Of Course it’s the Money, Stupid!

The increase
in the number of unconditional places being awarded at universities from 2985
in 2013 to 67,195, an increase of more than 2100% threatens, in the words of Sam
Gyimah, the universities minister to ‘undermine
the credibility of higher education’. While he is right to feel concerned, perhaps
he might also take time to reflect on the causes of such an implosion: the
fault, after all, doesn’t lie just at the
doors of the universities, but is symptomatic of a system that has long
predicated university as the culmination of an school system based on a
competitive business model governed by supply and demand.

It
was always thus, no doubt, but in recent years, with the decentralisation of
schools and funding cuts, all education institutions have been compelled to exercise
much tighter control over the supply of money and seeing their business as,
first and foremost, results driven.

Independent
schools, historic charities but more often these days hard–nosed, business
operations with boards packed with
influential alumni and successful businessmen who have been running their
schools with this mind-set for ages, riding out the storms, working on
efficiencies and replacing a slightly flagging Old Boy network with facilities
superior to any competitor. Their very existence depends on getting students
through the door in an increasingly hostile climate. But state education was never a business, depending on academic
results alone. Trying to replicate the independent sector, with the
growth of free schools and academies, but without the wherewithal and freedom
to do so effectively does not work, especially when real-term funding is under
constant pressure. Yet the measures applied are much the same: academic success,
schools are told, depends upon results and consequent roll growth. Between 2000
and 2010, the education budget doubled without producing a commensurate
improvement in results. Since that time, we have entered a time, epitomised by
league tables that has embraced results as the be-all and end-all without
sufficient focus on what the system provided for those not suited, by aptitude,
ability or inclination, by such an economic
model. Instead, the drive for results has led to a burgeoning education
industry that has responded to the pressure placed on staff and schools to get
the best results for students, whether the subjects chosen, or the pressure
applied, is in the best interests of the children or not. The results have
been growing incidences of cheating and
malpractice and examination boards, all of which are profit driven (not just
Edexel which is owned by the publishers, Pearsons), persuading schools to shop
with them; or by any of a growing number of panacea that schools are tempted to
buy into. As a result, the number of
students being tutored has skyrocketed, as have exclusions, while the incidence
of stress and depression in the young has also continued to increase under the
threat of league tables which continue to persuade schools to make decisions
that are at best expedient, yet more often than not working against the best
interests of children. Academic performance and the accumulation of data from
Key Stage One onwards is directed unwaveringly at A Levels and university
entrance. It may have made schools lean and more business like, but at a huge
cost.

Every
part of education is now full of bindweed, of contrary advice, of
administrative overload. Teachers and parents are assailed by an educational
publishing industry (‘here’s ten must-read books for your summer holidays’) or
examination boards, driven by profit and loss; whether it is heads, ignoring
experienced and well-qualified teachers because they add too much to their
staffing costs or worse, driving out older teachers on trumped up capability
charges, the purpose is the same, to drive down costs, even if the salaries of
some ‘super heads’ makes a mockery of
such intentions. Or else it is the effects of a burgeoning advisory and
conference industry, set up to improve staff by offering courses in
professional development, but run by independent providers and consultancies,
each squeezing their piece out of the education grant.

Accountability
is fine, but not when it is driven by the need to produce grades required for university
admission rather than a wider, more balanced curriculum; nor when it is to do
with universities simply trying to stay afloat and maximise their income; nor,
even more pointedly, when it compels schools to act against the best interests
of children. It is sad when it is the creative subjects that are squeezed out
by the demands of an avaricious exam system that needs data to graze on.

Perhaps
universities are responding in their own way to an education system that has
been made excessively competitive, excessively market-driven, with all the good
and bad that that involves by looking after their own interests rather than
those of the sector – or the students; perhaps that is the real issue that needs
addressing.