Employer engagement with co-funding

I have been studying the document Higher Education, Skills and Employer Engagement (2007) in which Sastry and Bekhradnia give their analysis of this particular situation in regard to employer engagement and employer-demand led need for higher education.

I will give my comments in this piece on what I have found within that document.

The first thoughts I had on perusing this document were; does the existing system of Higher Education function effectively enough. Given that there is never any shortage of students available to fill most higher education courses under the present system, the answer has to be yes. So this leads to the thought that what government is attempting to do here is to create some sort of niche market which may or may not exist.

The government is doing this because of what it perceives as a skills scare, not necessarily as a skills shortage. In my estimation, it is trying to replicate what it is doing in the further education market, which involves “Train to Gain” brokerages but unfortunately these have had very little effect on the numbers of people attending FE colleges as a result of the efforts of the brokers. So that was an amount of £30m which the government spent on that experiment which was not well spent. So whether Train to Gain could be transferrable to higher education is a moot point indeed.

What is being said is that employers should make a contribution to co-funding enterprises within the higher education sector and in return for doing this, the employer will realise some measure of control over the progress. The report is not clear about how this will work and neither am I, to be quite frank.
The policy on this is such that the project funding will be lower than it is at present; we have seen the amount of £22m being spent on co-funding projects with 11 employers at present but this may well dwindle in the future.

The problem is, that there is uncertainty as to whether these co-funded projects will be of substantial interest to employers in the future or whether or not we are just talking about a niche market. It does not seem to be a satisfactory way to go about expanding higher education provision in England.

The report is also casting doubt on whether we are reaping the rewards from Foundation Degrees or whether indeed there is a pent up demand from employer lead higher education projects.
There is also a mention of universities not being overly bothered about whether or not their courses are co-funded, except from the point of view of being able to minimise costs.

In the question of whether or not the new foundation degrees have been acceptable and worthy, one has to look at the question of displaced demand; that indeed students would have perhaps have been happy to keep on doing the HNCs and HNDs which have been replaced by Foundation Degrees

There is always a question about whether new forms of provision will be created by these sorts of tinkering at the margins of higher education. There are other questions being raised, such as for how long employers will really be interested in co-funding, or will they just walk away from such projects, leaving the schemes high and dry. The question is intrinsically, who really picks up the tab for these sorts of provision?

The HEFCE funding scenario in these sorts of situations is indeed questionable. What it is saying is that there is an assumption on the part of the funding council that courses have been co-funded and therefore there is less co-funding available. This is how part-time students are funded at present, with the consequences that part-time provision is the Cinderella of the Higher Education world. There is no guarantee that the funding scenario in any of these brave new situations would be spot on. It does not work for the part-time sector at the moment, yet government proposes that these sorts of financial guesstimates should be extended.
The report notes that this is an expansion of higher education on unfavourable terms – it is taking on adult learners to retrain in the skills arena because there is not a surplus of youngsters around to take up higher education from 2010/11 or thereabouts.

This gives the contradiction to the argument by John Denham, Secretary of State for Universities, that money should be shifted around in the higher education sector to be allocated to the younger end of the market. There might not be a younger end of the market by 2010/11. That’s where the other limb of the government plan comes in, to save money by co-funding.

I could go on for a long time yet about what I see as the fatal embraces of all these plans but it seems clear from the timbre of the report that it does not quite see the scenario evolving as the government does.

Whether or not employers will really be that keen on co-funding is a really moot point. The evidence for it over the past 20-30 years is that employers have not really been all that bothered. Government may well persuade some employers that it is a good idea through tax breaks and favoured status in one way or another. But it is difficult to get away from the fact that employers will want ready made employees with ready made qualifications. These sorts of schemes will only have a very marginal impact on that sort of existing mindset.

In other words my answer to co-funding is “Nil points”.


The relevant reference for the full report is as follows:-

HEPI Reports