The Daily Telegraph

‘Students should absolutely apply for refunds on fees’

Her childhood dream was to achieve high office – now the universiti­es minister wants to ensure vice-chancellor­s deliver value for money, she tells Camilla Tominey

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‘Risk assessment­s can’t be used as an excuse not to host face-to-face teaching’

‘Some vice-chancellor­s have turned a blind eye to the problem of no-platformin­g’

Michelle Donelan was just six years old when she decided she wanted to become a Tory MP. Captivated by Margaret Thatcher’s “incredible” performanc­e at the Dispatch Box, she would try to pull a sickie every week to watch Prime Minister’s Questions. “I was a bit of an odd child,” she admits. “I just thought ‘Wow!’ at people standing up and giving their opinions.

“Nobody apart from me talked politics at school, and I was bullied loads, but if you believe in something and you really want to do something, you stand by it and it just made me even more determined.”

Now promoted to her “dream” job of Minister for Higher and Further Education, which she took on in last February’s reshuffle, the self-styled working-class girl done good is fast gaining a reputation as one of the Conservati­ves’ rising – and most forthright – stars.

As we spend 40 minutes chatting in her spacious office at the Department for Education, green-eyed, delicatefe­atured Donelan, wearing a navy blue Phase Eight dress and high heels, is so across her brief that she doesn’t require any notes to answer my barrage of questions.

Unlike most politician­s unable to answer a straight question with a straight answer, the newly married 37-year-old is disarmingl­y direct as she tackles some of the biggest issues facing students today – from complaints about continued online learning to the no-platformin­g of Right-wing speakers.

She is refreshing­ly unequivoca­l on the lack of face-to-face teaching that is still prevalent at some universiti­es. Her boss, Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi, has already said there is “no excuse” for denying students physical lectures, but after the Prime Minister announced the lifting of Plan B restrictio­ns on Wednesday, Donelan is prepared to go even further.

“I have had to really say to vicechance­llors, you need to ensure that you are delivering on what you promised to students because, as the Prime Minister outlined, we’ve got to learn to live with this virus now. We’ve got to get back to pre-pandemic life. Risk assessment­s can’t be used as an excuse not to host face-to-face teaching. Students have been leading the way in the [vaccinatio­n] stats.”

Referring to the mechanism that has been introduced to allow students to apply for a refund on their fees through the Office of the Independen­t Adjudicato­r (OIA), she adds: “We saw refunds in the tens of thousands during the pandemic.”

Asked whether she advocates students applying for refunds, she is unequivoca­l on the matter. “Absolutely,” she says. “They are consumers, at the end of the day. They’re paying a substantia­l amount of money that’s an investment in their own lives. They deserve that appeal right.

“Something that I did last year was work with the OIA to introduce a new group appeal so that they can appeal en masse, like a whole class, to make it easier. This is all about making sure that students are getting value for money.”

Money was clearly an issue for Donelan growing up, the elder of two daughters, “in the middle of nowhere in a village that didn’t even have a bus stop, let alone a shop”.

Her parents, whom she declines to name, still live in a tiny village in Cheshire; she is similarly reluctant to discuss her wedding, before Christmas, to Tom Turner, whose family firm Stronghold Global hit the headlines last year for selling 20 million units of PPE to the NHS.

“I applied for Oxford,” she tells me, “and I didn’t get in. When I look back, I was completely unprepared. I didn’t have a clue what to say or what to do. One of the questions was like a philosophy-based question and, coming from my background, I’d never even been asked anything like that. So it just sort of completely knocked me for six.

“I wasn’t allowed to go to [university in] London because we couldn’t afford it.” Donelan ended up studying history and politics at York, the first in her family to go to university. “I’m quite shocked at this now, but I’d never even heard of the term ‘Russell Group’ when I was at school. I had to do all my own research.”

Little wonder, then, that she regards those who run the UK’S leading universiti­es as vastly overpaid. Data from the Office for Students (OFS) show the former head of the University of Exeter, Sir Steve Smith, was the most highly remunerate­d in 2019/20, on a pay and benefits package of £584,000 per year.

“There’s no denying some of these vice-chancellor salaries are eyewaterin­g and staggering,” she concedes. “I am not going to defend a salary that is that high.

“What really matters, though, is all those students getting value for money. Are their fees giving them a good-quality education? And how we define quality is, are they completing the course? And secondly, does that unlock graduate jobs?”

Emphasisin­g that her brief also covers non-university routes to work including internship­s, apprentice­ships and what she calls the “lifelong learning entitlemen­t”, she adds: “That’s something that I’m particular­ly passionate about. I was before I even entered politics. In fact, it’s one of the reasons I entered politics – to create opportunit­ies and to ensure that our young are not hoodwinked onto courses that aren’t going to deliver what they expect them to deliver.

“What we want is not a one-size-fitsall education system, but one that gets that individual where they want to get, according to their skill set, and to break this idea that, at 18, you’ve got to completely decide your entire future.

“You’re probably going to have five careers [over the course of a lifetime]. You’re going to need to retrain and upskill at various points in your life.”

Hence why Donelan has been working with the OFS to introduce a new Ofsted-style “requires improvemen­t” ranking to universiti­es and higher-education institutio­ns that offer poor-quality courses.

Where others might shy away from the term “Mickey Mouse” course, Donelan is happy to use it. Citing drop-out rates as high as 40 per cent on some courses, she says: “Universiti­es try to entice pupils to the front door and say that’s social mobility. Actually, that doesn’t help anybody.

“They then drop out after a term or a year. All they have then is debt and the stigma of having dropped out. Actually, what real social mobility is is getting them to fully complete that course and ensuring that they then get some graduate job.

“I use the term ‘Mickey Mouse’ because some of these courses are Mickey Mouse in essence. People from my kind of background, they just see a course. They’ve not got those advisers telling them this course is far superior to that one, and they can just end up doing a course hoping it’s going to lead them somewhere, and it doesn’t.”

“Hard-working” (as her campaignin­g material puts it) Donelan, who studied A-levels in history, politics, economics, general studies and an As-level in media studies at a sixth-form college after attending the County High School, a co-ed comprehens­ive in Leftwich, refuses to discuss her grades – somewhat peculiarly saying that she doesn’t “want to disparage other students who are working really hard as well”. Yet there is a clear sense that she has been empowered by the idea of fighting for the underdog that, growing up, she felt she was. She was the odd one out, both at school and university – being a Right-winger even

though her parents “weren’t particular­ly political” – and says that “nobody apart from me talked about politics. I’d like to think I changed the conversati­on for 15 and 16-year-olds, but I wasn’t cool.”

Describing how she was “incredibly homesick” during her three years at York, returning home to her parents every weekend, she admits: “I don’t think university was the best years of my life.” However, as a student, she worked two jobs to save up enough money to spend a year in Australia after graduating.

Having been involved with York Student Television, Donelan briefly dabbled in journalism, with a stint on Marie Claire magazine, before first standing for Parliament in a safe Labour seat in 2010. She lost that, but

n Tuesday, she truly made her mark on the department with the announceme­nt that she had persuaded a number of universiti­es – Cambridge included – to end the use of non-disclosure agreements (NDAS) in cases of sexual misconduct, bullying or other forms of harassment.

In 2020, a BBC News investigat­ion found that nearly one-third of universiti­es had used NDAS to resolve student complaints, involving over 300 individual NDAS – though the true figure is expected to be higher.

Donelan, who was inspired by the #Can’tbuymysile­nce campaign set up by former Harvey Weinstein aide Zelda Perkins and Canadian law professor Julie Macfarlane, first wrote to vice-chancellor­s about the issue in 2021, and is now calling on all universiti­es to sign up.

“I was quite gobsmacked when I found out NDAS were still being used. Complainan­ts should never be bought or bullied into silence simply to protect the reputation of their university,” she insists. “NDAS make it harder for other victims to come forward and help hide perpetrato­rs behind a cloak of anonymity.”

Drink-spiking on campus is also “something that upsets me, because somebody very, very close to me was spiked a number of years ago and then raped”, she reveals. “I just saw how horrific that whole incident was – and then also the treatment they were given by the police, being made to feel like they were the [guilty party].”

Citing the Government’s Rape Review Action Plan, announced last month in response to reports that victims were having to wait three years for their case to go to court, with conviction rates at just 5.7 per cent, Donelan adds: “I have spoken to the Home Office minister Rachel Maclean about this. The Home Office is working really closely with the police, who have invested money and time in the forensics so that they can better analyse bloodwork and detect what people are being injected with, because we do need to learn more about this. I’ve heard some horrific stories from students.”

Donelan is a vociferous opponent of no-platformin­g on campuses, denouncing the “absolutely appalling” and “toxic” environmen­t that saw Professor Kathleen Stock driven out of the University of Sussex last year, after she questioned the notion that gender identity is more “socially significan­t” than biological sex.

Last week, a report by the Legatum Institute found a “monocultur­e” has developed within British universiti­es, meaning that three in four members of staff with Right-of-centre sympathies feel the need to self-censor.

“This is about having freedom of speech and a culture on campuses where lecturers and students can speak their views,” she says. “Prof Stock felt, in the end, that her position was untenable, and nobody should be put in that position. That’s why we’ve introduced the Freedom of Speech Bill, to ensure that universiti­es are held to account on this matter.

“Some vice-chancellor­s have turned a bit of a blind eye to the problem. Hence why we’ve had these incidents which have become very high-profile – but what worries me more is the ones we’ve never heard of. Because, in fact, it is this chilling effect, this selfcensor­ship, that’s the most worrying. Imagine all of the ideas, the thoughts, that might help us as a society that are not getting spoken out or recorded because of that.”

Although she refuses to be drawn on individual cases – such as the walkout last month by Durham University students during a speech by Spectator columnist Rod Liddle – Donelan adds: “We have to remember in life that we often don’t agree with one another, but that’s part of the learning process. It makes people into stronger individual­s and employees, and that’s a message I would send to universiti­es.”

On students’ attempts to brand Sir Winston Churchill a “racist”, or Sir Isaac Newton an “imperialis­t”, Donelan says “I think we should be proud of our history”, adding that she would allow the statue of Cecil Rhodes to remain at Oriel College, Oxford, despite a long campaign to remove it.

“Yes, there’s a lot that we can learn from, absolutely. When we look at things like statues, I think that the answer is to retain them but to explain them so that we can learn from our history. There’s also a great deal to be proud of.”

Seemingly unafraid to stand up for what she believes in, Donelan jokes that while many in her childhood village may not agree with her political views, no one could argue that she hasn’t done what she set out to do.

“The reason I really wanted to be an MP is because I grew up in an area where I saw people didn’t have the same opportunit­ies as the people on the TV. It’s rare in life to find somebody that actually does what they say they’re going to do. Some of the people I used to know at school are like: ‘Flippin’ heck, she actually did it.’”

The six-year-old Donelan would also surely be proud.

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 ?? ?? Donelan disagrees with Oxford students who want a Cecil Rhodes statue removed
Donelan disagrees with Oxford students who want a Cecil Rhodes statue removed

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