Good evening everyone.

I’d like to begin by thanking you for inviting me to speak to you tonight. This will be my first major speaking engagement since being elected as the next NUS National President, and that being the case, I want to take this as an opportunity to set out what I think will be the direction for NUS on funding issues in the next year or so, and to clarify some important points that have been misrepresented in the press about the new policy of the national union in this area. I’m looking forward to hearing your reaction to what I’m going to say, and to engaging with you in a discussion later on. I hope that we can find more common ground tonight than might have been possible had I been giving this speech four years ago, on the eve of the Bill to introduce top-up fees being passed.

I also want to congratulate you for holding an event on this subject, and at this moment. I suspect that the agendas for equivalent occasions at most other institutions have a focus on internal matters, the development of new strategic plans, or similar themes. But you have recognised that no institution can decide on the next strategic direction to take before properly considering the context in which you will be working for the next five to ten years. I hope that many others follow your lead and begin their own debates about what that future may hold.

Our higher education system
Because these are crucial times for our higher education system. Right across the UK, important changes are taking place – changes that will almost certainly have a substantial legacy. In Wales and Northern Ireland, devolutionary advances are creating the serious possibility of different funding models and approaches in every part of the country. Scotland has already shown how this can happen, and really quite rapidly, too. The new funding settlement in Scotland is a winner for students – making HE essentially free once more – and it should act as an important lesson for anyone who believe there is no alternative to a system based on charges to the individual, whether as a student or as a graduate. In the next two years, England will look again at our own system, and a new settlement will be reached between the state, the HE sector, and the direct beneficiaries of higher education – students and their employers.

It is conceivable, of course, for the sake of completeness, to reach a solution in which individuals do not pay at all. Scotland has found a way – but at a price. We need to remember that when students pay less, the income of the sector falls. It is, as they say, a zero sum game. This is essentially the dilemma that NUS, and student officers around the country, have been wrestling with over the last few months, culminating in the historic change of policy endorsed by our Annual Conference last week. The problem is that this is an area where the student interest isn’t clear – in fact there are competing interests, interests that are in contest and hard to resolve.

On the one hand, it clearly isn’t in the interests of students for money to be taken out of their pockets, whether before or after graduation. If it’s the former, then this acts as a huge barrier to access, and if it’s the latter then income after graduation is suppressed, making it harder to live in an expensive 21st century Britain, and definitely harder to get on the property ladder.

In the interests of students
But on the other hand, it also isn’t in the interests of students to be educated in an under funded system, by under paid teachers, and with second-rate facilities and learning resources. A scenario like this would not only let millions of students down, but would also diminish Britain culturally and intellectually, not to mention put us at serious economic risk in terms of the new global context.

As I have indicated, these two competing interests are not easy to resolve. I do know quite clearly how I would resolve them if I was designing a system for funding higher education in isolation from other spending priorities, or from the general economic and social contexts. I still think the idea of directly linking learning, access to better learning, or simply the opportunity to learn, to an individual payment is pretty noxious. I still think the very process of doing this is socially regressive and acts reductively on the essence of education itself. And I still don’t think the wealthy are taxed highly enough in our economy. So – under perfect conditions – I would still make higher education free for students, funded through the proceeds of progressive, mainstream taxation.

And it would be very easy, when they ask me to submit evidence to the review, to simply write that in a letter and send it to them. It would be a strong position of principle – and I believe it remains a respectable position, which many of my members hold, and it should be afforded that respect. We need to be clear on this: to call for free education in the forthcoming review isn’t ludicrous, it isn’t offensive and it isn’t selfish.

But sadly, it also isn’t realistic, or credible, or has any possibility of being endorsed by any British government under Gordon Brown or David Cameron.

Painful
It’s painful to say it, especially for someone who was there on the night we got to within five votes of stopping top-up fees, but the only way to get a good deal for students in this forthcoming review is to accept the notion of a contribution to the costs of higher education, made after graduation – while making clear that the principle behind this still stinks. Only if we do this can we sit down at the same table with the vice-chancellors and the captains of industry, and have our policy taken seriously by the government. There are those who will accuse me of being a sell-out – in fact there are plenty of them – but I think the real sell-out would be to knowingly sit on the sidelines with a placard when the decision is taken to lift the cap to ten thousand a year; and if we aren’t on the inside arguing against this, there would be very little to stop it.

Last week, at our annual conference in Blackpool, a majority of delegates endorsed this compromise, and they did so for one simple reason – they want to win. We experienced a very near miss last time, and it was heartbreaking. Most student officers don’t want to end up in Westminster in the first month of the next decade, staring down the hall towards the division lobbies, losing again. It is accepted that we need to take a more subtle and strategic approach.

But having said all this – and I think I have been quite upfront about it here – what I won’t put up with is the wilful misrepresentation of our view, and the substitution of the position we have agreed for quite a different one. Some commentators in the press have seized on our debate at conference, and the outcome of that debate, as evidence that we have dropped our long-standing opposition to top-up fees. But they have not looked carefully enough at the substance of what was debated, and what was resolved. In reality, accepting top-up fees is categorically not what we have done.

To be clear: we are prepared to accept the notion of a graduate contribution to the costs of higher education. But we remain absolutely opposed to several key aspects of the present system, which we believe are detrimental to students and have the potential to be hugely damaging to higher education if that system is continued and extended. In fact, we are very much against any fees-based mechanism to achieve the graduate contribution. Such a mechanism makes price the crucial factor in the relationship between the student and what they are learning. It changes perceptions of value in what is offered, and what is learnt. It accelerates the breakdown of the community of scholarship in our sector, and exacerbates the miserable culture of ranking and rating that already blights us. In the long term, variable fees inevitably cause a qualitative change in the nature of higher education itself, and not for the better.

Alternative
Therefore, we want the forthcoming review to be about finding an alternative to top-up fees that is fairer for students, but still generates the kind of income the sector so badly needs. This is the only way to properly resolve the two competing interests I described earlier. At the same time, we need to find ways to restrain and reverse the market logic that has been allowed to run riot within government policy during the last few years.

So how could this be done?

Well, I don’t know the answer to that yet – but we’re going to try and find some answers over the course of the next few months, with the aim of publishing some proposals later this year.

What I do know, instinctively, is that the principles endorsed by our conference delegates last week are good principles. They invite difficult questions, but I think if we can respond to those questions properly, we will be able to win a better, fairer system. The time available confines me here to the briefest of summaries, but I will try to explain what we will really be calling for in the review.

Contribution
Quite apart from the issue of a graduate contribution, it has to start by increasing the state’s own contribution. I don’t accept the false choice between funding primary and secondary or tertiary education that we are often presented with. I certainly don’t accept it when the government has funded other expensive, and arguably much less worthy, priorities in certain areas. Earlier this week, David Eastwood, the chief executive of HEFCE, warned us that we are going to enter a period of financial stringency. Only the government can make sure that the sector has the money it needs in the medium term, and it should. And we should bear in mind that when Lord Dearing published his report ten years ago, he recommended that students should pay twenty-five percent of the cost of provision. In many cases, we are already well beyond that under the present system, and I think it should still represent an important line in the sand.

At the same time, the graduate contribution should be conceived in terms that are collective, not individualistic. It should be that we contribute to the costs of our education system, not that I pay a fee for my course. The difference is perhaps very subtle – but I think absolutely critical to getting this right. It means breaking the link between what the graduate pays and the notional price of the course they studied, and shifting the focus onto their future income as the best measure of the benefit obtained. We should think about future graduates working together to give back to higher education, not about an army of individuals, each paying off a sky-high loan. This also implies shelving price variability and the conception of a higher education market – we already, unhelpfully, have a market of prestige in our HE system: better not to reinforce this with a raw market of price, in my view.

The way that student support is provided should be completely overhauled. Funding should be offered on the basis of need, and not carved up in a thousand different ways by institutions trying to compete with each other. We should have a single source of support, with a combination of means tested loans and grants, issued by a central student support agency. There should not be scholarships offered as inducements to well-of students for enrolling on under-subscribed courses, at the expense of other students who living under the poverty line. There should not be mountainous unclaimed bursary funds, relying on students to claim when it is the system that should ensure they get what they are entitled to.

Business
The system should move away from low-level, course-specific contribution from business, and include a more systematic way for businesses to invest in the sector. Experimentation with demand-led mechanisms as in further education is unhelpful, and another facet of the market vision for HE. A new compact with business is required, so that universities are responsive to their needs, but in such a way that provision must be propped up by business interest to survive. It’s clear that this is an area where the government have no fully developed thinking, and there should be a more comprehensive policy.

And we need to find a way to solve the economic problems around the size of the student loan book without hitting graduates with higher interest rates that make the whole system even harder to sustain. The reality is that if the interest rate were increased, it would make either a higher repayment rate or the ending of the twenty-five year write-off point, or both, inevitable. Otherwise, the government could not be sure of getting its money back within twenty-five years, and this would defeat the whole object of the exercise. A contribution system based on a proportion of earnings for a fixed period would avoid these problems; some may end up paying more, but at least they would be the ones who could afford it. And by the way, those who are very wealthy should not be able to get the cheapest deal of all by paying up front.

Ideas recognised
If we can get some of these ideas recognised, and actively investigated during the review, we’ll really be onto something. But tonight I’m rapidly running out of time, and I don’t want to overstay my welcome – so I’ll leave you with some final thoughts.

In the coming debate on HE funding, NUS will be prepared to stand alongside universities in calling for more resources. We will even be prepared to support the retention of a ‘graduate pays’ system for a proportion of that funding settlement. But there are things that must be changed.

Firstly, we must be prepared to say – and I hope you will join me in this, but we’ll see – that the review must not be about asking simply: the cap, how high? We have to allow space for more radical and imaginative ideas and solutions, leaving no stone unturned in looking for better alternatives. I want to be totally clear on this point: top-up fees remain an appalling system and NUS is going to work to bring them down. That is now our primary aim.

Secondly, we must ensure that fairness and transparency for students are critical influences on changes to the funding system. We must remember those students who are all too easily forgotten: part-time students, mature students, students with caring responsibilities. We have to find a system that works for many different paths in higher education, and allows flexibility between them.

Love of Education
Finally, we should allow common sense and a love of education for its own sake to direct us towards building an HE funding system that is genuinely social democratic in character, and offers resistance to the tiresome presentation of yet another market-driven response. I can’t emphasise that point enough. I don’t think the issue should really be how much comes out of my members’ pockets any more, but in making sure that what they do get at university is not damaged by the wholesale adoption of a view of education in which learning is a commodity to be bought and sold.

And there I’ll leave it.

Thanks very much.

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