Ex-minister: Strip former polys of university status
NEW universities should be turned back into polytechnics to boost vocational education, says a former Labour education minister.
Lord Adonis branded the decision to ‘rebadge’ the institutions as universities a ‘very serious mistake’ and said it led to a loss of ‘edge and focus’.
Thirty polytechnics were opened in the 1960s to serve local communities and provide vocational- oriented qualifications, accredited by professional bodies. But the Conservatives gave them university status in 1992 in a bid to end the ‘binary system’ – and the institutions tried to replicate their more prestigious counterparts.
Lord Adonis said it led to technical qualifications being neglected as the new universities started to offer more traditional academic degrees. There are concerns that such degrees from lower-ranking institutions are not as valued by employers.
Polytechnics converted to universities after the passing of the Further and Higher Education Act in 1992. Speaking during a House of Lords committee hearing about education funding, Lord Adonis argued for the removal of the sta- tus of university from what he termed ‘ the lower- performing former polytechnics’.
He said: ‘I think it was a very serious mistake to have rebadged all of the polytechnics as universities in 1992, which was a reform done without any proper consideration or advice.
‘We’ve lost a very great deal of the edge and focus of vocational, particularly technical, higher education as a result. There is a very good case for reversing that reform in respect of the lower-performing former polytechnics and doing it in the context of a very significant reduction in the fees they are allowed to charge students, so we can offer a much better deal to students as part of a new reform.’
Recent figures revealed that some of the former polytechnics had lower employment rates than those of older universities in the elite Russell Group.
Critics have long argued that those who are not academic enough to get into elite universities for traditional degrees would be better off doing an apprenticeship or vocational course.
Many accountancy firms are now recruiting staff straight from school because of concerns that a degree from a lower-ranking university may not be preparing youngsters properly for the workplace.
Reversing the 1992 Act is the latest of a string of controversial proposals by the peer, a former education special adviser to Tony Blair and later a minister in Blair and Gordon Brown’s administrations.
He has also spoken out on the issues of pay levels for vicechancellors and, particularly, the tuition fees charged by universities in England.
Asked by the committee for his view on Theresa May’s recent decision to raise the income that triggers graduate repayment of student loans from £21,000 to £ 24,000, Lord Adonis said he thought the whole system of loans and fees would soon be scrapped.
‘It looks to me like as if the whole system is a pack of cards waiting to collapse,’ he said.
‘It reminds me of the poll tax, with each bolted-on reform trying to make it more acceptable simply adding to the costs and making it more baroque, and hastening the day when the whole system was going to collapse.’