The second part in a tale of two party conferences

In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m not the biggest fan of the Tories. So you can imagine I was even less excited about attending the Conservative Party Conference when I found out it was Blackpool, the train journey would take five hours and I’d be staying in a hotel I stayed in at my first NUS Conference and never planned on visiting ever, ever, again. Sam Rozati came along too, much to the delight of one former Block of 12 member I met who used to represent the Young Conservatives on the NEC.

That said, I attended on behalf of NUS last year. They had some good fringe events with plenty of free food and drink (more champagne than Labour – they are the Tory Party after all!) and I’ve always found that when meeting with Conservatives as an NUS representative there’s always been a sense of politeness, courtesy and honesty – knowing we’re not always in agreement but being willing to engage. So I was going in with a constructive mindset. With the headlines leading with talk of an imminent general election and favourable polls for Gordon Brown on pretty much every front I was also curious to see what the atmosphere and messages would be like after an incredibly upbeat and unified conference with Labour in Bournemouth the week before.

So I set off from home on Sunday afternoon after watching William Hague’s opening remarks to delegates in which he lavished praise on Margaret Thatcher’s legacy as Prime Minister and appealed for Party unity after leading figures and Tory grandees were found popping up undermining Cameron’s leadership, unsure as to what I’d find in the Winter Gardens (yes folks, the Conservatives held their conference in the same delightful venue as NUS).

I couldn’t help wonder where the stickers and gimmicks were as I entered the Winter Gardens, but this wasn’t NUS conference and it was surreal to be standing in the atrium without having to worry about my own or someone else’s election or who was taking part in which motion or how I was going to make it to the ACTS disco when there were still Block of 12 speeches to help write. It’s amazing what a party political conference can do to spruce the place up!

The first day was pretty relaxed and easy going as most of the education fringes were taking place the following day. I attended a fringe event organised by the Association of Colleges and the New Statesman entitled ‘rehab for hoodies: how college learning saves lives’. I thought the title of the debate was a bit unfortunate and played to the stereotypes of young people in the media, but the debate itself was lively with panellists including John Hayes MP, the Shadow Skills Minister with whom I’ve had a good dialogue in the past, Julia Neal the new President of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) and the Principal of Blackpool and the Fylde College. I made a contribution from the floor outlining NUS’ position on proposed changes to the education and training leaving age and our concerns about the number of young people who are leaving school with no formal qualifications.

One of the issues we discussed was just how little the FE sector is understood by much of the public so here are a few facts courtesy of the AoC:

• Every year local colleges train over 3.5 million people
• 235,000 college students are aged over 60
• The average A-level point score for sixth form colleges is 769.8 compared with 739.3 for school sixth forms, yet colleges receive less funding for A-level students than schools
• Around 200,000 students study higher education in a college and HE courses are provided by 292 colleges
• 27 per cent of 16 to 18 year olds in colleges are from the 15 per cent most deprived wards in England (compared to 9.5 per cent in maintained school sixth forms) and 64 per cent of those in receipt of the education maintenance allowance were studying in an FE or sixth form college.

I also met with Richard Angell in his new capacity as Press and Parliamentary Officer of the All-Party Parliamentary Committee Against Anti-Semitism to talk about the work that the committee is looking to do with HE sector bodies and institutions to root out anti-semitism on campus and spent most of the day milling around the exhibitors catching up mainly with the teaching unions and other partners we work with. Later that day I also attended the Absolutely Equal disco organised by the Commission for Equality and Human Rights with Stonewall, which was good fun.

Tuesday was considerably busier. At lunch I spoke with the Israeli Deputy Ambassador and the Head of Political Affairs about Khaled al-Mudallal, the Palestinian student studying at Bradford who hasn’t been able to return to his studies because of border restrictions around Gaza. We agreed to communicate with each other after the Conference to see if they could intervene to ensure Khaled’s safe return to the UK. The situation in the Middle East is obviously complex and I’m not going to try and boil what’s happened to Khaled into a simple black and white analysis, but whatever the wider situation we must do all we can to ensure his return to study in the UK and safeguard his right to access education.

Immediately after lunch I met with Rob Wilson, MP for Reading East, who is the new Conservative Shadow DIUS minister shadowing Lord Triesman. It was a useful introductory meeting and we covered a range of issues including the 2009 review, widening participation, the quality of the student experience and HMO quotas on students.

I then met with Pam Tatlow, a good friend of NUS and Chief Executive of the CMU Universities Group, representing modern universities. It was useful to catch up as I work incredibly closely with Pam and CMU. We are currently exploring ways in which we can better involve students’ unions at CMU institutions in the work that CMU and NUS are doing collaboratively. In a previous blog I mentioned a plot I’ve hatched with GuildHE institutions. I put this plot to Pam and she’s also keen. All will be revealed soon…

I then attended a fringe organised by the Smith Institute, Reform and the Russell Group which I also attended at Labour. With a different panel, the debate had a different focus but it was just as thought provoking. I also spoke with Wendy Piatt, who is now firmly settled in as Director-General of the Russell Group, heading up their think tank operation. I’ve since been in touch with Wendy’s office about feeding into some project work they’re doing around the internationalisation of higher education and the student learning experience, so that was a useful outcome.

Immediately afterwards, we rushed over to the other side of Blackpool where I was speaking on a panel at a CMU fringe on who should fund universities alongside David Willetts, the Shadow Secretary of State for Universities, Malcolm McVicar, VC at UCLAN, and Rob Wilson. I pointed out that while the Tories were publicly saying that no decision has been made on whether to lift the cap, John Redwood has been out and about saying that he thought that the lifting of the cap is both necessary and inevitable. I said that the Conservatives need a seminal ‘Clause 4’ moment to prove they’ve really changed and they should do the following:

• Embrace the widening participation agenda and actively promote it; the language from the Conservative benches has been positive of late on w.p. but we’ve yet to see any concrete policy commitments that would meet this warm words with action
• Embrance the diversity of the HE sector and fund it; the HE funding debate is about more than just the Russell Group
• And finally, if they really want to prove they’ve changed I suggested that someone put John Redwood back in his box!

I had a positive reception from the delegates present, including Adam Afriyie, the Shadow HE Minister. After the CMU fringe I went over to the NUT’s Fish and Chips dinner before spending the rest of the evening in various hotel bars catching up on the conference gossip.

So all in all what did I make of the Conservatives in Blackpool? Well it seems that the electorate will get a chance to deliver their verdict in a matter of weeks. I’m not convinced for a moment though that the ‘change to win’ theme of the week is anything more than an empty slogan. I’ll leave you with one final anecdote. One organisation present, promoting sexual health awareness, was told by a delegate that he wasn’t interested because it’s too closely associated with queers. He was the third person to use the term queer in a disparaging sense that day. Changing slogans and changing leaders is easy. Changing hearts, changing minds and changing cultures is much more difficult and Cameron and his uber modernisers, it seems, have barely scratched the surface of Britain’s old nasty party.

Wes

wes.streeting@nus.org.uk

07738 477 353

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