributed a couple of chapters. This was rapidly printed thanks to a generous grant from the CDBU, every MP was mailed a copy, and in June we launched it in the House of Commons (see image above).
Meanwhile UCU had launched their own official campaign, which we liaised with. But the obvious advantage of the Convention initiative was that it could draw upon a much broader range of academics and expertise than the central union.
On 5 July, NUT and UCU called a national demonstration over education. Then on 19 July, the Government called a snap Second Reading of the Bill, which we lobbied through London Region UCU and the HE Convention along with the National Union of Students. The NUS understandably focused mainly on the tuition fee system rather than the Bill itself – an understanding of what was being proposed for future generations of students was not very widespread.
We had a third Convention meeting in October at UCL, and lobbied MPs and Lords as the Bill wended its way through the chambers of the Houses of Parliament and select committees. We managed to strengthen some protections and limit some adverse outcomes (for example, the TEF was not applied individually to courses, disciplines or departments), but it was still a dreadful bill.
Then, in a dramatic turn of events, the bill was nearly torpedoed at the last minute, when the Conservative Government called a snap election. Unfortunately the Labour front bench allowed it through, in a process called ‘wash-up’, where near-complete Bills are allowed to become Acts in the dying days of an administration. Had UCU mobilised to stop this, the outcome might have been different.
Why is this important today?
I think there are a few important lessons for today.
The first is that it is possible to build a mass campaign of opposition to government-imposed changes to (Higher) Education amongst a much wider layer of staff than only UCU members.
There are very many who work in education and research today who may not be active in the union, in some cases may not be union members, but who are prepared to get involved in a serious campaign to defend their sector. They have dedicated their working lives to their disciplines, but they don’t necessarily see the union as crucial.
Second, to be effective, such a campaign should draw on the enthusiasm and expertise of those who join in. The Alternative White Paper was very quickly produced, but it had 16 contributors, including experts in HE policy, and we used the thousands of contacts we had gathered in organising the Convention to get feedback on the first draft.
By the way, the fact that we were setting out a case in opposition to government attacks made reaching agreement slightly easier (TEF: bad, privatisation: bad, bankruptcy: very bad…) than putting a positive case to undo them. Which aspect should be undone first? During Covid lockdown in 2010, the Convention called a couple of large online meetings to make a positive case for Government intervention to defend Higher Education. There was more argument about what such a case should contain. That said, it was still possible to reach broad agreement.
Third, the main limitation of an independent campaign like this is simply that we are all very busy. So strategically the Convention must inevitably be focused on timely initiatives, and exist as a loose network the rest of the time. It was never intended to supplant either the UCU or the CDBU in this arena.
Fourth, this type of organising translates locally into campaigns for democratic control of the university. Over the years since, this type of approach has fed into local campaigns against redundancies, against employer attacks on academic standards and Exam Boards during the MAB of 2023, and even into issues of free speech around the Palestine protests on campus. The question What is the University For? reappears again and again.
Perhaps the most far-reaching example of this tendency is the current campaign by colleagues in Dundee organising against mass redundancies, who over more than a year were able to call Town Hall meetings which involved hundreds of staff far beyond the union’s ranks, and challenge Senior Management. Carlo Morelli, a Convention steering committee member, is a leading member of the Dundee branch.
See also
- The Convention for Higher Education (website)
- The Alternative White Paper 2016 (PDF)
- The HE Bill in a Nutshell (leaflet, PDF)
