Five favourite facts and findings

After nearly six years at the Sutton Trust, my reflections on some of the research findings that most interested me and helped to advance the policy debate.

Today is my last day at the Sutton Trust after nearly six years in post. It has been a privilege to be involved in commissioning and communicating 100 pieces of research over that time, and I will miss working with such great colleagues. It seems like a good time to take stock too. So, I thought I would share my five favourite findings and facts from those reports, facts chosen because of their symbolism and influence in different stages of the social mobility debate.

Stop Start: The lost children’s centres

In the week of Tessa Jowell’s sad passing, it is worth reflecting on an important part of her legacy – the Sure Start programme, which brought a range of children’s services, including childcare, education, health, family support and play together under a single roof. Professor Kathy Sylva and her team showed in our 2014 report, Sound Foundations, the importance of good quality early years provision to school readiness and giving disadvantaged children a decent start in life. Her research this year brought an auditor’s eye to what had happened to the children’s centres at the heart of Sure Start, and in Stop Start, showed that 1000 centres had effectively been lost, nearly a third of all those set up by 2009. While some had been amalgamated, others had been hollowed out. It highlighted the importance of a much clearer early years mission in all parties if we want to address social mobility at the time when the gaps start to widen for poorer children.

Missing Talent: The high attainers who slip back in secondary school

In 2015, we published a much-cited research brief by Dr Rebecca Allen, which we called Missing Talent. Her research looked at what happened to a cohort of around 60,000 of the highest attainers in the Key Stage 2 tests at age 11 – the top 10% – when they took their GCSEs five years later. She found that 15% of highly able pupils who score in the top 10% nationally at age 11 fail to achieve in the top 25% at GCSE, but the figures were much higher for disadvantaged students, particularly boys, a third of whom fell behind. The report helped to highlight the absence of dedicated provision for disadvantaged high achievers in too many comprehensives, and made the case for the Future Talent Fund, announced in Justine Greening’s social mobility plan last year.

Admissions in Context: Giving poorer pupils a break

The debate on contextual admissions has moved on quite a bit over the last decade, and a report we published in 2017 helped to show that. Admissions in Context not only made the case for selective universities having transparent policies that show any breaks they are willing to offer disadvantaged students who have triumphed against the odds, but maybe don’t have quite the same grades as those who enjoyed a more privileged education. Crucially Dr Claire Crawford and Professor Vikki Boliver showed that a fifth of those from more advantaged backgrounds are being admitted to the more selective universities with two A level grades below the advertised ones. In the media coverage that followed, even columnists on right-wing newspapers traditionally suspicious of contextual admissions accepted that a change was needed to address the gaps that still exist – from, six to ten times – between those from the poorest and best off neighbourhoods at those universities.

Access in Scotland: Progress in higher education equity north of the border

I had the privilege to sit on the Scottish Commission on Widening Access, which reported in 2016, and subsequently to chair a Framework Development Group which has just commissioned a new access toolkit for Scotland. One thing that surprised me on first engaging with the Scottish debate was the dearth of data compared to England. That was what prompted me to commission Professor Sheila Riddell and colleagues at Edinburgh University to produce the Access in Scotland report. It had an enormous impact on the debate in Scotland, and is still cited regularly. Ironically, the finding we chose to lead on – that 90% of all access places in Scotland had come through colleges rather than directly to university – was overshadowed by a figure we quoted that I (mistakenly) assumed was widely known: that the university access gap was wider in Scotland than England. Either way, there remains a need for more good data and candour about it in the debate. But what is heartening is the progress being made on the policy front – driven by Nicola Sturgeon and Shirley-Anne Somerville (her higher education minister) – not least in the acceptance of commission recommendations. With the redoubtable Professor Peter Scott as Commissioner for Fair Access, acceptance of a minimum threshold for disadvantaged students by all Scotland’s universities and the progress towards better evidence on access, there are real prospects for progress north of the border.

Real apprenticeships: Improving quality and progression in job-based qualifications

When we asked the Boston Consulting Group in 2013 to look at how other countries did apprenticeships, we did so at a time when the political consensus on the value of apprenticeships was being undermined by the poor quality of too many of them. BCG’s analysis Real Apprenticeships has helped move the debate on and has given the Sutton Trust a locus in an area where it had not previously engaged. In their first report, BCG not only highlighted how relatively few British employers were then offering apprenticeships in those pre-levy days (there are other challenges now) but the low quality of what the majority of young people were doing compared to their German or Swiss counterparts. Later BCG research in 2015, Levels of Success, showed that those doing advanced or higher apprenticeships had comparable earning power to their A-level or average traditional degree counterparts. And our Better Apprenticeships research in 2017 by LSE and UCL Institute of Education academics showed how poor the progression rates were from intermediate to advanced apprenticeships. All of which has helped make the case for the Sutton Trust’s 2018 #BetterApprenticeships campaign for automatic progression, improved quality and more higher apprenticeships. Giving young people real choices must be the key to getting this right for the future.

Under review

I have blogged on the PM's post-18 education review for the Sutton Trust and Public Finance.

It was 16 months before the 1997 election and Conservative education secretary Gillian Shephard had a problem. It was a time of austerity. University intakes were growing rapidly. New ways had to be found to fund higher education that didn’t simply involve the taxpayer.

So she approached David Blunkett, her Labour shadow for whom I then worked to support her in setting up a review – with explicit backing from Don Foster for the Liberal Democrats – under the late Ron Dearing. The review would report after the general election and would be wide-ranging in its outlook. But it is remembered for one thing: it led to the introduction by the new Labour government of tuition fees paid by students (then opposed by the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats).

In 1998, the decision was also taken to convert all maintenance grants to loans (some had already been converted), but to means-test fees. Those who faced new fees also got higher interest-free loans repaid after graduation for those earning over £10,000 a year.

Since the Dearing review, we have had other big changes to the system. In 2006, fees were increased to a maximum of £3000 – after a big argument in the Labour Party against variable fees that led to the plans almost being defeated – and income contingent loans were explicitly available for fees. By then, Scotland had already abandoned fees. Means-tested maintenance grants were reintroduced and the repayment threshold was raised to £15,000.

Peter Mandelson set up the Browne Review in 2009, which reported to the coalition government after the 2010 election. It led to a £9000 fee maximum and no more variability in reality than the 2006 reforms despite the government saying it expected many students to pay just £6000. Repayments now started at £21,000 – a hugely expensive concession to the Liberal Democrats that ensured that many loans would never be repaid – and a real rate of interest was introduced that would only start to bite when inflation picked up more recently. Tinkering since then has seen maintenance grants scrapped and – at a cost of £3 billion a year – the barely noticed raising of the threshold to £25,000.

That’s the background to the latest review announced by Theresa May on Monday. But the background also includes rising student numbers – touching the 50% of young adults entering higher education by age 30 target set by Tony Blair in 1999 – and some narrowing of the access gap between disadvantaged and better off students. Perhaps more importantly, the political backdrop includes a popular pledge by Jeremy Corbyn to scrap fees that undoubtedly helped win seats like Canterbury and Reading East for Labour at last year’s election. So rather than seeking cross-party consensus, this review is more about neutralising a perceived party disadvantage.

But the confused history of fees is reflected in the confused nature of the review. A bizarre flurry of weekend briefing – propped up by the Secretary of State in his first TV interview on Marr – suggested that a key outcome of the review might be universities charging more for courses in expensive STEM subjects and less in humanities. Given the importance of STEM subjects to the economy this could perversely discourage students from doing those subjects and cold harm social mobility by encouraging poorer students to take cheaper courses. One can only assume its intention was to distract attention from reports that fees would fall to £6,000 a year, which ministers feared would raise expectations that might not be realised.

And the review has not exactly had an auspicious start. It is good that it is looking at the too often overlooked FE sector and at the paucity of apprenticeship options – barely 10,000 young people a year start higher or degree apprenticeships compared with 330,000 freshers at university – but it will be vital that the review panel feels able to take a hard look at the whole funding system and the interaction between different levers.

Modelling by London Economics for the Sutton Trust in November showed that it would cost about £1 billion to restore maintenance grants. It was a mistake to remove them, even if students got higher loans, and this should be the first priority for the panel. Then if the committee wants to look at fees and variability, they should be varied according to family income not the cost of the course. A model that would reduce average fees to £3,500 a year could – with restored maintenance grants – reduce debts for the 40% poorest students from over £50,000 to £12,700 and increase the proportion of loans repaid from 55% to 65%. The total cost of this would be up to £3 billion – about the same as the threshold change announced last October. Less radical means testing could cost less. There is also a need to get better value from the £800 million a year that universities spend on access and outreach in England, building a reliable evidence base on what works. But the priority should be leveraging this existing money to achieve better outcomes for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, rather than to risk stalling progress with cuts.

And then the review should take a long hard look at what’s on offer for those who go don’t go to university. For all the words about apprenticeships, the brutal reality is that less than a third of those taking higher apprenticeships are aged under 25 (let along being 18 or 19). Most apprenticeships for young people are limited level 2 programmes with few career prospects and patchy progression to higher levels. If anything, the apprenticeships levy is reinforcing a bias towards adults doing higher apprenticeships as the levy lacks the levers to prevent it being used simply to upskill existing staff. Addressing that issue and the quality of technical and paraprofessional education in colleges is as important to social mobility as changing the funding of higher education.

This week’s review may have had a pretty inauspicious start. But as the panel deliberates over the next year they have the chance to make a real difference to social mobility – if they get their priorities right.

Under advisement

I've blogged about teachers' perceptions of Oxbridge at the Sutton Trust today.

What are we to make of the idea that some four in ten teachers rarely or never advise bright students to apply to Oxford and Cambridge? This finding in an NFER poll for the Sutton Trust published today has remained stubbornly unchanged since 2007.

And perhaps more troubling is the perception that teachers have of the proportions of undergraduates at our two most prestigious universities who come from state schools  – typically they say 20%, around a third of the actual percentage.

There is no doubt that there is still a real access issue at our best universities. At the top third, you are six times more likely to gain admittance if you come from the richest fifth of neighbourhoods than if you live in the poorest fifth. At our most selective universities, the odds are even lower. Yet the universities spend millions of pounds each year on outreach, and lots more on bursaries, designed to narrow these gaps.

It is good that Oxford now has 59% of students from a state school background, and Cambridge has slightly more. That’s a real improvement, but it still means that taking into account sixth form attendance, privately educated students are three times more likely to gain a place than their numbers in the population.

The Russell Group always argue the answer is attainment: A-levels achieved by those in the leafier communities outweigh those from the less advantaged by a significant margin at the top. Yet that’s not the whole story. The Sutton Trust identified a ‘missing 3000’ some years ago who make the grades but don’t get in to the top 13 universities. There is little sign that has changed.

And they’re the group who may lose out if teachers don’t encourage their brightest students to apply to Oxford and Cambridge, and other leading universities. Both universities are central to the leading professions and best salaries, and if we are to make a difference to social mobility at the top we need to see more young people of real ability from low and middle income homes getting to those great universities.

This isn’t about criticising teachers or Oxbridge dons. It is about both schools and the colleges and universities being prepared to look afresh at how they work and being open to making the changes that could break down these barriers.

Earlier this year, the Trust published a brief on admissions procedures at the two universities and made some fairly practical suggestions based on what state school headteachers with a track record of success at the universities, and some of the alumni from our summer schools had said to us.

University rather than college-based admissions are more common, but the distinctions that remain are more of a hindrance to state students than those from private schools with the right networks. What contextual admission offers that are made remain opaque and the information about bursaries and other financial aid is simply not known by too many schools. With a new VC at Oxford showing a strong commitment to fair access and change coming at Cambridge there is a real opportunity for a radical fresh look at what could make a difference.

But equally, schools need to do far more to stretch their highly able students. Grammar schools still have disproportionate Oxbridge entries compared to their numbers too. Every comprehensive should have a strong programme of enrichment for their brightest students from early on in their secondary education. The Sutton Trust works with students to provide such stretch through its Sutton Scholars programme, but programmes for what schools call the able, gifted and talented need to be as embedded in the culture of every comprehensive as much as their support for those with special educational needs.

Our Missing Talent report last year showed what happens where schools don’t do this: we identified thousands of students in the top 10 per cent at age 11 who had fallen outside the top 25 per cent by the age of 16. They could have been set fair for top universities, but had lost that chance. That’s why we need the government not only to require grammars to do much more to recruit bright disadvantaged pupils, we need them to be clear that this should be a part of the DNA of every comprehensive too. To his credit, Sir Michael Wilshaw has pushed this agenda in his time as chief inspector. But this needs drive from the whole government and as much focus as the Prime Minister has given to grammars and faith schools.

Of course, many schools and sixth form colleges do push their best students to aim high, and universities do run more programmes than ever to reach them. But today’s research shows that this needs to be a national drive if we are to make a real difference to social mobility at the top.

Scotland's access challenge

I blogged for the Sutton Trust on access in Scotland, linked to a new Trust report that attracted a lot of Scottish interest last week.

Nicola Sturgeon has placed education at the top of the government’s agenda. By making her deputy John Swinney responsible for education in her cabinet, she has given a clear signal of how highly she prioritises the issue. And in looking again at national testing, she is showing a willingness to put pupils’ interests first: good data is vital to educational equality, and must be part of what emerges.

But the scale of the challenge should not be underestimated. Today’s Sutton Trust report Access in Scotland from Sheila Riddell and her colleagues at Edinburgh University provides the most detailed data to date on the scale of the access challenge north of the border.

Some figures are familiar: between the most and least disadvantaged, there is a four-fold gap in university access in Scotland at age 18, compared with a 2.4 point gap in England. Others are encouraging: access to “higher tariff” universities is less polarised than in England, although this may in part reflect that a larger proportion of the Scottish sector are in this category, though it includes all the ancient universities . But what is new is the startling figure that of the growth in new entrants to higher education from the poorest areas over the last decade, fully nine in ten have been to sub-degree courses at further education colleges.

This is not to decry the efforts of colleges. As I learnt in my time as a member of the Scottish Commission on Widening Access, articulation from college to university is a tried and tested route into university. Colleges have displayed an enormous dedication to improving the education of poorer students. But in a system where half the students moving from college to university have to repeat at least one year,  there are clear issues about both the  nature of what has been learnt before university and the willingness of universities, particularly the Ancients, to credit that learning.

Sturgeon has commendably accepted many of the recommendations of the Commission, including the idea of an independent Commissioner for Fair Access – a cross between Les Ebdon and Alan Milburn, at least in their current roles – and the target that a fifth of higher education entrants by 2030 should be from the poorest fifth of neighbourhoods.

There is a danger that the access debate is simply clouded in the arguments around tuition fees. In truth, neither side has a strong enough case there. The absence of tuition fees has not obviously changed the access picture – and in other countries, the abolition of tuition fees has proved a welcome initial saving for middle class families rather than a spur to participation by the poor. But then it is hard to argue that incurring £50,000 debt on graduation in a debt-averse culture is the right answer either, even if a proportion of the fees are used to fund access and outreach and regardless of what protection may be in place for lower earning graduates.

That’s why it is not enough simply to accept radical targets. The means must be put in place too. And that means accepting also the more radical commission proposal that universities should formalise their contextual admissions work with institutional minimum thresholds that are targeted at disadvantaged students. Critics in Scotland have talked of social engineering, but the inspiration for this idea was the radical access work at St Andrews which I heard about when visiting the university.

At St Andrews, studying Physics and Astronomy has become so popular that the standard asking rates are AAAA in the Highers. Students from a widening participation background can join standard degree programmes but with a modified Gateway entry year, which has a lower asking rate for entry, typically BBBB. In their year of entry these students do about half their credits on traditional modules integrated with the rest of the intake, and about half their time on strongly tutored modules designed for this entry cohort. The early Gateway cohorts include some doctoral students.

That’s also why it is so important that the Scottish government continues to fund dedicated places at the Ancients for disadvantaged students, particularly when other places continue to be capped.  But the changes needed to meet the ambitious targets can’t just be about the Ancients. Some universities already meet the 20% target, but there is room for more higher and degree-level apprenticeships in addition to their existing offer, directly linked to employers and jobs. The overall scale of provision at Scotland’s universities deserves more debate too, with applications having risen faster over recent years than the number of places.

Of course, none of what universities or ministers might do is enough on its own. The real challenge lies in what happens in schools, where attainment gaps are evident from an early age. It is a good start providing comparable data through assessments, but that needs follow up with equally radical approaches through targeted funding, a strong drive to improve standards, and intervention and support for schools with poorer results, especially in disadvantaged areas.

But we need to go further in raising aspirations too. The Sutton Trust supports 250 students each year at its summer schools at Edinburgh and St Andrews. Other charities, like the Robertson Trust, play a vital role funding access programmes too.

It is simply not fair that 26% of places at ancient universities go to privately educated students, when less than 5% of Scottish students are educated at independent schools. We need to see a concerted drive to improve education for able, gifted and talented students in every state school from S1 (Year 7 in England) onwards too.

That’s the challenge behind today’s report. And it is one that matters for Scotland’s future success.

Getting the student architecture right

I've looked at the possible impact of merging the Office for Fair Access into a new catch-all higher education regulator on my latest Sutton Trust blog.

Green and white papers are published for a variety of reasons, aside from the need to ‘consult’ prior to legislation. A new minister wants to make his or her mark. The government needs to save money. A department wants to show it is doing something, usually a new organisation with a new acronym. Whatever the reason, they are rarely all they seem, and the outcomes don’t always match their ambitious good intentions.

So how does the latest universities green paper, Higher education: teaching excellence, social mobility and student choice, match up? Among its new ideas is a Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), a way of holding universities to account on an aspect of their delivery that is decidedly patchy, and a new Office for Students (OfS) which will be a ‘single, light touch regulatory system’ that will ‘empower students, drive quality, eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy and save taxpayer money’.

The detail may still be dependent on MPs’ approval, though the acronyms are already in place. But can the Office for Students (OfS) really do all of these things successfully, and what will it do as a single entity for social mobility that maintaining the successfulOffice for Fair Access, and expanding its remit a little, would not achieve? The new Office will not only see OFFA absorbed under its wing, it will also run the new teaching framework, absorbHEFCE’s regulatory role and provide quality assurance.

Sensibly, it will not take over the creaky behemoth that is theStudent Loans Company, and the department itself wants to change how the remaining teaching grant is allocated to universities. There must, however, be concern at the suggestion that raising the fee cap would no longer require a parliamentary vote, and could be done by power of the Secretary of State.

The new body will operate in the students’ interest, we are told, but it will be funded by universities. There is much that is good about the overall functions of the new entity – it will have specific duties to promote students’ interests, excellent teaching and fair access. It will also be the body charged with deciding which new providers can offer higher education and providing better information on choices.

Having had my time in Whitehall, I can see how logical all this may seem. Government loves having everything ‘joined up’. It promotes efficiency and collaborative working, the civil servants hum. It (ostensibly) saves money, the chancellor purrs. And it gives me something to be seen doing in parliament, the minister cheers.

But I’m not convinced it will meet another important objective of the green paper: improving social mobility. One of the less well publicised government targets (they’re back in favour again, apparently) is to double the percentage of disadvantaged students going into higher education from 13.6% in 2009 to 27.2% by 2020, and to improve access for minority ethnic students. The figure was 18.2% in 2014. Achieving this will require real focus, not least with potential cuts in the spending review of widening participation funds, and a drive that ensures the target isn’t met simply by plucking the lowest hanging fruit – there is still an eight fold access gap in our most elite universities, after all.

The record of ‘logical’ mergers in recent years is hardly encouraging. The Every Child Matters agenda under the Labour government was a worthy and logical attempt to join up education and children’s services. The result was a lost focus on education standards in many local authorities where a social services agenda dominated, or vice versa. The resultant loss of dedicated child protection teams as part of that agenda arguably contributed to the Baby P case in Haringey. The ‘logical’ merger of the National College of School Leadership with the Teaching and Development Agency has been accompanied by a teacher recruitment crisis and the near-destruction of a programmecredited by the OECD as ‘changing the landscape of school leadership.’ Both were affected by a loss of focus.

The Office for Fair Access has had a good record since its inception in 2004. Its access agreements have kept universities accountable in a very specific area that is vital to social mobility. The duty to report on access to parliament, combined with the power to prevent universities charging higher fees, have supported improvements in access from disadvantaged students despite the trebling of those tuition fees.

The green paper would not take away any of these powers, and it would maintain the access regulator’s post. Indeed there is an expectation that the regulator should look also at the destinations of access students, a welcome extension of the existing remit. Improved information for students would be a great boon too. But the new Office would absorb OFFA into an entity with lots of other complex responsibilities. The result could be a gradual erosion of independence and loss of impact in a body that is likely to spend much time on the complexities of competition. That would not be good for social mobility.

There is much to welcome in the new green paper, not least the stronger role for students and the overdue focus on teaching. But the danger is that in its desire to create a clean new ‘architecture’ the Office for Students ends up creating something closer to theWalkie-Talkie than The Shard. We need to be convinced otherwise.

A comprehensive Commons and Cabinet?

I've blogged at the Sutton Trust on the educational backgrounds of the new MPs and Cabinet.

The election result on May 7 may have surprised pundits expecting a hung parliament. But it was equally interesting in what it says about Britain today, and who now gets to become an MP. Across the political spectrum, the diversity that really started in the late 90s has now become embedded in both main parties, and not just in an improved gender and ethnic balance, but also in a more socially representative group of MPs.

Over several elections, the Sutton Trust has been tracking the educational backgrounds of MPs and cabinet ministers, and there are some interesting trends visible in our Parliamentary Privilege research brief this week. For a start, newly-elected MPs are much more likely to have been to comprehensive schools in 2015 than those who were re-elected from the 2010 intake. And our analysis of the new Cabinet –widely quoted in the press this week – showed a doubling in the proportion of ministers attending Cabinet who had been to non-selective state schools.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that a private education is not still an advantage for Parliament or the Cabinet, just as it is at the top of professions from the law to the City. Half of David Cameron’s Cabinet was privately educated, seven times the proportion of the population who attend independent schools, and 32% of MPs were too, over four times the national average.

Moreover, while Conservative MPs are a bit less likely to have been privately educated – at 48% probably the first time their proportion has dipped below half – a number of Labour’s new intake had an independent education, pushing their proportion up slightly to 17%.

When people talk about parliamentary privilege in education, they often couple an Oxbridge education with having been to public school. However, the two groups are not synonymous and we would expect MPs to be better educated than the population at large. Still, it is still interesting that more than a quarter of MPs went to Oxford or Cambridge and a further 28% attended another Russell Group university. Half the Cabinet also has an Oxbridge education. Interestingly, among the new SNP group of 56 MPs – at least the 40 whose educational backgrounds were publicly available – few had a private education and Glasgow was perhaps unsurprisingly their main political training ground.

So what are we to make of all this? Of course, we should welcome evidence of improved mobility for state educated parliamentarians, and the Cabinet and Commons should be the richer for this wider experience, just as it has been improved by having a growing number of women MPs and those from BME communities. But just as the 29% of female MPs and 6% of BME MPs in the new Commons are not yet representative of the community as a whole, neither should we rest on our laurels when even in this new intake the newly elected MPs are four times more likely to be privately educated than average.

Some will say that this is all about class envy publicising this information, and some candidates refuse to make public their educational backgrounds perhaps for that reason. That isn’t what it is about at all. Rather it is to recognise that access to our best schools – and that includes our best comprehensives and grammar schools – is too often related to ability to pay, including the means to buy a house in a popular catchment area. So we need this more representative group of MPs to address these issues, supporting fairer admissions to comprehensives and needs blind access to independent day schools. The issue is one of fair access.

Equally, we should be less concerned that Oxbridge and the Russell Group has such a grip on political life than we should be that access to those leading universities is still so heavily skewed towards the richest communities. A child from the top fifth of neighbourhoods is still more than six times more likely to go to a leading university than one from the bottom fifth, and when it comes to the top 13 (including Oxbridge) that gap widens to nine-fold. There are too many bright youngsters from less advantaged areas who are not getting as far as applying to these universities, let alone being admitted to them.

So that’s the challenge for our ‘comprehensive’ Commons and Cabinet – will they do more to promote fair access to our best schools and universities, so they can be trailblazers for many more young people from modest backgrounds to reach the centres of political power in Britain today?

With the right policies, they can open doors for others to follow.

University funding challenge

I've written this feature on university funding for the Jan/Feb 2015 edition of Public Finance.

As the general election looms, Nick Clegg’s decision to back a trebling of tuition fees could come back to haunt him. A study by the Higher Education Policy Institute think-tank in Oxford suggests 10 Liberal Democrat university seats could be vulnerable to student anger, after the party’s decision to support higher fees despite its manifesto pledge to phase them out.

here are also doubts that the expected financial savings will be made. There is growing evidence that graduates will face debts into their 50s, while the Exchequer may see little real benefit because nearly half of the loans will have to be written off.

To understand why, look again at the 2012 student funding package and how it differs from what went before. When Labour introduced income-related ­tuition fees of up to £1,000 in 1999, it also replaced the remaining maintenance grants with loans to be repaid at a rate of 9% of graduate income above £10,000 a year. In 2006, fees rose to £3,000, although universities were permitted to charge less. Fees were no longer income-related, though some maintenance grants were restored. Tuition fee loans were introduced and the graduate repayment threshold was raised to £15,000.

The coalition government trebled fees to a new maximum of £9,000, extending the income contingent loans accordingly. But two crucial additional changes were made. First, the repayment threshold was increased to £21,000. Conservative ministers wanted it to be £18,000, but the LibDems insisted on the higher level. The second was the addition of a real rate of interest. Previously debt rose with the retail price index (RPI).

Under the new system, undergraduates are charged RPI+3% while studying and then pay interest of up to RPI+3% on a sliding scale once they graduate. The result is that from this year, graduates will pay off their loans – now much larger after the fees hike – much more slowly than under the old system.

Read the full article here.

Election 2015: consensus and challenges

In my latest Sutton Trust blog, I look at education in the general election and beyond.

Maybe they will surprise us. Perhaps in the weeks that remain before the voters cast their ballots on May 7 there will be something radical said on education, such as pledging for-profit schools or cutting tuition fees. But I wouldn’t count on it. And in one sense that’s no bad thing.

Underneath the often overblown rhetoric about unqualified teachers, local authority control or curriculum change, there is a far more consensus and continuity with the main political parties than you might think. Indeed there has been a strong degree of continuity in approach since Kenneth Baker’s reforms of 1988.

And this sense of commonality may explain why this week’s Comres poll for ITV showed that only 7% of the public saw ‘improving the education system’ as a big priority for government, ranking it last behind immigration, the economy, the NHS, welfare, housing and other issues. Other polling has suggested that the two main parties are fairly evenly matched as ‘best’ to deal with the issue.

All the main parties broadly support a strong degree of autonomy for schools and will continue with academies. Labour may not introduce new free schools, but will allow new academies which are pretty similar. All the parties recognise the need for greater regional management of an increasingly autonomous system, even if there are degrees of difference in what would be devolved.

With Nicky Morgan as a more consensual education secretary, there is more focus on teachers and teaching by the Government, echoing a theme that her shadow Tristram Hunt has been keen to put on the agenda. Although there are loud exchanges about ‘unqualified teachers’, their numbers are relatively small and their relevance to the system is less important than the rhetoric might suggest.

Both parties back a College of Teaching, rather more fervently than the profession if our polling last May is anything to go by, and both recognise that more needs to be done to improve professional development, a subject to which we will return next week.

So, this consensus may bring a degree of stability in schools. Big changes to the exam system have yet to filter through, and schools will have to tighten their belts further even if the overall national budget continues to be protected. They will welcome a breathing space.

Yet all this tacit agreement may mask the problems that an incoming secretary of state will face. And it is in their competence addressing those problems that they will be judged as much as on any exaggerated dividing lines drummed up for the purpose of election debates.

The most obvious is the need for many more school places, which requires considerable investment and strategic planning, as well as training the teachers to take the new classes.  This week’s Local Government Association survey put the need at 880,000 – a 12% increase nationally. There is also a real challenge addressing potential teacher shortages in key subjects if the balance between Schools Direct and university-based provision is not better planned.

But other deeper seated issues also need to be addressed.  The first is the attainment gap that still prevails in both primary and secondary schools. True, there have been some improvements in recent years, and the combination of extra money through the pupil premium and Ofsted rigour is at least getting schools to focus on their disadvantaged pupils much more than before.

But this may not be enough in itself. The prevailing mood against top down reform has meant that there is still too little pressure on schools that aren’t doing enough for their disadvantaged pupils. The new EEF Families of Schools tool reveals the starkness of the differences between schools with similar characteristics.

So, more needs to be done to get good teachers to underperforming schools outside the increasingly successful capital, as well as improving professional development generally. As we argue in our Mobility Manifesto, stronger incentives should build on the pupil premium awards to reward successful schools, and those that use evidence effectively. And there is a good case for revitalising leadership education by revitalising the National College of School Leadership, which many heads feel has lost its way as an amalgam with the old teacher training agency.

A second area ripe for change is in social mobility, which our research has consistently shown remains far too low in this country. In particular, we need to have fairer admissions in urban secondary schools, a revitalised national ‘gifted and talented’ programme for highly able students (our Sutton Scholars programme offers one model) and an opening up of the best independent day schools to talented children of all backgrounds.

This needs to be matched with a better co-ordinated approach to access to leading universities – where the gap remains nearly ten-fold between the poorest and richest families – that makes far more effective use of the £800m access funds now being spent. The new HEFCE networks are a start; using that funding wisely is the next step.

Ahead of all that, getting it right in the early years should pay dividends later on. All the parties are keen to promote their plans to improve childcare. That is a laudable labour market policy, helping family finances and improving employment opportunities particularly for women.

But it won’t necessarily support child development for disadvantaged children unless it is accompanied by a much more rigorous approach to the quality of education and care that they receive. With limited resources, as our Sound Foundations report argued last year, a government needs to balance the long-term economic benefits from getting that right against the more immediate benefits of a larger workforce.

If there is now a broader consensus on standards and structural issues in schools, whoever forms the government after May should have more room to move further on these issues. Hopefully, as they do so, they can develop a degree of cross-party agreement on lasting steps that will narrow attainment gaps and improve social mobility

University funding challenge

In my latest Sutton Trust blog, I look at the funding options facing higher education as debts mount for students and the government.

Hearing the BBC radio news on Tuesday, it felt a bit like a delayed echo from the spring. The headlines were all about the three quarters of students who wouldn’t pay back their loans in full, and the fact that those earning the salary of a good teacher would be paying loans off into their early fifties.

These findings, which came from April’s Sutton Trust/IFS Payback Time? report, were an important part of the evidence base for the latest inquiry from the Higher Education Commission, chaired by the impressive Ruth Thompson, former Director General of higher education in the old Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills.

In April, the IFS also joined others in highlighting how little of the extra revenue raised by the increase in fees from just over £3000 to a new £9000 maximum was likely to be recouped from the Government because so many students would not repay their loans in full. Just over 56p in every pound loaned would be paid back.

What has changed since then is that the new tougher mortgage rules introduced by the Financial Conduct Authority mean that banks are no longer allowed to ignore student loan repayments when assessing mortgage suitability. As the FCA confirmed in June, this is now regarded as ‘committed expenditure’, reducing what graduates can borrow. Our IFS report showed a typical successful teacher paying back around £2000 a year after tax through their forties.

Aside from the increased loans to cover the higher fees, there were two other significant reasons for the low levels of repayment: the increase in the repayment threshold for the new loans – £21k rather than £15k – which means slower payments after graduation; and a real rate of interest of up to inflation + 3%, which increases the total amount borrowed even more. For our report, the IFS calculated that the average student will graduate with £44,000 worth of debt, but an average of £30,000 would be written off at age 51 or 52 for the 73% of students who had not by that stage repaid their loans in full.

The cross-party commission didn’t pull its punches. “The current funding system represents the worst of both worlds,” is how the study puts it. “The government is funding higher education by writing off student debt, as opposed to directly investing in teaching grants study….Students feel like they are paying substantially more for their higher education, but are set to have a large proportion of their debt written off by the government.”

But it is easier to diagnose the problem than to find a solution. And although ministers gamely defend the new system (even if they may believe the threshold was raised higher than was prudent) others believe change is inevitable, including the Select Committee recently. In this spirit, the Commission suggests several options:

• Cutting tuition fees to a £6,000 maximum. This would reduce student debt, but it would leave an estimated £1.72bn funding gap for universities. This is the option that Ed Miliband was reported to favour, but which is apparently not backed by his shadow chancellor because of the cost.
• A graduate tax which would see all graduates paying back a proportion of their income rather than what they borrowed. The Commission estimates this would require government to borrow £4bn to fill the gap between ending fees and the arrival of tax revenues. They also point out that it would reduce the link between a graduate and their studies. Some argue that the present system is a form of graduate tax.
• An option favoured by some elite universities of removing the £9,000 upper limit on fees might allow more money for universities and more competition, but higher fees would mean even higher levels of public subsidy for loans (unless the universities took the risk for those loans, as some have suggested)
• Different charges for different universities or courses could also reduce the number graduates from expensive courses with high fees even if they were essential for the economy.
• They also looked at reducing the threshold or interest rate, while maintaining the status quo, and at a lifelong learning pot (akin to Singapore).

There is one other option that the Commission didn’t include, but which should be considered in this debate. This would involve reducing the maximum to £6000 for all students entitled to a full maintenance grant – around four in ten students – rather than the whole student population. Doing this would still require a government to plug a funding gap, but it would be rather smaller than cutting fees for all, and would also cut the level of loan default. Freezing the threshold for repayments might also help pay for it.

The argument for this change is that, despite improvements, there is still a significant access gap ranging from 2.5 fold between those from the richest and poorest neighbourhoods for all those entering higher education to nearly ten-fold for access to the best universities. Reducing the levels of debt for less advantaged students should be a priority of any review.

Those who argue against means-tested fees say that repayments are based on graduate earnings, so it is unfair to base them on parental income. Yet from 1998 to 2006, this is what happened. More to the point, it is what currently happens with maintenance grants and loans, where the idea that all young people are financially independent at 18 is not accepted. Moreover, our polling shows 2-1 backing among the public for the idea. As we think about the changes that might help rebalance our fees and loans system ahead of next May’s election, a measure which could also improve access should be on the table too.

Payback time for graduates and government

 In my latest Sutton Trust blog, I explain why I think the Government needs to think again on tuition fees, student debt and teaching grants.

When the coalition trebled university tuition fees to a maximum of £9,000 a year, it said it was making hard choices. Students would have to repay higher fees as graduates because the Government could no longer afford to subsidise their teaching grant, the argument went.

To some extent, I bought that argument at the time because the evidence of previous fee rises had been that they didn’t deter disadvantaged students, though I argued then that universities should cover loans above £6,000 and that there should be a better balance between teaching grants and fees than the Government planned. I also noted the problems in raising the repayment threshold.

But even I didn’t foresee quite how the new system would work in practice. Last month, the Government admitted that 45 per cent of debts under the new system are unlikely to be repaid, close to the level where the Exchequer would find itself worse off than before the fees increase.

Now, our new research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies reveals the true impact of the new loan system on middle income graduates like teachers,  as they continue paying off their student loans into their fifties. It highlights the ripple effect of the changes to the loan system and some unintended consequences.

Under the old system, a typical teacher would  have paid off their loans before their 40^th birthday. Under the new system, they will still be making payments of over £2,000 a year throughout their forties and into their early fifties - the equivalent of an extra sixpence on their income tax. This is at a time when most will have children at school, and family and mortgage costs are at their most pressing.

As the lowest earners will repay less and high earners will be able to pay back their debts more quickly, avoiding many of the high interest charges introduced in the new system, it is those on middle incomes who will be most affected.

With this double debt trap of longer repayments for middle earning graduates and a potential loss for taxpayers, ministers should look again at the student loan system.

Students who graduate from 2015 will not have to start repaying their student loans until they are earning £21,000 a year (more than £5,000 higher than before). Payments are at nine per cent of income above that threshold. This means that while graduates in their twenties will tend to make slightly lower repayments, three quarters of graduates will continue paying back until their early fifties. At this point, most graduates will still owe tens of thousands of pounds, which the government will have to write off.

Typical graduates now have to repay £67,000 in cash terms (£35,000 in 2014 equivalent prices), twice what they paid under the old system. Since the loans now attract real interest rates from  before the student even graduates, nearly half will pay back more in real terms than they borrowed.

When the Government trebled fees, the Sutton Trust argued for a better balance: lower fees with a smaller cut to the university teaching grant. However, the increased repayment threshold and a strengthened access regulator were enough to win over most coalition backbenchers.

The argument is not about whether loans and fees should exist – I have always argued in favour of both since the mid-1990s - but what proportion of university funding should be paid by graduates rather than general taxation, and how much graduates should pay. I am now convinced that argument needs to be revisited in the light of the new data on defaults and repayment levels.

When the fees were introduced, we were told few universities would levy the maximum fee, and many would charge £6,000. In reality, most courses cost the maximum, another reason for the predicted default levels.

The Government already provides larger maintenance grants to lower income students. Indeed, when I worked with David Blunkett to introduce tuition fees of £1,000 a year in 1998, we means tested them then. Ministers should consider doing so again. Given that most graduates are having large amounts of debt written off, this could be done at relatively little cost to the Exchequer. That would allow lower fees for those in receipt of full maintenance grants, who come from low income households.

There is an important social mobility point here. It is true that the new system is ‘progressive’ in the sense that those graduates whose average income is just £24,000 or less gain significantly from the new system, and those below £28,000 gain marginally in real terms. But few jobs that require a degree pay so little across a lifetime. The argument made for an investment in higher education has been about earning more than non-graduates.

So it seems unfair to penalise most those strivers who have had to work hardest to improve their lot. With means-tested fees, they would be the real gainers.

It would also provide more impetus to deal with another issue that has seen little improvement in recent years. Although more disadvantaged young people are entering higher education, numbers from low and middle income backgrounds going our best universities have yet to see significant improvement.  Students from the most advantaged fifth of neighbourhoods are still seven times more likely to go to a Russell Group university than those from the poorest fifth.

Universities today use much of the money they are required to spend on access and outreach funding bursaries and fee subsidies to attract those students. Means-tested fees would allow them to focus those resources specific programmes to attract more of the thousands of young people who get the grades but don’t apply to the best universities.

As the experience of the Sutton Trust summer schools has shown, such interventions could make a real difference to those disparities in access.

The Government may have got its sums wrong on student debt, but it now has an opportunity to make the right calculations to improve social mobility.

I also had a column in The Times on the report and appeared on BBC TV News.

I argue in a new Centreforum report that university endowments can make a contribution to postgraduate funding.

Sutton Trust research has highlighted the growing importance of postgraduate degrees in today’s labour market. Stephen Machin and Joanne Lindley have shown that 11% of 26-60 year-olds in the workforce now holds a postgraduate qualification, up from 4% in 1996.[1]

They also showed that somebody with a Master’s can on average expect to earn over £200,000 more over a 40 year working life than someone only holding a Bachelor’s degree.[2] The Sutton Trust report highlighted how the recent growth in UK postgraduates, dominated by international students, poses a threat to social mobility.

This makes it all the more important that postgraduate courses are affordable to the brightest graduates, regardless of financial circumstances. Universities and government need to think imaginatively about how to fund them. Without action to enable bright students from all backgrounds to access postgraduate qualifications based on their ability rather than their ability to pay, this could become yet another barrier for those from low and middle income homes.

The Trust supports targeted state-backed loans for postgraduates. But Government is concerned about affordability, given the growing cost of the current student loan scheme. One way to keep costs lower would be develop income-related bursaries funded by universities through their alumni alongside means-tested loans for postgraduates.

Tim Leunig’s earlier research for Centreforum has shown that while there is some funding available through university bursaries, research councils and other sources, fewer than 4% of students on taught master’s programmes receive sufficient funding to cover their fees in full.[3] Most universities offer some partial bursaries, but these are often a fraction of the costs of fees and living costs, which can be £18-£20,000 a year, depending on the course.[4] This is an expensive proposition for graduates with debts already set to exceed £40,000 from their undergraduate studies.

In the United States, many universities, including the Ivy Leagues, fund undergraduates from low and middle income homes fully through their endowment funds. Many also use their endowments to provide targeted support for postgraduates (as well as to develop new buildings and facilities, often their primary purpose in the UK.)

With a state regulated system of undergraduate fees and loans in the UK, and substantial mandated access funds linked to the new fees regime, there is a strong case for focusing a growing endowment pot on postgraduate studies and research. For this to happen, UK universities need to grow their endowments. Only Oxford and Cambridge currently have endowment funds comparable in size to the top 20 US universities, with the next largest, Edinburgh, significantly smaller at £248m.[5]

The 2004 Thomas report led the Labour Government to introduce a match-funding scheme designed to stimulate greater fundraising by English universities from alumni, and the development of larger endowment funds.[6] That scheme, which ran from 2008-11, had some success: annual fundraising by UK universities rose from £513 million to £694 million.[7]

But the potential is much greater. While US Ivy Leagues have always had large endowments, much American alumni fundraising is relatively new. Many state-funded universities have only developed their funds in the last 50 years: for example, the University of Florida increased its annual donations from $2m in 1976 to produce an endowment fund now worth $1.3 billion.[8]

Only 1.2% of UK graduates donate to their universities regularly, compared with 9% of US alumni. A Higher Education Funding Council for England report in 2012 proposed a target of 5% for the UK within the next 10 years, with some universities achieving double digit rates, to put the UK onto the US track.[9]

Explicitly linking some of those funds to support for postgraduates could make giving more attractive to some donors. Some universities already do this. Sheffield has alumni fund scholarships, funded by donations from 1500 alumni each year, worth £2000 each, and targeted at bright students who might not otherwise be able to study there.[10] However, such scholarships remain small scale: in 2013, they plan to provide them to 15 students, but only provided 6 in 2012.[11] Others with larger endowments say they are relatively generous. Oxford, with £3.7 billion in university and college endowment funds, says that 62% of its research students and 17% of its students on taught Master’s courses receive full scholarships covering fees and living expenses.[12]  

Such endowments may not cover all postgraduate costs, but they could make a significant contribution, when coupled with targeted student loans for those of modest means. Sheffield targets its scholarships to those who received maintenance grants as undergraduates. A similar approach more widely applied to those able enough to study as postgraduates would help ensure such support was well targeted where it was needed most.

Government may not want to cover the full cost of postgraduate studies and living costs, given the prevailing climate. While wealthier UK and overseas graduates may be able to turn to family funds, those for whom a postgraduate degree is the final rung on the social mobility ladder are unlikely to have access to such resources. Such students should have access to more means-tested bursaries, funded by universities through alumni fundraising. For that to happen, universities will need to improve their fundraising capacity. Government should make it easier for them to do so: the tax system needs to be simpler for large donations, and more pump priming should be available to enhance fundraising capacity.

Postgraduate studies are the next social mobility frontier. It is now widely accepted that we need to do more through nursery education, schools and undergraduate access to enable bright young people from low and middle income homes to fulfil their potential. They must not encounter a brick wall when it comes to postgraduate study. A new partnership between alumni, universities and government could help ensure they don’t.

The Centreforum report Postgraduate Education: better funding and better access is edited by Tom Frostrick and Tom Gault and available at the Centreforum website.

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[1] Stephen Machin and Joanne Lindley, ‘The Postgraduate Premium’, Sutton Trust 2012

[2] This is a gross figure, so it doesn’t allow for lost earnings, fee costs, extra taxes due or inflation, as some other analyses showing smaller premiums have done.

[3] Tim Leunig, ‘Mastering Postgraduate Funding’, Centreforum 2011

[4] Cambridge suggests these figures for most courses at http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/students/studentregistry/fees/costs/coursecost/costs2013v9.pdf . Taught course fees for home or European students at Sheffield and Newcastle universities are typically £5000-£6000 a year, with research fees starting at around £4000 a year, but often much higher depending on the course.

[5] http://www.suttontrust.com/research/university-fundraising-an-update, drawing on data from ‘Caritas Higher Education Yearbook’ data in the UK and the US ‘Chonicle of Higher Education’.

[6] ‘Increased Voluntary Giving to Higher Education’, DfES, 2004,

[7] ‘Review of Philanthropy in UK Higher Education’, HEFCE, 2012 http://www.hefce.ac.uk/media/hefce/content/pubs/indirreports/2012/philanthropyinukhe/HEFCE%20Philanthropy%20Report.pdf

[8] ‘Increased Voluntary Giving’, p.25 and University of Florida website for latest data http://www.uff.ufl.edu/AboutUFF/Endowment.asp

[9] ‘Review of Philanthropy’

[10] http://www.shef.ac.uk/ssid/finance/alumni

[11] Information supplied by University of Sheffield. The University also uses alumni funding to provide £3000 scholarships for undergraduates.

[12] http://www.ox.ac.uk/feesandfunding/prospectivegrad/scholarships/ and http://www.ox.ac.uk/about_the_university/facts_and_figures/

Are fees putting off working class boys?

In my latest Sutton Trust blog, I look at new evidence suggesting that working class boys may be being deterred more than girls by higher university tuition fees.

Students are well into the first year of higher tuition fees. While 54,000 fewer young people started university in 2012 than in 2011, the Government has been congratulating itself that the dip was not much greater.

And the water has been muddied by the changes in student controls that took effect just as the £9000 fee cap was introduced. Moreover, this year’s applications suggest that there is some improvement on last year’s dip.

So is all well in the world of higher fees?

The truth is it is too early to tell. And a new report this week from the Independent Commission on Fees highlights a number of areas where there is some cause for concern.

The first is what’s happening to boys, particularly working class boys. The Commission’s study of UCAS acceptance data has shown not only that the gender gap continues to widen, but that it appears even more pronounced in the lower participation neighbourhoods.

Women are now a third more likely to enter higher education than men, according to HEFCE, and the gender gap seems to have widened as a result of the new fees regime. Among UK residents, 143,600 women aged 19 and under were accepted to English universities in 2012 compared with 118,952 young men.

This represents a decline since 2010 of 2.6% for girls and 4.0% for boys, and a 5.9% decline for girls and a 7.5% decline for boys since 2011.

But in the 40% of English neighbourhoods where university participation is lowest, there were 1700 fewer boys aged 19 and under who were accepted for places in 2012 than in 2011. This represents a decline of 5.4% in the number of young men from these areas going to university this year. By contrast, the fall in the number of young women from these neighbourhoods going to university was smaller, at just 3.7%.

Perhaps of more interest, since it discounts any surge into 2011 to avoid the higher fees, when compared with 2010, the number of young male acceptances fell by 1.4%, while young female acceptances increased by 0.9%. By contrast, between 2009 and 2010, male and female acceptances rose.

In England, while the overall change in the gender gap in the less disadvantaged neighbourhoods was 1.6 percentage points between 2010 and 2012, the overall change in the gender gap in more disadvantaged neighbourhoods was greater, at 2.3 percentage points.

Although the decline in male participation in the most advantaged neighbourhoods was even larger, 20,000 more boys go to university each year from the two top fifth neighbourhoods than from the two bottom fifth neighbourhoods.

It means that the female: male ratio is now nearly 57:43 in the less advantaged neighbourhoods whereas it is closer to 53:47 in the more advantaged neighbourhoods.

With 2013 applications, UCAS has suggested that this gap is persisting. Its January applications report noted that 18 year women remain a third more likely in England to apply to university than men, but this rises to 50 per cent in disadvantaged areas.

If this is the case, it suggests that the information about the new loan repayments may be proving more attractive to young women than to young men, or that young men from disadvantaged areas are less likely to believe that the cost of a degree is worth it. Either way, there is a challenge here for policymakers to meet.

The Commission’s new report has two other important findings that should cause policymakers to take pause. The first is the familiar data on mature students – those aged 20 and over – who had 7.6% fewer acceptances in 2012 than in 2010, more than twice the 3.3% decline for younger students as a whole.

The decision to allow part-timers to have access to student loans hasn’t seen full-timers move to part-time courses either. HEFCE has shown a dramatic drop in part-time numbers, with 105,000 fewer students since 2010, or a 40% drop.

This is important for access, as studying later is an important route to social mobility for those from less advantaged backgrounds, and it is vital that the impact of fees on this group is not neglected just because the reductions among young people are smaller.

As the new President of Birkbeck College, Baroness Bakewell, put it at the weekend:

Part-time study is crucial for our society. It improves skills and kick-starts new careers – exactly what we need for the economy, employers and individuals during these difficult economic times. In response to the dramatic downturn in part-time students nationwide, unprecedented support is needed now to ensure part-time study thrives in future.
 

And the other key finding is perhaps a warning shot at this stage, but one that will need closer scrutiny as the university-level data becomes clear.

While there has been an increase in the numbers of young people from the most disadvantaged areas going to the least selective universities, there has been minimal improvement in the numbers going to the Sutton Trust’s list of the 30 more selective universities (which includes the 24 Russell Group members) and a small dip in the numbers going to the Sutton Trust 13 most selective group.

While the only rises to the Sutton Trust 30 were in the lower participation neighbourhoods, the only quintile showing a dip in acceptances to the Sutton Trust 13 was the lowest participation group. This means that there is a widening gap between this group and other more advantaged areas, and those from the richest fifth of neighbourhoods are ten times more likely to attend these universities than those in the poorest fifth of neighbourhoods.

Closer scrutiny of patterns among individual selective universities will be important here. Already, there is some evidence from HESA data that in 2011, the proportion of new undergraduates from state schools and colleges at the 13 top universities slipped for the fourth year in succession.

There is clearly an important issue for the most selective universities and their recruitment from the poorest neighbourhoods – and it is one that the Sutton Trust will return to shortly. The Trust has also commissioned the Institute of Fiscal Studies to examine the potential impact of students leaving university with debts likely to exceed £40,000 on their ability to afford graduate study, buying a house, and having children. Their findings will be published later this year.

So, the truth is that the jury is still out on fees. We need to see whether these findings for 2012 become clearer trends in the next few years. It is vital, meanwhile, that Government, universities and schools do all they can to reach young people with the ability and potential to benefit from university, particularly in areas where university participation is already low.