Of course it is right to raise questions over the suitability of the journalist and free schools advocate Toby Young to sit on the board of the Office for Students, but there are equally relevant questions not being asked (Toby Young to help lead government’s new universities regulator, 1 January). If indeed OfS is to be the regulator for higher education, how can a board including not only Young, with his obvious lack of appropriate qualifications, but also an executive of a company linked to tax avoidance schemes (Boots), the boss of a law firm and a former banker be expected to deal with the many issues that have been raised about universities recently?
Does anyone really expect this board to deal with the problem of excessive pay at the top and insufficient remuneration for lecturers just starting their careers? Then there’s the small matter of entry qualifications for students, with an increase of 40% in unconditional offers, the use of Pre-U examinations in many public schools, instead of A-levels, and the lack of diversity among undergraduates. An OfS board with such members is very unlikely to be worried about the disproportionate numbers of sixth-formers in the private sector being accepted for universities, let alone insist that only 7%, in line with the national average, be the maximum. As for universities being forced to publish their welfare and pay policies in their prospectuses, absolutely no chance.
Bernie Evans
Liverpool
• The government’s relentless reforms of higher education are becoming ever more contradictory and incoherent. The OfS – whose board now seems to be dominated by business people, bankers and Tories – is expected to increase competition between universities, curb grade inflation and ensure that universities are more responsive to what students want. But surely grade inflation is a consequence of imposing the market in higher education and treating students as consumers?
As most students are paying £9,000 a year, many of them automatically expect a 2.1 or a first; value-for-money. So universities, to compete for student “customers”, feel compelled to award more 2.1s and firsts than their competitors, otherwise they will lose their market share of students, and slide down the plethora of league tables which rank universities’ performance. The situation is becoming surreal. To force universities to become more like supermarkets selling a product to their paying customers in a free market, universities must be subjected to an increasingly Soviet-style regime of state control and bureaucratic micro-management. Another New Year, but the same old destructive rightwing dogma.
Pete Dorey
Bath, Somerset
• As a zero-hours-contract tutor for 34 years at a leading UK university, I was intrigued to read of the present government’s concern about value for money for students. What concerns me are the pay, employment security and working conditions of academic staff, who, it is implied, are not giving value for money. Today’s academics routinely work 60-80 hour weeks, teaching and assessing often enormous undergraduate classes, while maintaining the substantial research outputs needed to achieve funding and promotion in their careers. The proposed Office for Students advisory board includes not a single representative of university academic staff.
Rosalind Garton
St Andrews Open Learning, Cupar, Fife
• It is unnerving to speculate on why universities have been softened up as reported by the Guardian so frequently in recent months. Sexual harassment policies, quality-for-fees, vice-chancellors’ pay, fining universities for not allowing “free speech”, attacking advertising initiatives and three-year degrees – there’s a growing list of sometimes legitimate questions of universities which, when put together, look like the old Thatcherite strategy of preparing the victim for the sucker-punch.
We don’t know what that punch will be – winnowing the 119 universities back down to the 24 “leaders” in the Russell Group, perhaps (24/119 sounds suspiciously like a grammar-secondary modern-type ratio, which maybe appeals to Theresa May)? Perhaps realising the corporatisation of universities by turning them into privatised academies? Now we have Toby Young, the Voldemort of schooling, he of free schools and libertarian economics. So the direction of travel comes clearer. Full exposure to market economics and the solidification of the consumerist policy of pay-per-learn. The highest quality university education in the world is set to be flushed down the drain of competition.
Saville Kushner
Bristol
• “[Jo] Johnson ... told the Guardian that the demands of consumers and taxpayers needed a heavyweight market regulator that would actively intervene in the same way as Ofwat or Ofcom in water or telecoms.” Need one say more?
Gareth Reeves
Durham
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