Liam Burns (NUS president)

Transcription

Good morning I’m very grateful to Eric Thomas and Nicola Dandridge for inviting me to speak to you this morning. I’m told it when my predecessor spoke at your conference in September last year, this was the first occasion on which an NUS President had ever addressed a full plenary of the UK’s university leaders. I’ve recently read the text of what Aaron said that day, and one of the first remarks he made was this: “The relationship between student leaders and university leaders may be put under pressure in the months ahead, but in fact this is a moment when it is imperative that our dialogue is open, serious and sustained. Though of course we do not always agree, indeed something would be amiss if we did always agree, we count you as friends and colleagues and I can only imagine that the relationship between NUS and UUK will become even better in the future.” I want first of all this morning to reaffirm our commitment to those sentiments. A strong partnership between NUS and UUK is a necessary condition for students to be empowered in higher education, whatever funding system we have, whatever political party is in government, whatever the policy fashions of the day. That relationship is crucially important to maintain in a world that changes so fast. Today’s policy landscape would have been unimaginable even a year ago. Take this week as a case in point. Monday – the OECD advises that we are heading back into recession. Tuesday – the Chancellor cuts another £15bn from public spending and further constrains public sector pay. Wednesday – two million people go out from work in the largest co-ordinated strike action for two generations. Thursday – we are told there are ten days left to save the Euro. This is not the kind of background on which the future of higher education regulation, quality or even applications will hit the front page. Having been the subject last year of so much political debate and public exposure, there may now be a danger of major decisions about the future of higher education being made in relative darkness. Some things billed now merely as technical matters could make a big difference and have far-reaching implications. We all benefit from throwing light on those issues, raising the profile of ongoing HE sector reform, and bringing attention to those aspects of policy that continue to puts the sector’s strengths at risk. So it really matters that our partnership should be close and real. We work together very closely on shared issues, trying to get to the best outcomes for students in every instance. Sometimes, it is straightforward. Next spring, we are jointly running two seminars, one on access and participation, and one on social impact of higher education. These events will include speakers and workshops from universities, from the student movement, and others whom we work with. They are each in their own way crucial to maintaining attention on ways we make a difference in society that are under pressure in a difficult and sometimes confusing policy environment. But our collaboration on these issues runs a lot deeper than a couple of seminars. By working together, we can make a difference through widening access and participation in tough times. For a example, we are already looking at how we can bring students’ unions more actively into supporting institutional widening participation work, and we can and must collaborate on preserving the widening participation allocation – of some 360 million pounds a year – from a treasury now under orders to look for more savings. It is soft and exposed flesh, and we need to be keenly aware of that. We should defend it by working together to ensure that it is impact-focused and ideally has strong levels of involvement from current HE students. We can probably also agree that the wider structure of scrutiny on access is far from ideal – the creation of OFFA and Access Agreements was, after all, the result of a last minute horse trading over the last higher education bill. But we are where we are, and as Access Agreements seem to be here to stay, they should be something that institutions and students’ unions collaborate on across the sector. We know that OFFA are keenly interested in the extent to which students’ unions are involved in the process, and it is hugely encouraging that most Access Agreements approved in the spring refer explicitly to the students’ union and working with students. To push this further, we plan to facilitate a process by which each SU submits an independent commentary on their institution’s access agreement to OFFA. This will improve accountability and ensure student views are built in to the process. And student views should be essential to this. We continue to be hugely disappointed with the role that fee waivers are now playing. As you know, we oppose the new funding system outright – but actually we are even more opposed to it being distorted in a way that acts against student interests. When is the price not the price? When you offer a government-endorsed fee waiver. But we know that because of the way the income-contingent repayment system works, by far the majority of these waivers will be accrued but not realised over the 30 year period of the loan. For most people, the benefit is actually an illusion. To make matters worse, fee waivers are purported to be of equal value to a cash bursary of the same amount. But in fact, in present value terms, a pound of bursary in a student’s pocket today is worth far more than a pound of fee waiver, even if it is realised in the future. Finally, the National Scholarship Scheme is an especially pernicious implementation of this. Allocation based on institutional size and not need, rules that compel you to restrict the amount of cash in hand you give, and concentration of funding in the first year of study when it is arguably not most effective; it is a really awful policy. In this climate, a hundred and fifty million a year is a lot of money to spend on assuaging Nick Clegg’s guilt – and the parallel abolition of Aim Higher just makes it even more abysmal. I recognise that the argument can’t be universal; for example, if there is a very large fee waiver, greater than 50%, for highly selective courses, that may have genuine benefits. But examples like this are few and far between. Whereas it is clear that large numbers of small fee waivers are wrong and counter-productive. And the position is worsening, not getting better. We disapprove strongly of the way government is constantly changing the rules of the game. But two wrongs don’t make a right – so if you feel you must be in the auction for the margin, you should cut your main price, not shift money from bursaries into fee waivers. I know those are tough words, but it wouldn’t be right to come here and not make this case, because it is about the difference between money students need now that could help them stay in education, and money later that they won’t really need and will probably never see. So I want to make an appeal to you directly – work with us to eliminate low-value fee waivers in the medium term. Give money as bursaries, not as fee waivers, or at least give affected applicants a free choice. Set targets in your 2012 Access Agreements explicitly to run fee waivers down from now to 2015, and we will publicly support you and pile on the pressure for those targets to be approved by OFFA. Join with us to lobby the government to replace the NSP scheme with something that has real impact and puts scarce resources in the right pockets at the right time. When we collaborate on difficult things like this we can achieve really positive results, even the process isn’t straightforward. When we were first asked to work with Independent Task Force on Student Finance led by Martin Lewis, I was quite concerned. The last thing we wanted, especially after the problems that Aaron had in the middle of his term of office, was to be implicated in ‘selling’ the new system. I’m sure you will recognise that this was a legitimate worry to have, under the circumstances. But we got involved, and, on balance, that initiative is doing a good thing and an important thing, helping to ensure that people are not put off through ignorance. And now we have seen the first release of data on 2012 entry from UCAS, which looks bad, making the work of the task force doubly important. This doesn’t mean that some people have not simply decided, rationally and in the cold light of day, that they just don’t want to pay twenty-five thousand pounds or so for what you are offering. We should not lazily assume that applications will pick up from here, although, on balance, I still think it likely that the condition of the labour market will push many people who had decided against university into clearing next September. If I’m right, this will bring different challenges – a high level of entry during clearing means a high number of people making choices really quickly and not necessarily with the best advice, and could make retention more difficult for some. So we will need to watch this carefully and be ready to respond to a sudden rush, as well as the possibility of weakened demand. The independent task force is a good example of how we have to work together even when the ground may be uncomfortable for us – because the stakes are so high. There will be more to come. Not least, on the vexed question of the student as partner or consumer. At every opportunity now, David Willetts rather mischievously advises NUS to become a consumer advocate. Most of you will know that we have actively considered this direction. But it was debated and effectively rejected at our last National Conference. My feeling is that student officers across the country remain committed to a partnership model, and for that matter, I remain deeply personally committed to that model. But we can’t ignore the fact that the money flow has radically changed, that students, as graduates, will be paying a lot more, and that will affect their attitude and their approach. We must also recognise that if new providers sweep into higher education, perhaps with a pretty utilitarian offer, structured on a ‘bare bones’ student experience incomparable to what most of your provision looks like, the students who take up those opportunities may have sharper attitude to value for money than their peers. And finally, as the core and margin system beds in and possibly grows in the future, many of you will be starved of resources, relative to where you stand today. All of these trends are consistent with government intentions, however chaotic their attempts to put those intentions into practice. We have to respond to them, and we ought to respond together. We don’t want a situation where students are empowered only by voting with their feet, which is a kind of passive, false empowerment in any case. I take it you agree. After all, you are in the business of empowering people by educating them – which is such a rich and vibrant idea that it still dazzles in comparison to the false dawn of student consumerism. We want students to have more power in their education, and in the institution, as involvement and collaboration. An emphasis on Voice, not Exit. There are many ways we can look at doing this. First, we have to make sure that external, sector regulation provided by HEFCE, the OIA and others is well designed, proportionate and effective. It is best that we are direct with each other about what this means. The move towards changed systems of regulation may represent a challenge to institutional autonomy – we believe institutional autonomy is very important, but is not the only important principle. In a funding system where the stakes laid by individuals are so much higher, it is right and proper to enhance the protections they enjoy. In the balance between institutional autonomy and student protection, we will favour the latter, more often than not. And that will underpin our discussions with HEFCE and with government. But it does not mean throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It may mean more powers for central agencies, but is must not mean outlandish or untrammelled powers for those agencies. There is a balance to be struck. It does not mean we cannot work together, and indeed it must not undermine the strength of our collaboration. The best protection students can have in today’s landscape or tomorrows, is a well developed quality system that emphasises their involvement, strong and well-resourced students’ unions, and national representatives that can work closely with institutional leaders. That is what we have, and that is what we want to keep. And we can go further. We collaborated previously to develop guidance on student charters, and I believe that group may now be reconvened to look at the future of student charters. There are real possibilities there to be explored as the best student charters emphasise practical ways to develop the relationship between students and teachers, which has been previously identified as perhaps the most important strategic challenge for higher education and is now under even greater pressure. We should review governance policy and practice to extend and improve student involvement at the highest level. It isn’t only a matter of having more student governors by any means, though more would be better, and any university with fewer than two in a landscape where the minimum number on a further education board has just been reaffirmed as two by a Tory government looks pretty odd. At the same time, we should develop through ongoing development of the quality framework, improvements to student involvement at the school and departmental level – what we might see at the ‘hole in the middle’ between well built course representative structures and well supported sabbatical officers. So much policy is determined not on the bridge, but in the engine rooms of higher education – by heads of department and heads of school working with their colleagues. We have to ensure that in the future, they are working fully with students as well. And ultimately, the strength of our partnership is not in me speaking here, or in your leading officers speaking at our national events as they have in recent years, important though those things are. The real strength of our partnership is in the conversations that take place between you and your students’ union officers, regularly, constructively, and in the student interest. So for that, and for listening today, I want to say thank you very much.