Will there be co-opted funding

Yet another blast from the past, the Holborn Viaduct Station now closed, back in the days before Thameslink and the Snow Hill Tunnel, which supplanted Holborn Viaduct.


Back to business; my views on co-opted funding, or co-funding from employers whatever it is called.

I have got to be honest; I have not read the Leitch report on skills that Britain needs within the new milenniun. I am speaking from the perspective of someone who has already been in the workforce for 35 years, so hopefully I should know from past experience whether this thing about co-funding has got legs, so to speak. I am putting this before the public because this is one of the essential parts of the edict from the Secretary of State for Universities to HEFCE.

My question is, what were the prospects of me getting co-funding for a second qualification during 35 years of working life? Answers on the back of a very small envelope.

My first employer in the 1970's was a major education authority. Their complaint was that they could not make me a Clerical Officer Grade 2 because I had two Ordinary Level GCE's (remember them) in History. They did not pay for me to get an additional O Level. Instead I had to beat them to the punch when I came 2nd out of 107 candidates in the internal examination. They had to give me the job then. No, they did not pay me to do any studying, despite being a truly massive organisation.

I have already stated about my time in teacher training; that would in todays terms make me the proud holder of a DipHE; even though I had failed the course (or dropped out?) it was regarded as a first qualification - after two years of studying I had come away with nothing.

Time moves on; after two years I had a job with a major national transport undertaking. They did not take an interest in what previous education I had, did not offer me promotion and did not offer me the chance to take a qualification at degree level (or even at NVQ2 level). No prospects of retraining or promotion where ever mentioned either!!!

In the 1980's I worked for two years for a small but innovative company in the computer bureau business but it is unlikely that they would ever have held the funds to send me away to college for three years to do a degree in Computing (there was not such a thing as Information Technology then).

After that I worked for a major government department. I have to say that they did allow me to do some "Higher Education"; a course at Central London Polytechnic in taxation. Of course I was never promoted high enough to be able to put into practice what I had learned, nor did my department ever give me any sort of encouragement to do it but at least it did fund my studies.I would have appreciated it if they had put some more interest into it, though.

After five more years of work and a lot of fighting of City Hall, I eventually secured a place on an Honours Degree course in Accounting at Solent University. This was of course HEFCE funding with a grant from my local authority. I had waited 22 years for employers to really do something to show an interest in my potential. In the end only one person had really shown an interest in my potential - ME!! There had been no co-funding ever, to speak of.

After leaving Solent, I still could not get anyone to fund me on either further studies in Accounting, or to change my priorities to Law. Come 2003, the HEFCE funds came into their own again when the Open University allowed me to study with them for an LLB, of which I proudly got as far as a Diploma in English Law.

Again, no employer in all that time showed or offered me a chance to retrain, or improve my qualifications. And as for my efforts to get into teaching, which I would have loved to do, that is a whole different story.

So I would pose this question for the Secretary of State, do you still think that co-funding will work. Or would you like to gainsay my experience of 35 years. Come on down!!!