A bill was introduced in the 2021 Queen’s Speech that introduced a bold approach to restoring academic freedom and meaningful debate at universities. Why isn’t it yet in the Statute Book?
The electoral punishment of getting policy wrong now could be long-lasting.
A timely report – from Ed Balls, no less – suggests that a lack of graduates is not the reason for our productivity deficit. Rather, our productivity deficit explains the lack of graduate-level jobs.
Users of the Government’s scheme should enjoy the same exemptions from international student fees and NHS surcharges as Ukrainian and other refugees.
The Education Department treats universities like poorly performing secondary schools, and now intervenes in them so much that the ONHS may well propose bringing them into the public sector.
We need to give more time and resource to those bringing up children. Such parents need a much better package from the state to look after a baby in the first year of its life.
Such a move would damage the levelling-up agenda, dampen economic growth locally and nationally, and weaken the UK’s soft power abroad.
Foreign labour is an alternative to ministers facing up to how successive governments have gummed up domestic training and recruitment of medical staff.
The public sector has just swallowed another semi-autonomous set of institutions with little protest or controversy.
The measures would signal that we are a national community, membership of which brings particular rights and also obligations. It sounds pretty Conservative to me.
Risk and income sharing agreements allow institutions and students to become partners and shift losses on poor-value courses away from taxpayers.
These may take time to bear fruit, but must reassure the markets now that the growth path in expenditure will be measurably lower. Such measures must involve doing less, as well as doing things differently.
People need a sense of hope and optimism about their prospects. And one of the best ways for the new Prime Minister to deliver that credibly is indeed to show how they will grow the innovations which will make life better.
The Telegraph’s report this week that universities are tilting against applicants from “advantaged” backgrounds undermines ministers’ efforts to restore post-Covid sanity to pupils’ grades.
In terms of academic freedom, it is a game-changer. It is already having an impact – as can be seen by the way in which Oxford’s Student Union rapidly u-turned on a decision to bar the Oxford Union from Fresher’s Fair.