Good evening! This week's edition of the In Common newsletter comes from Rory Hamilton, Common Weal's networks and campaigns co-ordinator
When I was sitting my highers at school I remember some teachers using college as a "threat". IE: If you don’t do well, you’ll have to go to Borders College. Now, I’m not sure what sort of motivation that was supposed to provide, but I’m confident that it would be fairly demoralising to hear your aspirations used as a threat against others.
While education is fully devolved, I am treating Keir Starmer’s announcement aiming for two-thirds of young people to gain higher level skills through a university degree, further education or a gold-standard apprenticeship by age 25 with cautious optimism that it brings a tone shift and policy change up here in Scotland too.
The policy of free university tuition is very much a legacy of Blair’s Britain, intended (rightly) to make sure that a young person’s background, was no obstacle to their ability to get a university degree (and by extension enter the middle-class job market). However, it has not necessarily led to an increase in students from low-income backgrounds attending university in Scotland.
There are a number of reasons behind this which debunk the argument against free tuition: Firstly, the current university funding model is based around running universities like businesses, which means looking for "return on investment" for "shareholders", and doing so through attracting fee-paying international students and building expensive and poor quality purpose-built student accommodation which has a broader impact on rents elsewhere (the fact this is also causing a crisis in England indicates that tuition fees in Scotland won’t fix the crisis here).
Secondly, just because tuition fees are no longer an issue for "home" students, doesn’t mean that university doesn’t come with other cost-of-living issues, like rent, energy, and food, all of which have seen extortionate rises in recent years, while maintenance loans have themselves barely increased.
Lastly, and perhaps, most importantly, the mentality that you must go to university or you’re deemed not valuable to society has been a pervasive unintended consequence and far from breaking down class barriers, has somewhat entrenched the class divide.
This is particularly acute, when one considers the recent fixation on the "unemployed, white, young man" that Democrats in the US, among others, have been attempting to capture. The argument goes that we’ve spent so long trying to even-out opportunities (not my choice of word) for people from discriminated-against backgrounds that young white men fresh out of school without university prospects are being "left behind", and as a result are turning to the purporters of a toxic masculinity based on Christian conservatism – the Andrew Tates and Charlie Kirks of the world.
Now, I’m not sure how much this holds up under scrutiny – it’s not like the structural inequalities that preclude, for example, young black men from going to university or having prosperous careers, have exactly disappeared. However, if you were pinning your electoral hopes on winning over this "manosphere-adjacent" demographic, I would start with non-university career paths.
The devil will be in the detail to how this actually plays out. If the £800m targeted for a joined up post-18 education system with a unified regulator falls into the same trap of the university model of pumping colleges full of students without providing sufficient resources to support staff in the delivery, we can expect a similar crisis to unfold.
Likewise, if there are no jobs to go to, or houses to support those jobs, what good will 14 new "technical excellence" colleges be? Lack of jobs and affordable housing go hand-in-hand as reasons why rural areas and places like Inverclyde have seen depressing rates of depopulation for years.
And yet, the just transition offers the means to fix this problem. Not only is the private sector not investing in renewable energy at the rate that was suggested a market-led approach would lead to, but we have a huge skills shortage in filling the roles needed for a just transition of any value.
Expanding vocational training through a renewed emphasis on colleges and apprenticeships, backed up with genuine public-led investment in the renewables sector and an enormous programme of affordable house-building could not only be transformational for the economy, but also underpin a successful electoral strategy.
Between this educational push and the nationalising of steelworks in Yorkshire, there is a quiet English materialist nationalism which Starmer would do well to place emphasis on rather than overt flag-waving. The problem for the Government has been delivery because of an over-reliance on the private sector and arbitrary fiscal rules in hock to "the global market". Ditching this for a public-led investment approach would support a renewed emphasis on colleges and apprenticeships and provide the renewal this flailing government so seeks.
