This is the widening participation

This is the widening participation -

What the government have not thought of, in its indecent haste to shave £100million of the Higher Education budget, lest any naughty persons should want to take advantage of the facility to get an Equivalent Level qualification, is that this is the very money that is also being used to facilitate widening participation.

Widening participation is one of the government's avowed aims in higher education, along with that other interesting word, lifelong learning. That is where the HEFCE money is actually going.

I dont know where the government have got the idea that the ELQs is the group to take out some sort of revenge upon, the desperately naughty people who want to improve their lot by upskilling because they might have degrees which are out of date, or they might just want to take a course in foreign languages. Traditionally all these courses have been developed by good providers to make sure that everyone who wanted to take these courses could do so. The HEFCE funding was not earmarked to avoid people who wanted to improve their life chances by doing a second equivalent level qualification. It was there for developmental and innovative purposes in any case.

Now the point is, that by desperately earmarking this group and saying "Well these people are not deservingand must be cast out" what the government is actually doing is that they are removing chances across the board. Universities will have less money overall to play with. That means that course teams and departments who were involved in innovating and developing courses will be shut down. There will not be the impetus in the future to provide such courses; once the impetus is lost and the people who have been traditionally responsible for preparing these courses have gone from the system, the skills bases of the Universities will be eroded.

The knock on effect therefore will be that those who did not want to take equivalent level courses but even the first of their higher education courses will find themselves stymied because the courses may not be there. Funding cuts seem to have these cascading effects; one can never be sure of where they will stop.

Where this will leave widening participation and lifelong learning is anyone's guess; it a tautology on the part of the government to say that you are going to make these two great pillars of higher education (and further ed come to that) and then say that the game's up. You have to be committed to these ideas and show the public that you are committed to these ideas.

The other thing that I wanted to say about widening participation is that there is absolutely no proof that an educational deficit inherited through primary and secondary education can necessarily be addressed by higher education at the age of 18 and 19 years. Neat idea, does not work in practice. If we trying to get 50% of our youth into higher education at these ages, it has to be remembered that, first of all we probably will not do so because of a falling birth rate; secondly, that a deficit of basic skills is not going to be cured by getting a degree (and especially not when tutors are doing constant remedial work) and thirdly, that in common with everyone else, students are going to need educational attention and upskilling throughout their working lives.

I can give an 18 year old a degree; that is not a problem. The only point I would say is, what kind of degree would it be when that esteemed person gets out into the workplace and cannot still be properly literate and numerate. What value then are we going to place on our degrees. Employers organisations have been known to say in the past ten years that degrees are not what they were, nor are A Levels, or GCSE's. How many more complaints are we expected to have from employers who insist that they are being cheated by the system?

In order to ensure that we keep up the skills that are so essential for Britain as a top rate nation, we must have lifelong learning. To send an 18 year old for a degree and for that poor person to still come out without a grasp of the basic skills just shows us where the system is going wrong.

So for all these reasons, the government's idea about these funding cuts has a multitude of fatal embraces and logic errors. And what's more, it will destroy widening participation and lifelong learning. The shift in funding, clever though it may seem, will not solve the problems because it cannot begin to address the fundamental flaws of children leaving schools with inadequacy in reading and writing. No amount of degrees awarded to younger people will solve this problem.

The government needs to think deeper about all these problems than it has done heretofore. It has come up with what it thinks is the perfect solution, without thinking about the real minefield of detail that it has to traverse, starting, I am afraid, right now. This one has to be thought through and it is time for us all to get on the same side and fight for the people who have real deficits in their education. This will not be done by the principle of divide and rule.

Donald Hedges, Dip Eng Law (Open), BA(Hons)(Solent).