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This guest post has been kindly written for HEPI by Colin McCaig, Professor of Higher Education Policy in the Sheffield Institute of Education, who has 20 years’ experience in education policy research. 

The Labour Party is ahead in the polls and has been since December 2021. With little or no economic ‘good news’ coming down the pipeline in the next couple of years, many commentators now anticipate a Labour government for the first time since 2010. That was, of course, an era before graduates had to take on the full weight of £9,000 fees, before the encouragement of hundreds of new higher education providers and the removal of student number caps – the demand-led system we have had since 2015-16 – designed to create a fee-distribution that would theoretically lower average fees and make the subsidised loans system affordable. It was a time before the Teaching Excellence Framework, the Higher Education & Research Act (2017) and the unwanted attentions of a market-regulator, the Office for Students, were imaginable.

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