INSPIRING ENGINE OF SOCIAL MOBILITY
For many of us, the open University (oU) will for ever be associated with late-night or earlymorning black-and-white TV programmes. A long-haired bloke dressed in corduroys and a dodgy jumper would be droning on in front of a blackboard of incomprehensible hieroglyphics.
The ‘University of the Air’, as it was originally dubbed, has had its fair share of jibes over the years, but today it stands as an immensely noble legacy of Harold Wilson’s Labour Government of the Sixties, transforming lives through access to higher education.
Michael Young, later Baron Young of Dartington, a social reformer who shaped Labour thinking in the Fifties and Sixties, was the visionary behind it. Wilson recognised its potential as a driver of social mobility and a boost to a more competitive economy through a better educated workforce.
But it was his education minister, Jennie Lee, who made the oU a reality, facing down opposition and bringing on board the BBC, which, through TV and radio programmes, made parttime distance learning viable, backed by day and residential courses.
Since the oU began in 1969, two million have taken advantage of it – many of them, as Wilson envisaged, people who had no option on leaving school other than going straight into work, but who jumped at the chance to better themselves later in life.
Among the oU’s alumni are Scot John reid, home secretary in the Blair Government, and singer Joan Armatrading, who graduated in history in her early 50s. Sir Lenny Henry and former Scotland football manager Craig Brown also studied as mature students.
More importantly, the oU continues to help sections of the population other universities find hard to attract. Indeed, 55 per cent of its students come from a disadvantaged background, while 18 per cent have a disability. A-levels are not a requirement.
It is the largest university in the UK by student number, with 174,000 enrolled. Most are mature students (the average age is 28). Seventy-six per cent of these juggle their studies for degrees, degree apprenticeships, diplomas and certificates with day jobs.
Yet, distressingly, the oU is an institution in trouble.
Today, the university’s council meets to discuss how to respond to a vote of no confidence passed by the University and College Union (which represents researchers, teaching staff and lecturers) against the oU’s vice-chancellor, Peter Horrocks.
The former head of the BBC World Service, who joined the oU in 2015, is accused of ‘dumbing down’ the university with reforms that will mean £100 million is slashed from its £420 million budget. Modules within degree courses would be cut and the already limited faceto-face tutorial time may be abandoned.
(Mr Horrocks insists that many students don’t attend face-to-face tutorials. When appointed vice-chancellor, he took an oU maths module and found when he turned up to seminars, only one other or no other student was present.)
Seven of the oU’s regional centres have been replaced by ‘service centres’ that provide contact by phone or online – which opponents to the cuts have dubbed ‘call centres’.
Indeed, to critics of the plan, this ‘modernisation’ will reduce a great institution to no more than a ‘digital content provider’.
Many of the oU’s staff fear widespread job losses. There is also unhappiness about the £2.5 million of fees paid by the oU to consultants KPMG for advice on how to achieve the reforms.
But the truth is that Horrocks’s reform plan is driven by a need to modernise and financial necessity – because the oU is the victim of the Coalition Government’s wider decision to withdraw central funding in higher education areas and allow English university fees to treble.
THE minister responsible, David Willetts, says this is his biggest regret and another way of funding part-time study must be found.
Tuition fees introduced in England by the Blair Government have risen from £1,000 a year to £3,000 in 2006. They were capped at £9,000 a year in 2012 and are now capped at £9,250.
While most traditional, fulltime universities shrugged off the sharp increase (and, indeed, increased student numbers), the oU was badly damaged. Historically, its annual fees had been in the high hundreds of pounds, but with a loss of tens of millions from central funding, it had to increase fees to around £5,000 per year.
In 2012, it had 242,079 students. By 2016/17, the number had fallen to 173,927. By some estimates, the oU has lost 600,000 students who might have been expected to start studying in that period, but didn’t, if the funding had not changed.
(oU recruitment in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, which have not had the same changes as England, has held up.)
While an oU degree is far cheaper than a degree at traditional universities – costing about £18,000 over six years’ study, compared with £27,000 over three (excluding costs of accommodation) – its part-time mature students, many with mortgages and families, have a different attitude to debt than school-leavers.
For students in Scotland studying for their first degree, tuition fees are paid by the Scottish Government. This applies to those who enrol with the oU.
While most students can hope that unpaid debt accrued at college will have gone by the time they reach their early 50s, a 45-year-old mature student will be well into retirement before the standard 30-year payback period ends.
Moreover, if studying for a degree helps to improve their earning power, a mature student will only
enjoy that boosted income for a shorter period.
The changes Horrocks proposes are not just out of financial need. They are inspired by a vision he described in a lecture in which he took aim at what he sees as the out-of-touch academics of the traditional ‘Fortress University’.
He said that he wants the OU to evolve into a ‘University of the Cloud’.
With the development of the internet, those TV and radio programmes that were a longstanding bedrock for OU courses ended — though the OU continues to work with the BBC on a range of joint productions, including Blue Planet II and Frozen Planet.
Under the reform plan, the OU will invest £50 million of its planned £100 million annual savings into a ‘digital first offering’, to make more use of online learning.
HORROCkS wants to move swiftly, before American universities team up with social media sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn and start snatching lucrative business and educational opportunities from British universities.
He also sees a need for more flexible ways of engaging people in higher education throughout their lives. In a comment guaranteed to raise the ire of many academics, he suggested that ‘students have become consumers’ who ‘focus on employability’.
To that end, he wants the OU to concentrate, for example, on shorter courses targeted at increasing students’ ability to find a job.
Of course, this will be absolutely vital after Brexit, when people will have to improve their skills and increase productivity, particularly in manufacturing, so that Britain can capitalise on new trade opportunities. Horrocks surely has a point when he questions the traditional model of a three-year, full-time university course — many of which, especially in the humanities, scarcely prepare students for the workplace.
Tragically, too many graduates qualify with functionally useless degrees, with a third finding themselves in lowly jobs, feeling cheated and betrayed.
The fact is that many more people might relish the opportunity to study over a longer period with the OU while simultaneously earning, thus keeping debts down.
It would also be cheaper for the taxpayer. For, according to the OU, an average part-time course costs £16,200 in terms of public subsidies, compared with £21,900 for a fulltime university course.
Horrocks’ vision is for a university education we dip in and out of through our working lives — not something to tuck under our belts before we even get our first job.
I believe that Peter Horrocks should be applauded for daring to disrupt the traditional model of university education, rather than condemned by those critics determined to preserve the status quo — in their self-interest.
No one likes cuts and job losses, but the alarming fall in the number of part-time students following reforms in student finance has forced the OU into a position in which they are inevitable if this laudable institution is to survive — and fulfil its original remit as the University of the Second Chance.
If we want a well-qualified workforce, higher education must be available to everyone who can benefit — and that means more flexible ways of earning a degree.
It is the responsibility of the Government to step in to help this great institution that has transformed so many lives and been a brilliant engine for social mobility.
The Open University is a very special case.