Labour education policy is a mess, but we should not mock. The last election was fought on two wonderfully self-destructive slogans. When the Tories said: “Labour has stolen our policies-and they will not work,” Labour replied: “Tory spending targets are absurd-and we will adhere to them.” Quite right. The policies won’t work; the targets were absurd; the government has stuck to them, and it will all end in tears. The search for improved standards in schools has encountered local government rate-capping, and come off the worse. The Kennedy report on further education has sunk without trace. And the Dearing report on higher education was hijacked by press release before the committee reported. In comradely spirit, I offer an outline-in about 1,700 words rather than the report’s 1,700 pages-of what Dearing should have said about higher education, and some predictions about what post-16 education will look like in ten years. Dearing’s report was not a guide to the next 20 years but a memento of the last 30. It should be buried quietly, but not in the way ministers have in mind.

First, the context. The higher education system has expanded enormously; 40 years ago, some 5 per cent of school leavers went to university, now 33 per cent do. In Scotland, it is 44 per cent. Higher education is very different from what it was; before, it was liberal education for upper- and middle-class boys, and a few of their sisters. Now, it is mostly pre-professional training: the provision of credentials for the higher reaches of vocational training and access to managerial positions. (Of course, liberal education is also vocational training. The “transferable skills” that employers want are better fostered by “liberal arts and sciences” than by any other undergraduate training, and the threat to the liberal arts posed by Dearing’s obsession with education for work should not be underestimated.) It has also become an education provided on the cheap-in real terms, at about half the price of 30 years ago-and much of it is unimpressive. Even the best British universities would not make the US top ten any longer; any young academic who could get a job at Stanford or Berkeley would be foolish not to take it.

Higher education has become mass education without much changing its class character; only 8 per cent of the bottom two income groups enter the tertiary sector, while 80 per cent of the top income group do so. Most obstacles in the way of bright children from hard-up backgrounds are in place before they are 11 years old, but a reforming government should still lean over backwards to smooth the path of those who have not been disqualified before they are 18. Whatever system of financing colleges and universities the government finally decides on must include generous scholarship aid to the worst off. Not only are their needs greater and their parents’ ability to help them less, but they are more likely to be deterred by the prospect of starting adult life substantially in debt. A Labour government that ignores this is not “New Labour” but Old Reaganite.

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