By Anna Fazackerley, Head of the Education Unit at Policy Exchange
Parents with children awaiting their A-level results on Thursday are right to be feeling distinctly unwell. Last year, if they didn’t achieve the required grades the worst most parents faced was a few exasperating hours on the phone to admissions tutors sorting out a new place. This year if your children slip a grade it is likely to leave them with nowhere to go at all, even if overall they have still done well. With a boom in full-time university applications, but a drastic shortage of places, tens of thousands of eligible students will be stranded in the chill of the recession.
This surge in full-time applications has been driven
partly by older learners desperate to change direction or beef up their skills.
Applications from students aged over 21 are up by 34% on last year. Ironically,
many of these applicants would almost certainly have preferred to study
part-time, enabling them to juggle a career or family life alongside their
studies. What will have put them off is the realisation that part-timers receive
a fraction of the support given to their younger full-time counterparts.
Part-time students now make up one-third of all
undergraduates – and they aren’t doing flower-arranging, they are acquiring
skills to clamber up the career ladder. But
whereas all full-time students receive some financial support from the
Government, a staggering 90% of part-time students receive nothing at all. Lord
Mandelson can wax lyrical about social mobility and lifelong learning until we
are all grey in the face, but unless he addresses this yawning inequity huge
numbers of adults will decide that going to university to retrain is simply
impossible. In a report out today, Policy Exchange is proposing a new, fairer
but affordable financial aid model, which will lessen the divide between
part-time and full-time students.
We show that for an additional £33
million the Government can provide some financial support for 60,000 extra
part-time undergraduate students, taking the total number up from 44,000 to
104,000. The cash can be diverted from University Challenge – an ill-judged
scheme to build 20 new “universities” for £5-£10 million each in down-at-heel
towns. The assumption is that a university, even a £5 million one, will
automatically drive regeneration. None of the Vice Chancellors we spoke to were
remotely convinced.
Having focused rigidly on trying to push 50 per cent
of all young people into higher education, then slammed a severe cap on student
numbers just as the recession forces more older learners to reskill, the
Government should have expected this week’s car-crash. Now is the time for some
proper planning on student provision. And part-timers can no longer be
conveniently ignored.
