Joint speech to the NUS Campaigns Convention

Gemma Tumelty & Wes Streeting
National President & VP Education

Good afternoon everyone, and welcome back.

As we’ve heard already today, this is going to be a serious year, with serious choices to make. In higher education, above all, this is a time of change. The prime minister has changed, the education secretary has changed, and as a consequence the agenda has changed. We can now expect not only a review of funding policy in two years time, but during those two years – in the words of John Denham – a debate about the purpose and structure of higher education. This is a debate in which we must be fully engaged, not stranded on the margins. It is a debate which we cannot just hope to influence, but one in which we set the terms.

The system we were left with when the last Higher Education Act was passed is riddled with unfairness. This isn’t just a theoretical or rhetorical point; it is real, and the students who will be arriving on your campuses in just a few weeks’ time are the victims. They are the victims, first and foremost, of top-up fees themselves, each paying three thousand a year for exactly the same courses that were offered two years ago (with the same facilities, same number of teachers and expanding amounts of students) They are the victims of a complex system of bursaries that gives least to those who need the most. They are the victims of a fudged system to regulate access, which has resulted in an even wider social divide between elite and modern universities.

This system is much more complicated than we like to imagine it is, and our response must be much more than just a vague call to “keep the cap”. We need to have the capacity for self criticism needed to recognise that this is only an empty slogan; we must take a close look at ourselves and ask: who are we here to defend? In whose interest should we act first?

We could act first in the interest of traditional full-time undergradutes, who we have, in truth, always given the highest priority. Or we could make a different choice – we could act first in the interest of part-time students, who face unregulated fees, and have done for years. We could act first in the interest of students from disadvantaged backgrounds, who face huge challenges in early life, and whose grades and learning experience are very often impeded as a result. We could act first in the interest of the student who faces discrimination as a result of her disability, or her sexuality, or her ethnicity.

If we continue to choose to prioritise the needs of the same people, then OK – we won’t surprise anyone, and we won’t cause a great shock. But we could rightly be accused of ignoring our commitment to achieving social justice in higher education. Justice in fairer admissions; justice in fairer grants and bursaries; justice in terms of a fair return for your investment. Fair, that is, no matter what your start in life.

So that’s the choice. But what does it mean in practice?

It certainly means we must fight for an admissions system that treats every applicant on their merits, and ends the built-in advantage for those from privileged backgrounds. But it must go further. It certainly means that we must secure for our members a bursary system that isn’t subject to the whims of university vice chancellors. It certainly means that we keep our commitment to targeted grants, based on a test of your means. But it must go further still.

We need a higher education funding policy that goes further towards challenging this unfairness, discrimination and regression. But before we get there, there are certain notions we have to tackle, honestly and openly.

First is the notion that higher education can ever really be free. No matter how it’s funded, someone has to pick up the bill. Some people say the taxpayer should. Some people say business should. Some people say students should. The reality is that most people – most stakeholders in this issue – will tell you that a balance is required, between the taxpayer, employers and students. This was the essence of the Dearing Compact in 1998; this is the central proposition of the Leitch review, published last year. Government wants this balance, universities want it, employers want it. This is the game now – and we’re not in it. We’re not even close to being in it.

What does that mean if it’s left unaddressed? It means that students will be outside the room when the next major reform of higher education is decided on, just like we were last time.

And when we took that position, a principled stance in favour of higher education free for full time undergraduate students, we were right. We were absolutely right because we had the public, most of the press, and almost half of Parliament on our side. Almost.

Just five votes in it. The most successful major NUS campaign of the last decade – but for five votes, we would have won, and successfully defended our principles.

But now, the rules of the game have changed. We can defend our principles all we like, but really, it’s outcomes that matter to the people who elected us. Last time, the principle of our campaign was sound, but the outcome was terrible for students. It has to be different this year; it has to be different when the review happens.

Why? Well, it comes down to this: variable top-up fees that create a vicious market in higher education and hundreds of thousands more a year deep in debt, are wrong and always will be. But – and think carefully about this – do we really think we can win the argument that those who have benefited most from a university education shouldn’t pay more?

We’ll leave that question to be resolved another day – because it’s right that you must have the chance to debate it fully, and come to a clear conclusion about the answer. But to those of you who might believe that conclusion already is clear, consider some statements that have been made recently about our higher education funding policy:

One: advocating a policy of universal grants, which would cost 35 billion and is not supported by any of the three main parties, would make NUS look out of touch with reality and the needs of students.

Two: Our current target is the review in 2009. We must aim towards this and focus our efforts on keeping the cap on fees and not let the fight for free education make us ineffective and destroy our chances of winning on the issue of the cap.

Three: We have lost the argument for state-funded higher education with the public.

These are not our statements; they are yours. They are statements of policy passed by Annual Conference in March. It is our official position, agreed by the sovereign body, and we have a duty to pursue it.

Because here’s the bottom line: NUS needs to be in the game; we need to be in the room when the real decisions are made; we need to have a serious policy to fight for when we’re there.

That’s why we have prepared a three-year strategy to put us back in the game, and to get us back in the room, and in a moment, we’ll set out in detail what that strategy involves. But before we do, we need to imagine the scale of the challenge and the consequences of failure.

Currently the market in fees is virtually non-existant so long as fees are capped at £3,000, but imagine for a moment that this regime is taken to its logical conclusion: that the cap has been increased significantly, or lifted altogether. Within the cut throat market of UK HE Plc there would be big winners and big losers.

Big winners in the form of ancient and red brick universities able to pitch themselves at the high end of the market and big losers in the form of modern universities and small and specialist colleges. Within such a market, the headlines of the day wouldn’t be about course closures, but an epidemic of institutional shutdowns concentrated amongst some of those institions which are most successful at widening participation amongst some of the poorest and most under-represented communities in Britain.

Ministers of any government committed to social justice should baulk at the prospect that, further down the line, spending per student would be greatest in those institutions with the worst records on widening access and lowest in those institutions which are best at widening access.

Let’s take this head on, and let’s prevent the nightmare scenario of the open market from becoming a reality. We have devised an ambitious strategy that sets out how we will obtain the research needed, the development of committed, trained and enthused activists necessary to campaign on the ground, and the action we intend to take as we move towards the review.

And crucially, this is a three year strategy – we must not try to do everything in one year, we must ensure we take the right actions at the right times, and that means adopting a different plan for each period of this campaign.

Our objective is that, by the end of this year, NUS will have a clear policy agenda and vision about what a fair and equitable funding system looks like. We will have started a programme to enable you to recruit, train and develop activists across your campuses. These activists will be integral to this campaign, but also will create a base of people with whom you can work to run local campaigns. And together we will begin to build a wide range of partners who will assist us in ensuring the success of this campaign.

This year we will be asking you to set up open student meetings, inviting your Vice Chancellor debate the future of Higher Education funding, and to lobby the local council or regional development agencies to look into the impact of fees on the local economy and participation in the area. Some of you will also want to hold local demonstrations, and we will support and encourage this when you decide to adopt that approach locally.

To build our campaigning capacity we will extend our programme of Activists’ Academies, ensuring that your activists have the right knowledge and skills to be effective campaigners.

Nationally we will engage with all political parties and pressure groups on their education policy, and we will build political alliances, culminating in the launch of an All Party Parliamentary Group on Higher Education Funding.

After this session, there will be workshops on all three strands of our campaign: setting a clear policy agenda, building membership capacity and building national alliances.

Today, we are also releasing two documents to you, the first, which we have already mentioned is the Economic Impact of Free Education research carried out by Gill Wyness of the Institute of Education. The second is a pamphlet recording the opinions of a wide variety of people on the issue of Higher Education Funding. We hope that you can use these two documents as a catalyst to start a debate on this issue on your campus. And we will create further opportunities to debate this issue through our Regional Conferences, the Education Zone Conference in November, and in February, a second Higher Education Funding Debate conference.

Year two will see us produce research and evidence to support our case, more regional activist training, parliamentary lobbying, regional direct action and work with the our allies running a series of high profile events like a mass National Forum on Education.

And as we head into the final furlong, we will ramp up the action, with a series of town hall meetings in several large university cities, and finally a national demonstration, in the build up to a Parliamentary vote. But most importantly, as we are meeting with and lobbying decision makers, we will come back to you to ensure that any negotiations we conduct are member led, evidence led, and ultimately – your decision.

We said earlier that at the National Union of Students, we take the fight to where it is, and to where we can win. So this year we can announce today that we will be supporting our colleagues in Northern Ireland in their education funding campaign, where there is a real opportunity with Stormount re-sitting that we can really get the issue of variable fees on the agenda. All political parties before the election were utterly opposed to the funding system and in fact recent changes to the student-funding package announced by DIUS, do not apply to students in northern Ireland, and therefore right now they are the worst off group of students across the UK.

They will be holding their National Demonstration on the 19th November to call for an independent review of the funding system imposed on them by Westminster, which I urge you all to support.

So we’ve got a clear strategy, please read it in more detail and engage with it, it requires you to set some clearer policy positions, help us build capacity, and make an impact on the review and the ultimate decision. It would’ve been easy for us to stand here and make grand policies and announce mass action for the year ahead, to pretend for reasons of political expediency that we can go on as we have before and to pander to the loudest voices. There are debates to be had in the year ahead and we should not be afraid of this. Because we need – and students need – a credible negotiating position for the National Union. It would be great to think that our future strategy can be reduced to simplistic sound bites and slogans, but we know – and you know too – that it isn’t that straightforward.

For too long, the NUS membership have been marginalised and sidelined in those hard and difficult debates and the campaign direction and tactics. We’ll put NUS back in the game, and today we’ve stepped up to the plate, asking the questions and presenting the choices – now it’s up to you.

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