UK
Education, education, education? When will Labour tackle the crisis engulfing our schools, colleges and universities?
By Conor Bollins
Tony Blair made ‘education, education, education’ the centrepiece of his legislative agenda in the 1990s. As with so many other areas of policy, Keir Starmer doesn’t seem to have any hopes for education at all.
This is not to say that Blair was a paragon of progressive change for the education sector. Academisation, punitive Ofsted inspections, and the introduction of tuition fees, are all failed policies that can be traced to the New Labour years. Nevertheless, the current government’s complete silence on the crisis engulfing our schools, colleges and universities is utterly shocking by comparison.
This is a crisis that is systemic throughout all levels of our education system, with seriously worrying implications for the outcomes and life-chances of the children and young people in our society.
Now well into our second decade of austerity, there is no area of the sector that hasn’t been damaged. Childcare for nursery-aged children is almost entirely unaffordable. There is a recruitment and retention crisis in our schools, with teachers leaving the profession in droves. Most if not all major universities are set to become financially insolvent over the next few months and years.
Investment in education is still the surest way for a state to facilitate social mobility, employment opportunities, and cultural dynamism. Yet, before we can start to look ahead to how this can be achieved, urgent action needs to be taken simply to stop the system from collapsing.
A view from my own university
As a Lecturer, the area of this broken system that I come up against most often is Higher Education. My own university, the University of East Anglia (UEA), has simply been ahead of a curve on a miserable trajectory that most equivalent institutions have since followed.
Similar to other institutions founded in the 1960s, like the University of Sussex, UEA sought to open up Higher Education to the less privileged and to foster intellectual creativity by encouraging interdisciplinary research. Today, financial mismanagement and a failure of leadership has led to a situation in which the university’s very survival is in jeopardy.
As I write, members of the UEA branch of the University College Union (UCU) are out on strike over a dispute arising from the executive team’s plans to axe over 190 jobs as part of a cost-saving exercise. The Vice-Chancellor announced the need for compulsory redundancies, in order to meet continued budget shortfalls, only a year and half after 400 members of staff had already left the university through voluntary severance.
The executive team’s inability to engage in meaningful negotiations, intended to try and find a better solution, has led to a situation in which recourse to industrial action became our UCU branch’s only option. At the start of this year, 82% of UEA UCU members voted in favour of going out on strike in a ballot with a decisive turnout of 67% – demonstrating the strength of feeling amongst staff. Our branch has worked exceptionally hard to protect its members, also providing case workers for all members at risk of compulsory redundancy who requested one.
The pressure exerted on the employer has forced them to recognise the need to work with the unions. However, despite voluntary redundancies and cost savings already made, they still want to force through compulsory redundancies to save the last 0.25% of annual operating costs. Our colleagues going through this process are being put through intense anxiety and uncertainty. At this point, even if the employer changes course, it is likely that the relationship between staff and management will be permanently damaged.
Our more general fear is that if we do not resist these plans now, UEA will find itself in this same situation year after year with the institution ultimately plummeting towards a death spiral. UEA is both a regional employer and an ‘anchor institution’ that plays an essential economic role in Norwich and Norfolk. As such, the university’s terminal decline would have severe consequences not only for staff and students, but also East Anglia as a whole.
The wider HE crisis
Although the issues at UEA are particularly acute, they are only representative of the wider crisis currently unfolding within the Higher Education sector.
At least 90 universities have announced restructuring plans involving compulsory and/or voluntary redundancy schemes. This means that nearly one in four UK universities are slashing staff numbers and cutting budgets. Multiple other UCU branches are out on strike in opposition to plans to cut jobs, including at prestigious Russell Group institutions such as Newcastle University and even Durham University.
It seems almost inevitable that this will cause lasting damage to the world-leading standing of UK Higher Education and perhaps the eventual loss of the country’s most successful exports, at a time when Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves are claiming to seek growth in the economy.
At a national level, UCU has suggested a set of very modest proposals to the government to begin solving this crisis. First and foremost, UCU has called for an end to the student visa restrictions introduced by the previous Tory government and the reintroduction of student caps. This would end the free-market for-for-all that currently exists and help to rebalance student recruitment across the sector.
UCU has also proposed a review of Vice-Chancellor salaries. At UEA, it is understood that 22 staff are earning more than £150k and 4 staff are on £205k. At a time when university managers are pushing through large-scale job cuts, this is frankly obscene.
Linked to this, UCU has called for a root and branch review of university governance. Part of UEA UCU’s local dispute concerns the appropriate mechanisms and structure of senior management and governance. Essentially, the view amongst members is that university management should be held accountable, with staff having oversight of decisions made on behalf of the whole institution.
By and large, Labour have rejected all of UCU’s proposals. Most disconcertingly, when pressed by UCU’s General Secretary, Labour’s Education Minster claimed: “the reality of this government is that we believe in controlling migration and international students are part of our migration system.”
Only this month, the white paper published by the government has set out plans to make it even more difficult for international student to apply to UK universities. It is hard to see this as anything other than a continuation of the Tories’ ‘hostile environment’ or an attempt to pander to the racism of Reform UK.
The stakes
At the heart of this confrontation is a disagreement about what universities are and what they should be. Are universities meant to be profit-seeking enterprises or sites of culture and learning?
The scale of the cuts means that, at universities such as my own, the sciences are just as much at risk as the humanities. In this context, those who believe in a functioning Higher Education system need to reflect on how we conceptualise the purpose of academia and how we can go about defending it.
As it stands, the purpose of the sciences seems to be viewed as a way in which to pump out employees for the pharmaceutical industry. The best that humanities graduates can hope for are sales or customer service roles in dodgy call centres. Surely, we should instead promote the ideal of a flourishing intellectual culture in which the sciences are about the pursuit of new truths through rational enquiry and the search for knowledge that can benefit the whole of humanity. Alongside this, the role of the humanities should be seen as creating philosophical frameworks that help make sense of and interrogate the developments of our fast-changing world.
And how should universities operate? Do we want universities that only care about outcompeting one another through vanity building projects and the creation of shiny prospectuses? A better alternative would surely be universities that collaboratively introduce students into welcoming, international communities of scholarship.
The cold hard truth
Of course, the material reality of people working and studying in universities is a far cry from this idealistic picture.
For a substantial number of people working in the sector, their working conditions are defined by precarity. Departments of every variety, the length and breadth of the country, prefer to provide teaching through lecturers and seminar leaders employed on fixed-term contracts.
There are now a generation of academics who have never known what it is like to enjoy employment security. Low-paid, short-term teaching posts have created an environment where early-to-mid career academics are frequently juggling jobs across different cities with little-to-no prospect of a permanent position on the horizon. Many of these people have had to delay taking out mortgages or settling down to raise families to the point where it is no longer an option for them. For academics on work visas, a sudden decision not to renew a contract can even put them at risk of deportation.
In the wake of the pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis, the experience of being a student has also become increasingly fraught. There is a mental health crisis amongst young people that universities are not set up to adequately cope with. Staff, who themselves are low on morale, also lack the training to provide counselling and the support services that should exist to fill in this gap are increasingly being cut down or closed.
The exorbitant costs of tuition fees are a barrier to students from less advantaged backgrounds, as activists warned it would be back in the early-2010s. The price of university tuition also adds strain to the relationships between staff and students. Most students I know appreciate that our working conditions are their learning conditions. Yet, the sector itself is clearly encouraging them to think of themselves as consumers, and this can sometimes create unrealistic expectations of what individual members of staff can achieve.
Equally troubling is the way in which the assessment regime of schools and colleges feed into student anxieties and insecurities. Through outreach work, I have heard from primary and secondary school headteachers who have needed to round up pupils who have refused to come to school out of fear of the SATs or GCSE exams. In my own field, which is History, I am also constantly baffled by how the A-Levels can sometimes stifle critical thinking rather than enhance it. Forcing students to satisfy narrow assessment objectives, in order to pick up marks in an exam, causes them to subsequently think and write in a clunky, insincere, and mechanical fashion.
It is also frustrating that increasingly stringent performance metrics make clear that teachers are expected to ensure that students meet these requirements, despite having fewer and fewer resources to help achieve this. Insultingly, the government has also told schools that they must pay for salary increases won by the National Education Union (NEU) by draining what remains of existing school budgets.
Where’s all the money?
There is no money for glue sticks in our schools. There is no money for research in our universities.
There’s no money for teaching assistants in our classrooms and there is no money for faculty professional services on our campuses.
There is no money for anything, it seems, other than the salaries of CEOs of Multi-Academy Trusts and the Vice-Chancellors of universities.
The bottom line is that the education sector needs a serious injection of cash, which the Labour government tells us, like its Tory predecessor, will not be coming.
And, with that in mind, isn’t it interesting to think about what the government is prepared to spend its money on?
Billions upon billions of pounds have been spent by the government on fuelling the conflicts in Ukraine and Palestine. We seem to be awash with money for weapons and the military, with Starmer having raised defence spending to 2.5% of GDP. Yet there is none for our schools and none for our universities.
What’s worse is that the Prime Minister and his government seem to envisage a future for our children and young people where the only stable jobs are connected to a war economy. It seems the only practical plans for growth that Labour have been able to come up with are related to investment in arms-manufacturers like BAE Systems.
I’m proud to say that this is a future that our students at UEA profoundly rejected, when they passed an ethical careers policy at their Students Union. This demanded for the university not to advertise jobs to them that were connected to the fossil fuel industry or the arms trade.
Students are right to want better for themselves and for the planet. They are right to want careers based on innovation and creativity rather than death and destruction.
What next?
Collective action at individual institutions, like UEA, has gone a long way to making meaningful differences to people’s lives, by ensuring that members of staff made redundant have left on the best possible terms, and sometimes held back the tide of cuts that university managers want to force through.
In the end, however, we need to bring about structural change to the sector, ensuring that there is an appropriate amount of investment and also reforms that give staff and students democratic oversight of their places of learning.
Between now and the next general election, this will mean holding the feet of Labour MPs to the fire, and making it clear they cannot count on our support if they do not do the right thing by our educators and, by extension, the future of our children and young people.
- Conor Bollins is a Lecturer with the School of History at UEA and the Anti-Casualisation Officer for UEA UCU. You can follow Connor on Bluesky and Twitter/X.
- You can show your support for UCU members on strike on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter/X.
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