The publication of the latest Milburn Report on social mobility led to me being interviewed on Radio Sheffield once again today. The Report seems to me to have two foci - one around the encouragement of young people from widening participation backgrounds to stay in education beyond the age of 16 and then to aspire to go to university, and the second around the difficulties for students from such backgrounds going on beyond their undergraduate studies to take postgraduate qualifications. It was the former that the Radio Sheffield interviewer wanted to highlight, although it was the latter that I would have preferred to deal with on air. I have become a cracked record in various places over a number of years with my view that we are doing few favours to students from impoversiehd backgrounds who arrive here with career goals that will inevitably involve a postgraduate qualification, and who then find that there is no support for them undertaking that - despite a relatively generous support package at undergraduate level. That is not something that universities can fix: bursaries and other support for postgraduates are not 'countable' as part of our commitment to the Office for Fair Access. I know that because we have tried it: four years ago when Martin Harris was the Director of OFFA, and again only a couple of weeks ago when the new Director, Les Ebdon, visited us. The Vice-Chancellor recently was told, at an external event, about the extent of this glass ceiling problem for widening participation students in one area: any such student wishing to become a barrister after taking a qualifying law degere will find that there are only 6 scholarships available nationally to do so.
The focus of today's interview was, as I have indicated, on support for 16 year olds. Milburn has suggested that universities should pay bursaries to young people from low-participation neighbourhoods to enable them to stay in education until 18, and should work with them to improve attainment and aspiration. I will leave on one side the fact that we do the latter already. The former suggestion is nothing new. Until this year the government paid Educational Maintenance Allowance to relevant young people: it has now withdrawn that and replaced it by a much less generous bursary scheme, distributed to schools to administer (at great cost to themselves), and in such a way that many schools have allocations that are greater than they can spend whilst schools in real areas of hardship have seen a massive cut in the funds available to their students.
We had a governors meeting last night at the sixth form college where I am a governor. The principal of the college reported that she had been at meetings with other sixth form college heads where they had indicated that because they didn't have enough call on their bursary allocation they were using it to give merit awards to students with full attendance records, whilst in our college - with one of the most deprived catchment areas in England - potential claims from eligible students add up to over three times the available funds.
The withdrawal of EMA is a disastrous policy, but for the Milburn Report to suggest that the cost of replacing it should be borne by universities would be to try to paper over a crack in education policy that is widening by the month. Actually, to speak about 'education policy' in relation to widening participation is probably a misnomer. The withdrawal of EMA, the ending of the AimHigher project where universities, schools and colleges worked together to seek to raise aspiration and attainment, the ending of support for the 'Excellence Hubs' for gifted and talented children from widening participation backgrounds - all of these things suggest that there is now no real political drive to raise higher education participation for those who might, by some in power, be possibly labelled as 'plebs.'
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