Welcome to the top education for those who don't know me, I'm full of crap,
so I'm very pleased to be able to introduce our speaker for the top mental seminar today.
Who is the person who is now in medicine?
That's an education centre, you know, for many years, wisdom that you don't send the department having been external examiner force
on all masters in higher education and taught succession schools as well.
He is a visiting professor at Gene Centre for Global Higher Education and the Simon Marginson, who's on this path.
That's up. You'll see a visiting fellow of Hot Chicks at New College, so several weeks lots of their and particularly in relevance to today's topic.
He was a consultant to the Deering Review in 96 97 and the Foster review further education colleges in 2004 five.
And he is the proud, followed by hope that there won't be even know won't be the Policy Think Tank
Award for Lifetime Contribution to better higher education policy making.
So I wanted to get to talk to us about all human evidence and continuity in the open report.
OK. Hello. Thank you for coming. And as you may have glimpsed, I have an interest in policy enquiry, particularly in relation to tertiary education,
and that's what I'm going to be discussing through the medium of the vehicle of.
The orga enquiry now that enquiry is the fourth major review of higher education.
Since the 1960s. Robbins, the high watermark for committees of enquiry.
When daring. A kind of committee of enquiry.
And then we move into different styles of policy enquiry with the Brown Review, and now we have the Orga review.
So I'm going to talk mainly about Olga as a policy enquiry process.
I'm happy to discuss its recommendations and any critiques you might have,
but I'm coming at it really in terms of how governments mobilise independent.
Expert advice. And different kinds of expertise externally to bring to bear on policy formation.
So what those four examples do? Is aimed to devote time, people.
And a remit to government to advise.
What happens after those events is another matter, but as a species of policy enquiry process, they are formally independent.
They are external. They convene. Individuals with varieties of expertise.
Sometimes they can be only one person and it's a single person enquiry.
But that is that carries less weight less authority than what you might call a more grand committee type
investigation in depth and breadth of major policy questions which governments find difficult themselves to address,
or they want to park somewhere in the long grass.
Or they want somebody else to be heroic and make the breakthrough.
So what was auger charged to do? How did he go about it?
And what kind of argumentation and evidence did he put together to create a 200 page report which?
Some of you may think is now dead, but I'm informed that it is still alive.
And the reason I know that it is still alive is that I had interviews arranged
with the secretariat to the Orga Committee and they were about to send me.
Information about how the panel went about its work.
On the assumption that it would have come to some kind of end or conclusion.
By this particular event, we are here today, that hasn't been the case.
So what I'm going to talk about is the first stage of my enquiry, which is.
Based on textual evidence and conversations in and out of government with people who were close to this process,
I hope to offer you soon some conjectures and observations,
which I will in the second part of my work, seek to test or evidence in terms of what kind of quality,
quality, what kind of enquiry process this involved.
OK, so. Are you ready for this? We're going to do it in three parts.
So. I'm going to attach a question to each part, and with your permission, I'll stop after part one.
And if there are any questions and discussion, we can enjoy that and then I will proceed if you will allow me.
OK, so that is the plan. And here we go.
These are the three questions I'm going to pose. What kind of enquiry, what species of enquiry, what were its conditions of existence, in other words?
What conditions shaped its creation?
What conditions shaped its conduct?
And its dynamics. And then what rate of report can we talk about in relation to the orga enquiry?
Those of you who are familiar with Robbins will realise the wait was literally physical.
It was 12 volumes in the case of Deering.
It was a box set of 10 volumes, so they weighed in quite a lot.
The lightest one. For lots of reasons, was the Brown review.
Looking at the funding of higher education post New Labour in 2010, and Olga comes in as a more substantial document again.
So if you look at tertiary education in what started out as Great Britain then became the United Kingdom and then became, in my case here, England.
In other words, devolution has changed the. The territorial remedy for these enquiries.
So there you have a sense of weight and you have a sense of the.
Mix and style. The interesting thing, of course, is the higher education has routinely been seen as an area for major review.
There have been no such reviews. Of further education.
There has been a one person review here by someone called Foster.
But that's the nearest I got to some kind of independent expert enquiry, so we might discuss that why it is in the English tradition,
higher education play strong when it comes to large enquiry, further education does not.
I'm also indicating the assumption that governments will respond to these events, these enquiries, these reports.
And here's the government response to the daring enquiry.
And this was the response of the Blair government in 1997.
But around these, you have a large literature both in political science, in the Ministry of Science,
in policy studies, but also in the field studies in the study of further education, in the study of higher education.
So one of my students that are rather good thesis on a daring enquiry.
And here you have a tome on the Brown review. And here you have an anniversary volume on the Robin's report of 1963.
So each of those iteration styles reflect very different settings and contexts, but also a shift in the form the enquiry takes.
So at its simplest, I'm going to make a distinction between what you might call broad gauge enquiries.
And short order enquiries, so you would put your Robbins and daring, probably here you would put your brown and auger probably there.
What do I mean by broad gauge? Or what examples would we find in the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s, which somehow reflected a long view,
both forwards and backwards and a broad view in terms of all dimensions of the area of enquiry?
So standing advisory councils, you don't see them anymore.
But in the 50s and 60s, they were standard ways in which a whole set of parties would come together under the auspices of government,
but independently to review policy and suggest policy on a systematic basis,
often quite political, but at the same time, sometimes quite influential, influential in stopping things happening as well as advancing things.
And then, of course, we have the blue riband example of a committee of enquiry.
The Royal Commission. Robbins was meant to be a royal commission.
It ended up as a major committee of enquiry.
Never sure what that distinction is. My sense is you get a bit more resource.
If you're a royal commission, you get more civil servants able to do things for you and your budget is probably larger.
I haven't found any constitutional reason or distinction between them.
And then, of course, you had the jeering type process, which is to bring together in the case of Deering,
over 14 15 people gearing dislike that he thought that was unmanageable.
But of course, given the need to represent a whole variety of interests in a in a rather noisy environment called higher education,
where we're all very articulate and we're all very demanding in the quality of the enquiry and evidence and argument and writing which is conducted.
That's why Deering had to accept that kind of mode.
Now, my argument is that probably. And she's getting over simple.
There's been a shift since the 1980s from broad gauge.
To much more tight, focussed enquiries.
At the minimalist, there one person reviews. Alison Wolf was commissioned by a man called Gove,
who was a minister to undertake a review of vocational qualifications in relation to students before the age of 19.
There was no advisory group in sight. It was a one person effort.
Now that is quite exceptional.
You do have one person reviews, but there's often an advisory group around them who are either pretty passive or make themselves pretty active.
Again, the dynamics will differ in relation to a whole variety of politics and policy conditions.
Then you have task groups which have independent members which are very focussed
on particular sets of issues to address and then the one I'm most interested in.
And where Orga is the clear example, an expert panel?
So what I'm going to try and do now is simply again, ideal type comparison.
Compare. Committees of enquiry as ideal types and expert panels.
Now the obvious distinction is terms of remit. Here you have an expectation that you will work for more than a year.
Often two years up to three years, dedicating yourself to a set of very large questions, often with a future horizon.
Deering had a 20 year future horizon. Hard to imagine any kind of activity, which is a policy enquiry, having anything beyond the medium term.
So again, that shift has happened very quickly.
If we're talking about expert panels now. No large numbers of the good and the great small numbers, orca, six members and a chair.
Short time frame, well, short timeframe was expected.
We'll come to that in a minute and very tight. Terms of reference.
And what that means is no go areas as well as places you might want to go.
So here you have more circumscribed conditions for expert panels compared to the more open boundaries,
which means of enquiry were identified with, for example, Robbins formerly was a report on full time higher education in Great Britain.
To his great credit, he ignored those terms of reference and devoted the mass of his data collection to both part time and full time higher education.
No one blinked an eyelid because the authority Europeans was such that that's what committees of enquiry are able to do.
They're able to express their authority in setting their own boundaries again within the limit within some kind of limits set by government.
My senses expert panels are inside government. Olga was a panel enquiry which sat in a larger policy process.
So it's very important to see the report as not somehow the expression of a government policy process.
It's embedded in a larger and longer process. And again, I hope to illustrate that in a minute.
Committees of enquiry arguably are alongside government. If you're a panel, you're probably inside government, but you have to be careful here.
Both of them are pleased by various parties.
So in the case of Robbins, he had three assessors.
And they weren't just any old assessors, they were senior civil servants from the Treasury,
from the ministry and from the Scottish Education Department. They sat in every meeting.
So the idea that somehow there was reporting into government didn't really apply,
given that government was inside the deliberative processes which that committee expressed.
This is an interesting one. If you look at both.
Well, look at Robbins in particular, there are notes of dissent.
What say you look at the back of the Robin's report and the member who represented what was then called local authority higher education,
what you might call higher level further education was concerned about a number of
recommendations which were troubling because they privileged the university interest.
But of course, given that Robbins was dominated by vice chancellors and other university interests,
his voice had to be positioned as a note of dissent.
Deering didn't have that Deering, of course, was a consumer career civil servant,
and he dined out on his ability to smooth and evolve and glue together reports which have some coherence and consensus.
And then lastly. This is not as clear cut generally.
Large scale major reviews are reporting not to ministers as such or individual ministers there reporting to Parliament.
In other words, the report goes into a parliamentary process. And the scrutiny has a different.
Gauge and range benefits straight to ministers.
Olga reported, had to report to a prime minister and not just the prime minister, but to the chancellor of the Exchequer.
It was led by the Department for Education. Because it was a larger process.
And it was civil servants who were the secretariat for the augury enquiry.
That's my next question. So any observations about the English and their interest in major enquiries on a very irregular basis.
These are special events. They only come into play where the nature of the difficulty of the problem is supreme.
We could have a whole seminar on varieties of enquiry and there'd be a spectrum of
those which are inside government and those which are far away from government.
Quite an interesting example in higher education is the pressure which built up in the 1970s for another robins.
So Robinson in the 60s, things were changing in the 70s.
Pressures were building financial pressures as well as demand increasing.
And governments were very reluctant to look to another Robbins.
So the Society for Research into Harvard Education asked the Leverhulme Trust if they could fund an independent enquiry.
Into the future of higher education. Now, that's an example of midway between being close to government, wanting government to attend seminars,
participate in activities and at the same time, it's a scholarly society.
We've charitable foundation money, which is running the show.
That produced some excellent pieces of work. It also resulted in senior civil servants as regular attendees.
So here you have an interesting amalgam of participation and interests as a result of a formal reluctance of
government to take on anything which was likely to be seen as large and potentially difficult to deal with.
I mean, you have to take them case by case. I think.
What happened to Robbins was that it was accepted by the conservative government which commissioned it and then a new Labour government,
so a Labour government which replaced a conservative government adopted a radically different policy, a binary policy.
So where Dearing wanted to expand mainly through universities, new universe, new universities created larger universities, expanded.
What the labour government did was to run a binary policy whereby growth was to be on two lines.
A line of higher education, which was owned and controlled by local authorities, local government.
And a university line, which was an autonomous tradition which had its own funding mechanism where the Treasury.
But the policy was to grow on two fronts, and of course, that continued all the way until 1992.
So from the late 1960s. Through two decades into the early 90s.
British and then. Increasingly, territorial higher education was premised on that two type approach.
So that's one example. During a course had the task of making the breakthrough on fees.
Of course. Higher education was never a free historically.
But. Deering had the task of arguing for a student contribution.
Governments couldn't do that on their own. In fact,
the governing party and the opposition party agreed to a Concordia that they
would actually accept or address the same issues through a daring enquiry.
And of course, it was a Labour government, a new Labour government, which was able to move on that.
So one could answer your question, I fear example by example.
But there are examples, of course, where it is kicking stuff into the long grass.
It's a holding, it's holding position or holding pattern. And of course, some people are arguing.
And so I hope to show that Olga has no more legs left to it or rather.
It's been a long time now. Is there any likelihood that some of this stuff is going to be re-engaged with?
But of course, it hasn't been engaged formally by government yet.
So there hasn't been a government response to something which reported in May which something was expected to have reported in the previous year.
So we're in very volatile times, I wonder why.
And those that those volatility is play into why Augur is quite an interesting example of a panel which is sitting in very choppy waters.
And he's having to navigate those waters in ways which it may not be in control of.
Shall I continue? Are you OK with that? All right.
So by conditions of existence, as I said, when setting up such vehicles for enquiry, to what extent are they having to be meeting?
Quite specific. Boundaries requirements.
And not go certain places because they're told they are not allowed to go in certain places.
Now that diagram there. That's right. Those three pictures probably tell you enough.
There's two agendas going on there. The first one and the second one.
Tell you about. Where the Auger review was launched.
It was launched not in a university, but in the College of Further Education in Derby.
And it was launched many months after it was announced.
It was announced by Theresa May in that famous speech at the Tory party conference, where she had that coughing fit.
So in between the coffin coffin there, there was some higher education stuff.
But of course, this was Brexit land. And the perturbations which we associate with Brexit were playing into Theresa May's position.
She just failed to win a majority government.
So she had a minority government.
One assumption was that why Corbyn did better was that the youth vote or the student vote may have played into his popularity.
And. Nick Timothy, who was a special adviser, one of the two special advisers to Theresa May.
Was arguing that May's position should start to move away from higher education in the universities as a favoured territory
and look more to where working class students and where students in regions outside of the major conurbations were located.
So here you had a. Agenda, which was political, which was revving up powerfully.
And the symbolism. Of a college was really important in signalling that if you like that, that electoral shift towards a different constituency.
But the other agenda, and I think many commentators just haven't grasped this is that they're already existed.
For government, a major tertiary policy, it was expressed in something called the Post-16 Skills Plan.
It was published in 2016. There was no consultation around it, but it was highly radical and it's still in play.
And basically the model or the template, which Auger was working with.
It's a two track system in the future of academic or something called academic education
is one pathway and something called technical education as a pathway on the other side.
So England was to move from what from what scholars have described as a linked system.
Early attempts at an integrated tertiary system had been routinely defeated.
What this new template was offering was a much clear cut attempt to shift demand away from higher education,
which was seen as revving up towards 50 percent.
And creating. A technical education route separate, and we've quite loose and minimal relationships between a technical line and an academic line.
So this is where T levels come from.
The parallel qualification to be created in relation to A-levels,
and this is where technical qualifications at levels four and five sub bachelor
qualifications are meant to be the preferred model for technical higher education,
which is. Highly work-related or is expected to be occupationally specific in its purposes.
So not much tampering with the academic route A-levels.
Bachelor degree, possibly post-graduate professional jobs.
The technical route starting at 14.
Your GCSEs shaping those in relation to T levels at 18 and then the possibility of mixtures of apprenticeship and courses,
which would take you through a technical education route. Now that is seriously radical.
And. Commentary around Orga hasn't really addressed that second agenda, but I would argue it's the dominant agenda in the Augur report.
All the noise, of course, is around fees and higher education.
The bulk of the report is about the kind of model which is being incubated in the post-16 plan.
So this my point about the auger enquiry sitting inside a larger process.
So the overall review is government led, as I said.
Orga is described as an input. I mean, it was always seen as a major input, but that's a that's an interesting bit of language isn't there.
It's not the driver necessarily in this larger process.
And the other important thing is that there's another review, which was started earlier than the Orca review,
and that is a review of technical education at levels four and five.
And that was the other input formal input into the orca enquiry.
Now that Level four Level five review is an internal government review.
So I have to declare an interest at this point. I'm I'm on something called an expert reference group, which isn't really an expert reference group,
but I'm there to kind of know who's around and get a sense of or trying to understand
what kind of policy and politics is going on around that configuration of interests.
So to return to and say this is the the news story, and this is interesting, isn't it?
This is a government review of Level four, level five, which, unlike its other reviews, only gets presented in a new story form.
Yeah, so you find out about it and how the government intends to define its terms of reference in a piece of media form like that.
So again, this is my point about do you read significances in this?
Or do you not? But it's alive, and it's an input and has been a major input, including an evidence input into the orga enquiry.
But formally, and this is what makes Augur different than before for the first time, you have tertiary education as the scope of the enquiry.
So whereas previously, as I said, it's either higher education major reviews.
Or very little in the way of further education reviews here you've got headline tertiary education,
the English can't cope with the concept of tertiary. That's why they had to call it.
Post 18 education and training. Bit continental, isn't it?
Tertiary dish, so perhaps that might be.
Well, I'll offer you some explanations for why the English have a. Don't like it, have a disinterest in emotion of tertiary.
Or can't? Don't want to go there. Now what is post 18?
Education and training in England. I think a diagram like this would have been rather useful, but the front end of the.
Orga enquiry rather than words. What what beast are we talking about or what beasts are we talking about?
What volumes, what kinds of students doing, what kinds of things?
So I'm going to build up a picture of what is post 18 education and training.
So this is what the enquiry had to deal with.
And this tells you the large scope and the the the various territories they had to address in a short order form of enquiry.
So here you've got, let's call it, the higher education sector, i.e.
Education at a high level after 18, which is defined mainly in terms of universities as the main providers.
Two and a half million, including some offshore stuff. Notice that most of it is Bachelor.
And, of course, administratively, a student starting it the first year of a bachelor degree is somehow studying at a bachelor level.
Of course they're not, but formally they're registered for a bachelor degree.
It's only a minority of students who register for a level four.
Higher national certificate. Or a minority of students who register for a higher national diploma or foundation degree.
And I tried to indicate their scale because that is a target for the post-16 skills plan and for Orga,
the need to grow higher education at those sub bachelor levels in order to meet a whole variety of economic and social requirements and needs.
That's the hard education sector. If we bring post 18.
Further education in it looks like this. Roughly the same number of students.
But of course, most of them are studying at the upper secondary levels or basic education levels.
Most of them are studying part time. Most of them are adults in work.
But there's a whole variety of qualifications, professional, occupational, leisure type,
liberal, general vocational, which constitutes that territorial bit of the system.
Now, Olga. Had his terms of reference defined as that?
So what you notice immediately is that there's some higher education taught in colleges of further education in another sector,
but very small amounts.
So this level four level five stuff roughly equal volumes taught in university type institutions and college type institutions.
But the issue for Olga, and to their credit, they thought about this a lot.
I'm being told. It's the further education is a bit more.
Further, education is also 16 to 18 year olds.
So. These spaces here are young people.
And, of course, in a post-16 system. The further education system is significantly larger than the higher education system,
and of course, the 16 to 18 population in schools here is the smallest part of a post-16 system.
Now why that was important for Olga was the obvious relationships between.
Particularly Level two, level three, level four, level five or six.
If you draw a line at a large part of further education is not addressed.
So. What was an innocent and it was a pretty innocent description of a line called Post 18, education was problematic for an enquiry and as a result.
Or good in some of its qualifications, ignores those terms of reference and goes into level two level three areas because you need to demonstrate
and understand and comment on and make recommendations about pathways and routes and progression.
OK, so. That I think is important as a scene setting problem.
For the enquiry in its early days, and of course, all enquiries in the early days,
you take ages to get going right, they have to get the people around the table.
On the same day, gearing spent a lot of time trying to get co-wrote his membership in the first number of meetings.
And of course, the the secretariat wanted to move immediately to plan the whole process.
And they did. So some of the design of the call for evidence was already fully developed by
the time most of the members of the committee sat down and looked at them.
Because you had to get the show on the road, and of course, if you all of the secretariat that is your job,
you've got to deliver this thing and it has to be delivered to time, to quality and to meet the future policy and political conditions of the next.
Government. Now, I've used the soft word guidance to what the enquiry was asked to do.
Basically, it was asked to take on board,
i.e. accept that the current system has expanded mostly and mainly around bachelor degrees at the undergraduate level.
But the incentives have been all about charging the highest level of fee you can.
And a result has been that, on average, the graduate debt has increased.
So you can see the echo of the politics of my slide,
where Theresa May is thinking about a constituency which is not her graduate middle class constituency.
A much more diversified, heterogeneous population who need to.
Who are not served well.
There's no high quality alternative routes, the argument goes, the need for higher wage returns for all students in tertiary education, whereas.
The Bachelor degree has always outperformed other qualifications in relation to both employment outcomes and salary outcomes.
And here you see the policy agenda out of the post-16 skills plan.
The need for advanced technical skills through higher technical qualifications with comparable quality and an expectation that over time,
the returns will be on a comparable basis to those in universities at the bachelor's degree level.
And of course. Quite firmly. There's no messing around here, you're told.
This isn't about giving you freedom to roam. This is about user pays.
This is about income contingent principles.
This is about progressive forms of income contingency.
So that was rule one, if you like Rule two. As I said, these payments have to be on that model, a cost sharing model.
The current technical reforms are the driver for the review.
OK. That parrot that sentence doesn't jump off the page, but it's the powerful one.
Those reforms, which are already in place, which are beginning to be implemented,
will become the architecture for a new two type academic and technical education tertiary system.
No, playing around with the imposition of no caps. All right.
And lastly, no fiddling, no messing around with the loan system as designed, nor with principles of taxation.
So I mean, daring had some quite.
Wide ranging and numerous conditions, but this is of a different order.
And it's over different order because this is a expert panel expected to deliver
a remit which is specific and concerned with what can be done in nine months.
That was the expectation of time which Augur had.
But of course, that time was much longer because of high politics.
Now this could be a seminar on its own. And there's lots of people were better placed to to lead on this.
And you will have your own stories and insights and involvements, no doubt.
But the first, you know, if you look at it in terms of three moments, the early moments, the middle stages.
And the later delays in the early stages, we're talking about ministers trying to stop the review happening in the first place.
So the review came out of a conservative conference.
It wasn't launched until four or five months later, and in that time,
the ministers for universities and the education secretary at the time did their best to prevent the review from happening.
They were trying earlier to prevent me from even announcing it.
So we're talking about high politics at a very early stage.
And then we have. Something quite interesting.
I mean, leaks are not unusual. But here you have a panel.
Independent Lee convened for its expertise, but suddenly you have action.
Around the panel, the panel is not going to be reporting.
As in the time frame, it's expected to do because of the fallout from Brexit politics.
You know, the 40 to 60 ministers who lost their jobs or change their jobs or move somewhere else.
Under those frantic years and there's continuing frantic years.
But the question is, were they leaks?
Or were they? Statements placed into the debate.
Were they meant to do work? Um, and in the second part of my enquiry, I hope to tease out where they came from.
I have my conjectures. I have my names, but I don't have evidence.
So it's clearly the case that there's an interesting dynamic between dissenting ministers.
Past and continuing having interests to, um, stymie some of this stuff or insert stuff, which is troubling, disturbing messing about.
Or, on the other hand, you might have an enquiry process,
which is not uncomfortable about floating some stuff, putting it out there, testing the water.
And of course, the there were three. Testings of the water, mainly through Sunday Times and the Sunday Telegraph and a few other outlets.
First, you had a fee level at six thousand five hundred as a minimum, which was a trial.
So that did the rounds for a while. Then you had the 7500, which was the the minimum fee level which was alighted on by the old grey enquiry.
Then you had this very interesting discussion or idea of movement of.
Limiting demand on higher education to those who got A-level grades of a certain level.
The three D's debate. So what's going on here?
Who's in play, who's doing this for what purposes, for whose interests?
And of course, the enquiry, we don't I don't know how that was responded to.
Whether it was seen as helpful because you had in a sense, you had an enquiry process which had been delayed,
so why not have a consultation through leakage, you know, test the water that way?
Get some feedback. Or was it a more deliberate attempt to damage the whole idea of moving away from the current maximum fee?
So I'll leave you with that. So look at that little BBC News item and you can see how the phrase drift in the leakage or the debate is described.
And of course, alongside this. Came arguments about financial stress and the financial survival of some institutions.
So we're talking, you know, we're talking about big issues, sometimes hyper inflated, sometimes seriously important.
OK. I think I'm going to stop stage two at that point.
Any any observations on that or any insights into how or at this point in its middle years or middle months,
I should say, was having to deal with some choppy waters.
Well, clearly, Treasury modelling and forecasting was part of the Augur process,
so it was already inside an anticipated modelling of, you know, of different scenarios.
So it was not I would conjecture it was not taken by surprise.
But clearly it had a major steer on the kind of report which was made and the tone and style of its presentation, arguably.
So my interviews hopefully will tease out some of that about whether there was continuity in the activities and planned procedures of the review,
or whether there was a bit of disjunction here, a bit of a bit of having to rethink.
Step back review. Change position or rethink a position.
Well, clearly, as I said, it was the driver for me having to have a position in relation to its policy on higher education and fee levels.
So the counterpoint was to go to a lower fee that was how Auger played it.
But of course. How that was played, how it was finessed is another matter.
So if I could just move on to how some of those things were dealt with in terms of six people?
So this is a group of people charged with some electric things to think about and recommend.
And when I talk about the weight of the report I'm talking about, it's it's coherence,
it's underpinning evidence, it's argumentation and it's presentation.
And I want to start here and argue that the resources inside those inside the enquiry personnel are considerable.
And the link we make, I want to suggest, is that Beverly Robinson, who's the principal of Black Pool and filed further education college,
and Allison Wolfe, crossbencher, an economist, a professor at King's College London and a former colleague.
I was the junior colleague when she was at the Institute of Education.
Alison Wolf has. Made a large part of her career to understand the nature of the economics of both university and non-university education,
and she has written some very important papers monographs about remaking tertiary education.
So I would conjecture that the intellectual resources and thinking had to a large extent
been done by Alison Wolf's previous academic and policy and political activities.
And Beverly Robinson, I couldn't find no trace of an utterance in public where it written down.
But both of them sat. On a report.
Commissioned by. The then minister for Skills, Nick Boles.
Which was chaired by David Sainsbury.
Who was a previous minister in the Blair government?
And within, I think it's two months, the words in that Sainsbury report were broadly reproduced.
Paragraph by paragraph. Diagram by diagram. Into the post-16 skills plan.
What I call facsimile policy formation. And very few people have commented on that.
So here you had another. Policy enquiry process premised on a panel format where two of the participants
were authors to a very important blueprint for academic and technical education.
So this election is not innocent, and of course it's not, but it's very important for the resources, the intellectual resources and the understanding.
So with Beverly Robinson, you have a grounded understanding of the mysteries of further education in all its perplexity and complexity.
And with Alison, you have an extremely acute economic analysis of the conditions for higher and further education.
And of course, with the crew, you have a political scientist as well as a vice chancellor of the University of Essex,
as well as a former president of Universities UK. And finally Master of University College Oxford.
But very small in relation to both the politics and the policy world.
And of course, he was the joint author of that wonderful book, The Blunders of Our Government.
Written with Tony King. So he still does political science, writing and analysis of a high order.
And there you've got the seeds of significant intelligence.
Philip Orga himself, of course, besides being a financier, writes books.
And has written well-regarded books on the history of the banking industry.
So, you know, for a chair which is in the world of higher education, you got a fine someone who's kosher.
You got to find someone like Dearing, who's chaired higher education funding councils before who has authority and recognition in the academy.
OK, Augur may not have been. Recognised immediately as one of us.
But Philip Auger, Ph.D., historian, plays into a persona which arguably is important for this purpose, but arguably his main.
Nous is as a former member of the Directorate of the Department for Education,
so he knows his way around Whitehall and he knows his way around the department and their priorities.
Edward Peck was the vice chancellor of what we still call a modern university,
Nottingham Trent University, and Jacqueline Rogers is a tech entrepreneur and government adviser.
So that probably interestingly represents she represents the employer interest.
Which arguably is a bit thin on an enquiry, which is, you know, revving up to talk about.
Employer led technical education courses, qualifications and apprenticeships.
Interesting that.
And one of the criticisms of the report, the report, is that the employer voice is not really there, and you can see arguably why not?
So I'm going to talk about what services were offered to the enquiry, support services and analytical services.
And one of the things I've been struck by is what I might call midwifery services provided by the Gatsby. Foundation.
Now, the Gatsby. Foundation is a large charity funded by the Sainsbury family, and they were the secretariat for the.
Commissioned. Panel by Nick Boles looking at technical and academic education.
So that's the Sainsbury bowles axis in relation to a support function.
And of course, not in government alongside government or not across various interests.
And then, of course, Nigel Thomas, a senior member of The Gatsby Foundation, has a very senior secondment to the department.
And as far as I know, he's still there now.
He's been there a long time in policy history, contemporary times, and I would assume that he is an important uh.
How can we put this an important voice come fixer, come adviser, direct to government?
Now this notion of advice direct to ministers is a major feature of the 2012 Civil Service Reform Plan,
where the idea of civil servants mediating relationships between ministers and other interest groups is critiqued.
So I'm not suggesting that the if you like the the world of Whitehall,
the world of civil service activity and relationships with ministers is part of this flux and
part of this opportunity of a charitable foundation to speak into government powerfully,
particularly through the presence of David Sainsbury, who has some authority and he has history.
And of course, what we notice is a lot of the commissioned work done for Orga or rather not done for Orga,
done for the Level four and five review, which then gets channelled into Orga.
So you have that kind of alternative route of research and analysis going into Orga,
not direct by the bare panel, but through the auspices of an internal panel.
So here you've got something very interesting. I don't think I'm over emphasising.
It's important if you go on the website of The Gatsby Foundation, you see how significant the.
Collection of studies, the collection of think pieces about technical education are.
But of course, if we go to. The analytical side and, of course,
economics and econometrics was always going to be a major driver for the analytical thinking and evidence base for the panel.
Some of that was in-house. Well, a lot of it was in-house and a lot of it was Treasury, not just department.
And there was also a lot of near to government analytical services provided by.
For example, the Centre for Vocational Education Research, which was set up five years ago by the Department of Business,
pays, I can never remember the the correct order of words.
But there you had an attempt to create an analytical capacity which was close to government and which could
actually hear the demands of government or hear the interest of the government and respond with high quality,
basically econometric work. So the likes of London Economics, the National Institute for Economic and Social Research,
Gatsby, CVR are well represented in the population of citations.
As analytical sources, which were either commissioned directly or indirectly,
or they were published works which were well reviewed and well used by the panel, that last point is the what I really am impressed by.
The citations aren't just decoration. They've been read and understood, and they've been assembled carefully and thoughtfully.
And that's really important. So it's rather light on commissioned work,
pretty heavy and impressive on what you might call analytical reviewing for the purposes of building an argument by the by the panel.
And this is takes me to the nature of the evidence base.
So as I said, some of it is coming in terms of government and not just from one department.
Some of it's coming from government agencies. And some of it is coming from review reports in other parts of government.
But basically, the amounts of commission stuff, as I'm showing here, is unusually small.
So there's two big pieces of work, one looking in the costs of undergraduate education done by KPMG and then the actual
review of the public evidence going into Olga is done by another consultancy,
Pye Tait. But elsewhere, you don't see commissioning of research.
You don't see research studies conducted for government, but indicate but independent of government at the same time,
in the way you did see in a committee of enquiry style of activity where there was a longer game and a longer time to enable
that work to be completed and then discussed and used or not in the recommendations and thinking of the review team.
The other thing I'd like to point to is the evidence base, so there was a call for evidence template x number of questions,
well formulated questions which most people were able to feel like they could
respond to intelligently and not feel over framed or overdetermined by them.
The if you want to find the worst example. Is the.
A consultation document on level four and five is clumsy.
It is a logically ordered, it is a low grade civil service work, I fear.
So you have these contrast jumping at you from a, you know, from a from a two processes which are in tandem, but somehow they are of different orders.
Now that 370 responses is made up of about 250 organisations.
The first thing to note is that if you compare that with 10 years ago, when Brown invited evidence,
roughly less than half of that number were responding and the composition of the evidence population is now very different or significantly different.
What you find now is the wonk land presents the think tanks, those groups who are constituted for policy purposes.
They may have short lives or longer lives, but they do analytical work.
It may be secondary. It may be supplementary. It may be highly political.
It often is on a political spectrum, but they've got evidenced arguments to make.
Which previously may have come through an academic type route.
Certainly, if you look at the daring is about 850 pieces of public evidence which went into daring.
I was a member of the team who won the contract to review it, and we had.
Three months to do it, and we hired a house in order to put 10 people.
Working six days a week reading 800 submissions.
They wouldn't do that now. They have a consultancy firm who do specialist stuff on systematic, uh, reviewing.
Now, whether or not it's of a nuanced quality, which the gearing review was, and of course it was one of the volumes, I'm very proud of our volume,
one of the volumes in the daring enquiry fact volume one is the evidence of our reading and analysis, and it's discursive.
It's not technically.
Framed is not a technocratic review of who said what and why and when it's a more thematic attempt to get at different orders of purpose and priority.
So you've got a lot of stuff going into August now that isn't just because there's a wider landscape here.
Further education out of education, vocational education, higher education,
apprenticeships, courses, professional qualifications, undergraduate qualifications.
Colleges, universities, private providers. And one can continue awarding bodies.
Of several hundred kinds. That's a different landscape when you go into a tertiary scale and scoping.
So, you know, that's one of the reasons that you had that volume.
But I think the other reason is the growth of one plant over the last 10 years,
a very significant phenomenon, which I think deserves some research in its own right.
Now, if you haven't got much commission stuff and you're dependent on your internal
departments to do the analytical econometric and statistical analysis in the main,
why is it then that you find some work done by near to government agencies who weren't formally asked to do it?
But they did it, so this idea of hearing what might be worth doing.
And it's going to play well is something which is unable to be evidenced in any written document.
But when you look at relationships between what is said in the orga text and the citations in some areas based,
some some works are doing big work, but they're not commissioned.
They are from formally independent if close to government outfits.
So that kind of thin wall veil is very important in.
Expert panel activity, I've used the words suggested, but you might find a better one.
And then of course, there were lots of workshops, lots of invitations to individuals and groups you keep, I think,
was one of the invited members of academics looking at, I assume, aspects of vocational and technical and apprenticeship style education.
So a lot of that was going on. Interestingly, although it's a very comprehensive report, it's very there's very little on its evidence base.
Unlike Deering, where you had the secretariat taking a lot of time in the annexe to actually document every element,
every activity, every visit to a country, to a college, to buy a provider, to an awarding body.
That's my problem now. I can't share that with you because the secretary agreed to talk to me,
but agreed to give me an account of the activities and the meetings of the enquiry.
We both share the assumption that the enquiry would come to a close by the time I'm speaking to you now.
And of course, that is not the case.
It is open and that is their word, and they are unable to speak to me directly until somehow a degree of closure is able to be recognised.
So citation for me is a really powerful and important way in which the report has weight.
And I think Alison Wolfe's command of that literature command of the economics of education is probably a significant element in that.
Process of. Understanding translating into proposals and recommendations, right, I'm going to come to a conclusion.
But before that, what about argumentation? This is very, very conjectural and.
I'm not sure about it, but it does tend to reflect the distinction between a panel type enquiry evidence
and argument process and a large committee of enquiry on a grand scale.
Thinking outside the box in a sense, the box has been defined for all.
The box is not defined, necessarily for larger and more open performance of enquiry.
But the great merit of the argumentation. Whatever you think of its connectivity or lack of connectivity.
For the first time, you have examples of tertiary thinking, tertiary framing.
So the chapters don't just. Come together because there's a bit of continuity.
They come together because there's intersection here and you can make the argument and follow the argument across chapters,
mainly because you have a tertiary drive to the reading and the way in which.
A high quality bit of writing has been conducted. But of course,
driving everything is one of the original expectations that the recommendations
will follow the money and its value for money judgements which will decide,
for example, low value higher education, which may not be able to be supported in the future,
and where funding for such activity might be able to underpin the increased funding for further education.
Trying to reduce the asymmetry of the budgets for further and higher education.
And in so doing, try to reduce the. Status differences between the two settings for education and training.
Choice making is the other partner to value for money.
So choice making here is within the template. Encouraging students to.
See demand. For technical education as a more attractive proposition, arguably than routine demand.
For higher education was socialised demand for higher education, so that trick of.
Moving demand from one pathway to another is the big project of both Augur and the Post-16 Skills Plan,
arguably, but of course, what Augur is doing is having to take policy.
And I think they were quite happy with our.
Whereas arguably, if you look at committees of enquiry, you have more option posing and probably a bit more broad based modelling.
For example, Dearing played with the idea of a different fee level for year one.
Think about the logic of that playing into growing level four, level five.
That has that's quite a fertile idea.
I didn't see it in Awka, daring took it seriously, and it was dismissed, partly too complex, too difficult because, you know,
their main job was to get the assumption of a fee contribution into the public mind and the policy mind, which is what gearing was able to achieve.
The other interesting thing when you read the report is that there's nothing, there's no history.
Beyond the last 10 years.
So because it's dealing with the economics of contemporary conditions for higher and further education and because it's concerned with levers.
Rather than structures and because it's got to accept.
The existing structures, one of the reasons it's got to accept them is newly created.
So the Institute for Apprenticeships.
One year later, the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education was a government construction notionally employer led.
But basically there to create an apprenticeship move, a push.
When it came to technical education, totally ill-equipped to even think about it.
And again, another example of some low grade activity,
which is that we are doing major damage to the argument for apprenticeships and technical education.
So I'm saying that not necessarily as a advocate of the post-16 skills model,
but in terms of making some comparisons with how the quality of arguments is uneven in the way
in which texts are written and the way in which practical activity takes place on the ground.
So there's no policy history before, I reckon, 2010.
No less than drawing. Now you have some really interesting lessons.
Take the foundation degree, which was a new labour creation, began life.
Invented by government in 2001 had premium funding.
It was meant to be a two tight qualification which functioned both for progression to the Bachelor degree and direct labour market exit.
It was meant to be designed in conjunction with the employer.
That was the conditions of existence for the design of the qualification.
Complete absence. I don't think that's just because it was a new labour creation.
And therefore, you know, we don't need to go there, perhaps. I think it's because the present ism in its terms of reference was such that
they had a big enough task to deal with rather than going along backwards.
And of course, they had no future horizon. The future horizon was next year.
Or the the government whom the report is presented to.
So not much structure, a bit of agency through choice making.
But a lot of stuff on how to join up.
The bits of the infrastructure, the architecture for tertiary education.
So the new bits, as I said, was a new institute picking up technical education.
Then you had the abolition of the Funding Council for Higher Education and the creation of a more regulatory type body,
which wouldn't have a remit necessarily for educational thinking and argument
in the way that the Higher Education Funding Council had a history of doing.
So again, I would reflect that that is all about contemporary conditions for policymaking, as well as the role of policy of enquiries of that kind.
So how do we what's what's the scorecard?
Well, guess what? The lowering the bar might be, I didn't put it in.
The lowering of the bar would be the brown review. Absolute shocker.
I think it's what sixty pages looks like a consultancy report badly written.
No evidence base. There had to be.
A, I think it was either a request for information or it was a a p q in order to find out what one piece of research had been commissioned.
And it wasn't research.
It consisted of some focus groups assembled to try and hear a small number of voices from schools, from colleges and universities.
I mean, embarrassing. So when you lift the curtain?
On. A review model like the Brown Review.
I would regard that as a lowering of the bar here with Orga.
I think you have a very different, much higher quality. Enterprise.
So if you're a expert panel, you have to do what was asked.
They did it. OK? And it had everyone saying like that don't like that.
Much too predictable, much too narrow, not quite the usual kinds of arguments, which are often associated with a different kind of enquiry vehicle.
But it didn't bit more than actually it was asked. And of course, it had to surf the waves of Brexit land.
And ministerial change and ministerial positioning and dumping and leaking and
other ways in which a public debate was able to be incubated outside the review,
but actually playing into the review. Now whether or not what was a set of responses?
At system level outside, the review was part of their thinking and judging and weighing in terms of what's going to play,
what's not going to apply is a matter for future work. So my conclusion is you have a report here.
Clarity, coherence and authority. And because of that.
And because it had recommended. Actions which were connected.
It won't die easily. In other words, it will always be able to be revisited because it has some important material and argument inside it.
It may die of political death. I think it will probably have some policy work which still can be done.
My great disappointment last minute of this session is that there was no final chapter on going tertiary.
Because in a sense, the the question was, how do you maintain a tertiary?
Consciousness,
a tertiary vision in a system which is still a two type system where the the mentalities of those who play in the two pathways in further education,
in higher education are reproduced in the.
Departments within the department in the sections, within the department,
the different cultures, the different ways of coming at a notion of higher and further.
Now I realise some of you are people who've lived those worlds.
So I'm offering that as my final observation that I would have liked a final chapter which said, OK, five years on.
How are we going to get real joined up stuff?
Do we need some kind of tertiary over view, which has leadership and intelligence to actually enable that kind of framing to pursue?
And that's of course, what the Welsh have tried to do in their remodelling of tertiary education.
I'll leave you with the English. Thanks a lot.