It has been a long time coming. Theresa May announced a review of post-18 education in her ill-fated 2017 Conservative Party Conference speech. In 2019, the Augar panel reported. In 2022, a higher education reform consultation occurred, which closed 14 months ago. Now, via a press release heralded by the Department for Education as a ‘crackdown on rip-off university degrees’, we finally know what the Government plans to do (sort of – some of the details remain fuzzy and, even where there is more clarity, there’s a general election sandwiched between now and full implementation).
In other words, someone who was enrolling as a fresher as Theresa May spoke could now have completed a BA/BSc and a PhD while waiting to find out what the Augar report would mean for higher education. People who entered secondary school in 2017 will be applying for higher education this year, before the new announcements have taken effect.
I am not a fan of predicting how historians will write up the present – the whole point of history is to have a different vantage point – but it is fair to say that they will struggle to portray the last few years as anything other than rather slow when it comes to education reform. The Augar report was, after all, a response to the perception that there was a pro-Corbyn ‘youthquake’ at the 2017 election, since when we have had one more Labour leader / election and three more Prime Ministers.
Now that Ministers have said what they will do, much of it is not hugely surprising. Minimum eligibility requirements have been put back in a box. The idea that people with low A-Level grades (or equivalent) should not be entitled to subsidised student loans is one of those ideas, like introducing post-qualification admissions or mainstreaming two-year degrees, that is endlessly floated and then rejected but which never quite dies.
