There are signs of
some muddled thinking in this report today.
The report notes that the number of English students applying to study
in Wales
has dropped, and the usual suspects proceed to provide the customary quotes.
The Conservatives'
Education spokesperson wins the prize for squeezing the most clichéd phrases (and
the most hyphenated ones too) into the shortest space (‘headline-grabbing’, ‘wafer-thin’,
‘half-baked’ and ‘wake-up call’, all crammed into two sentences). Stripped of rhetoric however, her point seems
to be that the policy is wrong because it’s going to cost more than planned.
In fairness to the
Government, they have admitted previously that the costings for the policy were
based on estimates. Indeed, they had to
be estimates. No-one could have known in
advance what the level of applications was going to be; apart from any other
factor, this was the first year with the new higher fees level – no-one really
knew what the effect of that would be on applications.
We shouldn’t
castigate governments for proceeding on the basis of estimates rather than hard
figures, which seems to be part of the Tories’ pitch. All governments do it; very little would
happen if they did not. If the estimate
could and should have been closer to the out-turn, then there is a potential
criticism of incompetence, which is rather a different matter. But from my reading of the figures, it seems
to me that the government took a reasonable and reasoned view in arriving at
its numbers.
The question is
what happens next. The Tories’ position
seems to be that the policy should be abandoned because it costs more than
planned. That sounds rather like a way
of trying to sink it on practical grounds rather than arguing with the
principle, which is what they really dislike but are afraid to say.
Clearly, it will be
challenging for the government to find what looks like significant extra funding
for the policy, but having taken the bold decision to go down this route, it
would be an enormous shame if they decided to change tack at this stage, quite
apart from the impact on the financial planning of students.
One thing which
does deserve more attention, though, is the comparison between Wales and Scotland when it comes to the
numbers of students choosing to stay here to study. There are many factors involved in this, but
the difference is nevertheless stark.
One of the advantages
of the previous policy, before it was abandoned by the One Wales Government,
was that there were signs of an increase in the number of ‘stay-in-Wales’
students. Encouraging that trend wouldn’t
solve the financial problems, but it would help to direct the expenditure into
Welsh universities. There’s scope for
some tweaking of policy, but it doesn’t need to be abandoned.