Higher Education since 2010

Since 2010 Universities have undergone some of the largest upheavals of any area of the public sector. The changing nature of funding and fees has seen great uncertainty across HE which has been used to justify restructures, pay cuts against inflation and increasing demands on staff. The squeeze on staff comes from the newly “business orientated” management style which has quickly gained prominence as the way to run Higher Education Institutions in the UK and also from increasingly challenging students who now, rightly, expect top level service for their ever-increasing tuition fees.

To take the first, and to many staff, the most important area of pay, UNISON has calculated that the last time university staff received a pay rise in line with the RPI (retail price index) figure of inflation was 2009-10, during the last Labour Government. Since the Conservative-led coalition and their full administration in 2015 university staff have lost thousands of pounds in real terms due to falling pay settlements.

Had pay rises only kept up with inflation, someone on the lowest pay point of £14,767 p.a. would now be earning £16,194. To some that extra money would be a family holiday, but to many on the lowest level of the pay-ladder it is the difference between eating and heating: it is no coincidence that UNISON is once again this year running a loan scheme for the purchase of school uniforms for members’ kids.

Below is a table of sample wages; what they currently are, and what they would be if those salaries had kept up with inflation. The third column is the difference.

Current Salary	Inflation Matched	Loss
£14767	£16194	£1427
£17310	£19640	£2330
£20400	£23207	£2807
£23620	£26902	£3282
£28143	£32085	£3942

Of course, matching inflation wouldn’t solve the problem of low pay and would in-fact increase the pay gap between better off and poorer workers. UNISON would like to see a progressive pay deal that recognises the lowest-paid workers in our universities. Matching inflation is no panacea but it would have been a start. In the last seven years all support staff and most academic staff have had to make do with an average of 1% p.a. while the pay of those at the top of the HE disappears over the horizon and heads for Never Never Land.

We should also consider students that are impacted by these unprecedented fees; fees levied by a generation who received their degrees completely free for the most part. The average cost of a single year tuition at a university in England (still free in Scotland for Scottish students) is now $11,534. (the Student Loan Repayment Calculator uses dollars to ascertain fees around the world). This has shown that England is the most costly place to study in the world; ahead of even the USA. Denmark, France, Norway, and Sweden maintain free education while a nominal fee of less than £500 covers Germany, Belgium and France. All of which is an indictment of those running the fifth largest economy in the world and speaks to their unwillingness to accept that education is an investment by a country in its own future.

As things stand, before increased fees come in, and before there is any sell-off of student debt and a change in interest rates, the Intergenerational Foundation has conducted research to suggest the average graduate will still owe £60,000 in tuition fees alone 30 years after leaving university.

In the coming election the Conservatives have pledged to keep the public sector pay cap and raise tuition fees. Labour have pledged to remove the public sector pay cap and make higher education free for those who wish to study.

 

A Personal Political Post

Whenever I write about politics I try and source the things I am saying, and I use statistics a lot to emphasise the points I am trying to make. I don’t pretend that there isn’t a personal slant to it, or a bias involved but I very rarely write about my own feelings concerning politics in any kind of coherent way; I react, shout, get angry etc. but those are hear of the moment responses to an ongoing situation or a developing narrative. I thought I might take some time to document my own experiences with politics and why I feel what I feel about Labour, The Tories, Jeremy Corbyn and so on.

I used to work for the civil service, the Department of Health to be exact, from 2000-2006. Prior to this I wasn’t very politicised, I knew little and read less about politics. My newspaper of choice was The Sun and my favourite journalist was Richard Littlejohn. I knew nothing about immigrants and wouldn’t have considered it a bad thing to “send them all back”, or words to that effect. What I noticed while working for the civil service was that the people around me didn’t think like that, it wasn’t an echo chamber for what I now know to be right-wing views, but rather a place where people exchanged ideas and thought much more deeply about the cause and effect of government policy. I found myself unable to talk to colleagues on nights out after work, because the conversations didn’t revolve around football, cars, tits and immigration; I didn’t like that and I realised that when I tried to contribute I made a fool of myself, despite my colleagues being very inclusive at all times.

I decided to start reading things, I didn’t really know what to read or where to start, I read a variety of books, some with a right-wing feel, some with a left wing feel; I tried the Times, Telegraph, Independent and Guardian while they were still all proper broadsheets – the Financial Times scared me. Eventually I settled down to the Independent and swallowed its comment pages whole; Steve Richards, Johan Hari, Robert Fisk were my favourites, particularly on foreign affairs; by this time we’re in a post-9/11 world and everything is about extremism and the war on terror. I found the Middle East to be much more complicated than “we should just bomb the lot of them”; that sounds stupid but that was my attitude, and the attitude of so many of my (non-work) peers, and it remains the attitude of so many who refuse to grow intellectually and try understand the issues at play in a global context.

Fast forward to the present-day I have read and understood a lot more than I ever thought I was capable of. I was brought up in a school system that taught me I was stupid and my place was in factories, on an assembly line for the rest of my life, building things for the upper classes to buy. My school had the attitude of “if you’re already clever, we’ll help you be cleverer, if you don’t show a natural aptitude for learning, fuck you”. I was inculcated with the message that “higher education isn’t for the likes of you”. Now, when I tell people I left school with no GCSE’s they find it hard to believe.

My experience with the education system shows what the Tories do to working class kids who aren’t exceptional. As soon as a Labour government came in, as I left the school, new buildings shot up, the curriculum changed, the levels of support for children who weren’t succeeding was increased. Still some kids fell through the net, but they weren’t plucked out of it and thrown overboard in to the deep blue as the Tories did. The Tories are terrified of an educated working class; because an uneducated people is much easier to manipulate and cajole through the politics of fear. This is the Tories all over, they protect and help those that need neither protection nor help; it is their policy for children and their policy for everything else; from the sick to security needs, from taxation to wealth distribution.

I hear people, usually older people (sorry but it’s true), complain about Labour and generally regurgitate what they have read in the Express or that other proto-fascist rag they read on a day to day basis. I hear them and I struggle not to turn my nose up at them. I know I understand the arguments better than they do, I know I have read more about it, I know that they are turkeys voting for Christmas in most cases, particularly the working class elderly. I have no doubt that comes across as arrogance, it isn’t meant to, if all you read are editorials in the Daily Mail on immigration, then I’m sorry but you don’t understand immigration enough to make an informed comment on it. You wouldn’t let someone replace the exhaust on your car just because they subscribe to Top Gear magazine, but you’re happy to let people vote in a government who open their eyes to the tiniest, narrowest corner of the national debate. And those of us that take the time to understand things are considered “the liberal elite”; there is nothing elite about me, or my friends; just a desire to understand things, learn and make things better – the smarter people are, the more likely they are to be left wing.

Going back to working for the civil service, it is where I met my partner, now my wife. She stayed there until very recently (laid off and now there is no one to do the job she left, but it still needs doing) and while the type of work was never her cup of tea; the bureaucracy and red tape really is a problem, since 2010 when the Tories got in I watched her really struggle. Week after week she would cry herself to sleep on Sunday nights knowing that the next day she had to go in, and give her all towards implementing a government policy she knew was wrecking the NHS, there were other factors too but I witnessed what the Tory machine does to workers first hand – of all my ex-colleagues that remained at the Department of Health, I don’t think there was one that didn’t suffer some kind of mental anguish about what the Tories were doing; and yet none of them can speak out because of the apparent independence of the civil service.

I look at people such as Theresa May, Michael Gove, Boris Johnson; any of them, and think; would I want you to be my boss, could I go to you with a problem, would you understand if I am struggling mentally, financially? I don’t think they would get it, I think they would ignore it or tell me to pull myself together. I look at their opposite numbers in the Labour Party, Corbyn, Thornberry et al. and I know they would be sympathetic; capable of understanding what I was saying and empathising. Most of the time choosing who to vote for is based on who has the best ideas, but it is also about the people themselves and I see no warmth at all in 90% of Tories; that figure is almost exactly reversed when I think of Labour MPs.

It is only because of progressive governments and indeed oppositions that the Conservatives have moved anywhere at all politically. If it wasn’t for the expansion of the vote, the creation of trade unions and their Labour Party, we would still have a Tory government arguing for the retention of child workers in cotton factories, for denying the franchise to women, for marginalising Jews, black people and all other faiths and races, for continuous Empire and colonialism, for the differentiation between deserving and undeserving poor, for the disabled and unmarried to be locked away. It comes down to this; conservatives enter politics to see what they can get out of it for themselves, progressives go in to politics to see what they can give of themselves for others. I’ll forever be with the latter, under whichever party banner or leader it may be; to be anything else would be as foolish as it is immoral.