Sam Scott, University of Gloucestershire
Locating the UK Higher Education Crisis
During the 2022-23 UCU (University and College Union) strikes it was apparent that spaces of critical interaction were often positioned within more than at and beyond the UK Higher Education (HE) sector. Most notably, the UCU chose to channel much of its anger towards HE apparatchiks rather than focus on the systems, structures and culture governing the UK university sector. Similarly, many students struggled to connect the UCU strikes to the long run marketisation of UK HE, and many lecturers feared that student disquiet at the strikes would translate into poor National Student Survey (NSS) results (and raise questions about course viability). In this Intervention I am particularly interested in the UCU’s approach during the 2022-23 strikes towards the decline in real terms pay and working conditions in the UK university sector. The UCU focus – on institutions and their apparatchiks more than wider systems, structures and cultures of UK HE – was perhaps due to the belief that change could be initiated through university managers? Alternatively, the UCU may have been blind to the systemic issues of UK HE? Or, it may have been fearful of taking on an intransigent government directly? Whatever the reasons for the focus I argue in this Intervention that more could have been done to systemically, structurally and culturally reimagine UK HE in response to crisis.
The Marketisation of UK HE
To appreciate how things could be different in UK HE, and how the UCU campaign missed its target in this respect, requires an awareness of how the UK HE crisis was arrived at. Some academics and some students are aware of this history, others are not. Almost three decades ago, in 1996, the Conservative Party (under John Major) commissioned the Dearing Report (1997). This report led to the introduction of tuition fees by the Labour government of Tony Blair. Dearing essentially signalled the start of a tuition fees culture in UK universities for home students (though fees had been levied on international students since 1980). It enabled and emboldened the Labour government to finish a Thatcherite initiated project to reform university funding that had started, but been defeated, in the mid-1980s when the ardent monetarist/ neoliberal Sir Keith Joseph was secretary of state for education.
Whilst Joseph was unsuccessful in bringing in an era of student fees he planted the seeds for this policy. In addition, his approach towards higher education helps us to understand why the 1980s and 1990s saw a: “deliberate combination of headlong expansion and progressive lowering of funding levels” (Collini 2012: 181). The university sector was thus rife for funding reform when the Dearing Report emerged. From 1998, with the Labour government taking up Dearing’s recommendations, and the unfinished business of Sir Keith Joseph, we saw a shift in university funding away from government grants to universities towards one based largely on student tuition fees. Whilst fees were set initially at £1,000 they were raised to £3,000 in 2006 and the Browne Report (2010) then saw them jump to £9,000 in 2012. In 2017 they were raised a little more to £9,250, but essentially have been stagnant since 2012, and are now capped at this level until 2025.
The Thatcher/ Joseph inspired neoliberal shift in UK higher education has been well documented (e.g. Mahony and Weiner 2019). It has, arguably, heralded the most significant set of changes since the 1963 Robbins Report (which started the expansion of higher education in the UK from 5% of young people in the early 1960s to around 50% today) (Committee on Higher Education, 1963). As Collini (2012: 38) has summarised, “the changes that have transformed the landscape of higher education in the past couple of decades have not principally been changes in scholarship and science themselves, but changes in the ways universities are administered, financed, and overseen by their host societies”. In turning education into a marketplace, and getting students thinking like consumers, albeit heavily indebted consumers, a major paradigm shift occurred. Some students are aware of this context, though others are not, and it is often difficult (for academics and for students) to imagine how higher education could be financed, managed and constructed in different ways.
The UK government acknowledged a “marked” shift over the 2010s away from direct funding, associated with the fees regime (Bolton 2019: 18). However, this new funding model has been stuck – with fees stagnating for over a decade now – and this is key to understanding austerity in the sector. The impacts of this austerity have been significant across the higher education sector but certainly not uniform: Russell Group institutions and their staff have generally fared better than newer ‘Post-1992’ institutions for example.[1]
The IFS (2022) note that: “The continuing freeze in the tuition fee cap until 2025 will likely lead to a substantial reduction in real tuition fees”. Stemming from this Universities UK observe how: “the proportion of English universities reporting an in-year deficit increased from 5% (2015-16) to 32% (2019-20)”. Similarly, the House of Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee (2022) found: “There are systemic, long-term pressures on providers’ finances” in English higher education and noted “a background of deteriorating financial health of an increasing number of (HE) providers”. Overall, funding of UK universities is now set to fall to its lowest point since the 1990s (UUK 2022).[2]
Simply increasing fees, and thus student debt, is not the only solution though to the austerity being seen. Indeed, to think in terms of charging students more for their courses in order to tackle government underfunding not only pits students against university staff but it ignores the dilemmas and problems causes by the marketisation of higher education. Not least, the latest fee regime (from September 2023) sees student loans become cheaper for higher earners and more expensive for lower earners; with around 3% of lifetime earnings going on paying off student debt amongst middle/ low earning graduate (IFS 2022). The fee regime also means that it is more attractive financially for universities to expand numbers on those courses that are cheapest to teach (ibid.).
Alongside the issue of a fees-orientated market for higher education, one must also consider the lifting of limits on student numbers at UK universities in 2015. The impact of this ‘freeing up’ of the market cannot be overstated. The policy decision has meant that some universities have opened their doors much wider, whilst others have struggled more with recruitment (mainly the newer Post-1992 universities) since the lifting of the student number controls. The resultant income and wealth inequality within the higher education marketplace has meant that a collective sector-wide solution to declining pay and conditions is much harder to find and that the laissez-faire approach of the government risks undermining the viability of some (especially Post-1992) universities. Not only this, but collective university-wide bargaining appears increasingly difficult.
Through both the fees environment and the lifting of number controls, the UK higher education sector has been subject to considerable ‘marketisation’. According to the OECD, the UK now has the most privatised tertiary education sector and the lowest rate of public funding of all OECD members (OECD 2020). It also has some of the highest fees and highest student-debt on graduation of all OECD countries (OECD 2022). In addition, and due to this financial context, students in the UK are now positioned as consumers of education first and foremost. This outlook means that there is an obsession with student satisfaction, and other metrics, as part of a new managerial orthodoxy. This orthodoxy makes strike action, which inevitably impacts the student experience, appear particularly irrational and destructive.
The UK’s intense HE marketisation, that goes back to the mid-1980s (for academic takes on this context, see Brink 2018; Collini 2012; Smyth 2017), is central to understanding the most recent 2022-2023 UCU strikes. The effective privatisation of a public good (education) has occurred alongside a broader decline in pay and conditions, and creeping privatisation, across the UK public sector in general. The pervasive market-driven logic and an associated tighter funding environment have, in combination, helped to reduce real terms pay and working conditions for public sector employees and have underpinned a series of strikes, in universities and beyond. Universities are therefore not alone in having to negotiate a hostile funding environment in the UK; but they are in a unique position to understand this and to look critically and creatively for alternative ways of doing things.
The recent UCU strikes have thus occurred within a context that has advanced a market model of higher education, especially since the mid-1980s, and after a period of prolonged attacks by government on unions and strike action. Against this context, one might have expected the UCU to do battle mainly with the underlying structural-ideological causes of deteriorating pay and conditions in the university sector. Instead, it chose to largely highlight university management and vice-chancellors as the central villains. In this respect, the battle lines were drawn between lecturers and the university apparatchiks which not only diverted attention away from the real causes of declining pay and working conditions (causes outlined above), but it also made it more ‘natural’ and justifiable for managers and vice-chancellors to undermine the strike action (which they certainly did).
The UCU 2022-2023 Strikes: Missing the Target
As Coderre-LaPalme and Greer (2018: 263) note: “As other power resources decline, British unions increasingly rely on their discursive power in their campaigning in the public sphere”. For the UCU this campaigning, during the 2022-23 strikes, has taken on a particular feel and form. Across YouTube and Twitter the UCU attacked university bosses, and vice-chancellors in particular.[3] Irrespective of whether this was a worthwhile target, it is a campaign that, in my opinion, missed the key target: namely, successive government’s structural-ideological attack on UK HE. This has made the UK university sector one of the most marketised in the world. University management is employed within, and operates for, this neoliberal context but cannot change it at an institutional level.
The result of drawing battlelines within universities was polarisation between staff and managers. The model assumed that the UCU and its members can pressurise bosses/ vice-chancellors who in turn, through the UCEA (University and Colleges Employers Association) employer body, will then pressure government. An alternative approach would have been less adversarial within the universities and the university sector and more adversarial with government and the market.
To be sure, strikes are inevitably adversarial with respect to workers and bosses, but they need not have focused so heavily on this during the recent UCU dispute. Bosses are often just very well-paid messengers of the neoliberal capital process who alone, and even collectively, may be ill-equipped to modify or change the status-quo. We know from other countries that the UK higher education environment need not be so privatised or marketised and that the system we face as UK academics has been artificially manufactured, driven by ideological dogma. We also know that this can be particularly damaging to smaller, newer post-1992 institutions who are operating without the income and wealth of Russell Group institutions.
On an institution-by-institution basis there is simply not the scope for the progress the UCU would like. Improving pay and conditions in higher education must involve a critique of the origins of crisis and a targeting of the particularly intense neoliberalism that surrounds UK government and shapes UK universities. Anger, frustration and blame being channelled at management, especially vice-chancellors, is all very well, but it is rather simplistic and is in danger of simply ‘shooting the messenger’. Coderre-LaPalme and Greer (2018: 278) conclude that for trade unions in the UK: “all of this activity has had only subtle effects on government policy and the British model of capitalism” over recent decades. The challenge for unions then, in the context of prolonged public sector austerity, and prolonged protest, is a big one. It is not helped, though, by largely targeting management and vice-chancellors at the institutional level.
Concluding Thoughts
Why are crises in capitalism often understood as issues inside the system (whether linked to worker, managerial or corporate failings)? I have considered this question in the past, with Professor Karen O’Reilly, in a study of the crises facing horticultural firms and their contemporary dependence on precarious and migrant labour (O’Reilly and Scott 2023). Like horticulture, the UK HE sector is in crisis, and it has similarly become difficult to imagine progressive alternatives. There seems to be a tendency, in neoliberal capitalism, to channel critical thought in response to crises within rather than at and beyond prevailing structures. The spaces to contest are narrowed by virtue of the neoliberal status-quo becoming second nature. This said, the extreme marketisation of UK HE, alongside heavy managerial oversight by the state, is not inevitable: it emerged out of the 1980s and 1990s neoliberalism. Nonetheless, the 2022-23 UCU strikes were positioned largely as internal battles with university apparatchiks. Similarly, student frustrations were often (though certainly not always) located within the university rather than being channelled into structural critique; and this translated into lecturers’ inward-facing fear around poor NSS results and course viability. This intervention, I hope, will shift the construction of crisis from inside to out: to get all parties thinking about crisis historically and structurally; and to see that there could be less crisis-prone and more creative alternatives to the extreme marketisation and student indebtedness that now dominates UK HE. A starting point here might be to look again at controls over student numbers to avoid institutions monopolising and to keep class sizes to a manageable level in a pedagogic sense. The balance between tuition fees and direct funding could also be revisited: with a view to reducing student indebtedness whilst not further impacting upon an already stretched HE sector. There are of course many other solutions to the current crisis in UK HE funding, and this intervention will I hope initiate further discussion.
Endnotes
[1] The Russell Group formed in 1994 with 17 original members and now has 24 affiliated Universities: University of Birmingham; University of Bristol; University of Cambridge; Cardiff University; Durham University; University of Edinburgh; University of Exeter; University of Glasgow; Imperial College London; King’s College London; University of Leeds; University of Liverpool; London School of Economic and Political Science; University of Manchester; Newcastle University; University of Nottingham; University of Oxford; Queen Mary, University of London; Queen’s University Belfast; University of Sheffield; University of Southampton; University College London; University of Warwick; University of York. Post-1992 institutions were allowed to acquire university status only after the Further and Higher Education Act 1992. They are the newer, and generally smaller, Universities in the UK.
[2] There are important differences between the policy context in English, Welsh, Scottish, and Northern Irish higher education. This intervention is not designed to draw out these differences, though we note that the fees and funding crisis appears most pronounced in the most neoliberal regime (England).
[3] See, for example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Zdg3j-g_JE and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRit_iEUVYo on YouTube, and https://x.com/ucu/status/1612132558405308416 and https://x.com/ucu/status/1649323724015910912 on Twitter.
References
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Featured images: “UCU and Unison strike placard (uni gets richer)”, “Student solidarity placard (tuition fee hikes, ucu strikes)” and “UCU and Unison strike placard (wages down 20 per cent)” by Alarichall on https://commons.wikimedia.org/ CC BY-SA 4.0