Donalds Political Blogspot

The RBS scandal

2012-02-01T07:15:00.000-08:00

I think that the whole thing is a seminal event in terms of morality, ethical behaviour and responsibility. The fact that this bank has been allowed to grow and leverage its balance sheet to the tune of £1.2TN, the same as the entire GDP of the United Kingdom means that here is a corporation wishing to encompass riches, power and influence far beyond the dreams of avarice. This is something out of a fairy story, or something that would have been encompassed in one of Shakespeare's tragedies. The fact that RBS wished or wanted to be bigger than everyone and everything around it, is very worrying, especially for those of us (and that means everyone) who had to pick up the bits when RBS developed a spanner in the works.Of course one could use a bank to buy up every bad debt, useless customer and subprime asset that one could and then hook it up to that bank's balance sheet. This is what in effect RBS have done, with very little constraint. They in fact do not possess sufficient sense of morality and ethics to do the opposite. Nonetheless, I dont think it is hysterical for the public to pick up on the wide sense of dis-ease that this situation has caused. This is an institution which shows that it simply does not care for the traditions and mores that have made the United Kingdom what it is. This is an institution that wants to be more than the sum of any morality or decency with which it was created. In short, it is an institution that wants to own everything, to boss everything and ultimately to get its own way so that it is bigger than any developed nation on earth. If people dont find that sense of meglomania extremely worrying, than I do; thats why comparisons with Mussolini and others are being made at this time. The truth of the matter (if thoroughly examined) is that the banks, instead of being the servant, now seek to become the master. We cant let them do it and thats why the stripping of Fred Goodwin's knighthood was an extremely good thing in the sense that we should not be pinning gongs to the pompous breasts of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

The Great Press Scandal (or not) as you may think

2011-07-21T06:53:00.000-07:00

The Great Press Scandal (or not) as you may think…….

The Great Press Scandal of 2011, or not, as you may think. This story starts somewhere in April 2011 and carries on kicking and screaming, until the prorogation of the Parliaments in July 2011. It has its seeds in the imprisonment of two gentlemen from the News of the World in 2008, or thereabouts, after having been convicted of phone hacking. Following an investigation headed by John Yates, AC Counter Terrorism at the yard, there was, he stated, no further need to investigate these matters. Everybody thought that was the end of the scenario but the Guardian newspaper kept on delving into the matter and eventually unearthed the factoid that many thousands had had their voicemails intercepted, including Milly Dowler, a schoolgirl from Surrey, who had been abducted and tragically murdered. To make the story that bit more complex, the editor of the newspaper News of the World had secured a position at 10 Downing Street after having retired from that newspaper and an AC from New Scotland Yard had gone on to be a journalist with this, or a similar newspaper. As more and more revelations came out, there was a worry that the Prime Minister David Cameron had made a mistake in not checking out Andy Coulson, former editor of the News of the World, before employing him at 10 Downing Street.

More and more revelations came out; the senior police officers involved in the scenario were invited to attend a Select Committee for Home Affairs – Sir Paul Stephenson, Commissioner for the Metropolitan Police appeared before that committee. He resigned his position in July 2011. John Yates, AC Counter Terrorism also appeared before that committee. He also resigned. Various people also resigned from News International, the conglomerate who produced the news of the world. One gentleman resigned from the Wall Street Journal after 52 years service. Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International in London, also resigned. Rupert Murdoch flew into London and closed the News of the World after 168 years.

After a series of smoke and fires within the precincts of Parliament, including hours of televised select committees, we are now no nearer into knowing, who, how, what reasons for, when, or how many? These are all forensic things that need to be known before one can make any judgment on what really happened. The Police (MPS) are further investigating the matter. They now have 50 officers on the case, although only 136 of the victims hacked have been notified and there are many thousands of victims yet to be spoken to by police. For all the sound and fury of this matter, there has been precious little progress made and it is quite significantly worrying that this is supposed to be one of the biggest scandals in British life since 1936, yet so little has been done, apart from a parade of MPs lining up to do a circus act within the chamber or the Select Committees. Oh and amusingly enough, Rupert Murdoch was assaulted with a custard pie made of shaving foam whilst speaking in the committee rooms. He stated that his appearance was the most humbling day of his life.

Nonetheless, what progress? None that I can discern; no forensic questioning on the part of anybody. No real attempt to establish a global version of the scenario with facts – who did what, what happened, when did it happened, where did it happen, who were the principals involved. All this is meat and drink to a police investigation, yet everybody else decided to turn Sherlock Holmes to try and investigate the matter, without any legal qualifications, or forensic training in police interview and investigation techniques. It makes me so sad that we as a country could have been so silly as not to know that this was all bread and circuses. Someone has said that all of these “investigations” such as the speeches in Parliament and the select committees have been a put up job so that the establishment could jump out of the way of the boulder which was coming towards them. Is there more than a grain of truth in what this person has said. Only you can decide.

Of bread and circuses

2011-07-20T07:40:00.001-07:00

The questions have been asked: should the Murdochs resign? I dont know about the Murdochs resigning; I have not seen one of any of the people involved doing anything sensible about anything really, except create bread and circuses.

We are no further forward in getting to the root of this matter than we were years ago when this first started. Thats because no-one is taking a long forensic look at it and asking the relevant probing questions and then drilling down until the evidence points in a direction, then following that direction.

All thats been achieved has been a few MPs saying "Please James and Rupert, did you know anything". Answer "No, I did not". "Oh, okay then, thanks awfully!"

Isn't there something so terribly British about the polite but consistent way we fail within our Parliament and Press to get to the vital points of evidence that underpin these enquiries. But the search for truth is not a circus, nor a zoo. These past two weeks have been a spectacle in truth evasion and no-one acquainted with the search for real evidence would be fooled by it in any way whatsoever.

Lack of forensic skilling lets down Parliamentary Select Committee

2011-07-19T12:45:00.000-07:00

Various commentators have said that a lack of forensic questioning let down the Parliamentary Select Committees to day, in dealing with Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Yates, Brooks and the two Murdochs. I am inclined to agree with this view.

Everyone involved in these sorts of processes knows that when such an interview is taking place, you start first with a global scenario of facts; then you break that scenario down into separate strands, where you pursue the line of questioning down the strand where-ever the evidence goes, or create sub strands and go down those as far as the evidence goes. Eventually what you get is a series of spidergraphs with an answer at the end of each one. Then you join up the spidergraphs to get the whole of a reconstructed picture which you have obtained by interview evidence. And each of these spidergraphs are started off by asking the key questions.

I noticed this failure of forensic intensity especially when they were interviewing AC John Yates; I kept waiting for them to ask him what he did with the evidence that he had before him. He never answer that questioned because it was not asked.

Example: Assistant Commissioner, dealing with the bags of evidence which were kept at New Scotland Yard, in Room 233 and pertaining to the phone hacking, can you tell me what happened to those bags of evidence?

You are showing that you know where the bags are, what room they were in and at what time and what action was taken? And you know that because you draw together previous strands of the interview to get to that point.

The Select Committee never got anywhere near it; sadly they just did not know how to question Yates. And thats just one example of how they failed to question.

So we can only hope that the police and the IPCC do a bit better than MPs. Thats my sincere hope?

Sir Paul Stephenson at the Select Committee

2011-07-19T05:50:00.000-07:00

19 Jul 2011:
I have seen the Sir Paul Stephenson interview by the Select Committee. To be honest I think it was deeply flawed; I would have thought that an interview drew together lines of enquiry which had been well thought out and that there was a logical corollary between each strand of the enquiry and the next. But here was a scatter gun and accusative/confrontational approach by this committee which did not seem to get to the point of anything. Furthermore, they were asking him questions which required a greater grasp of detail that the Commissioner possessed and to be frank I dont think it was the Commissioner's fault. Even to the extent of the manpower numbers involved in MPS, which I think were nearer 45,000 and not the 50,000 which Sir Paul stated. I dont think overall that the Select Committee carried out a professional interrogation of the character. I dont think they are going to get any sort of overview of the police from what has been stated.

I am further disappointed to know that the Committee dont realise that the police are very highly trained, far more highly trained than any group of Members of Parliament; these are the people that we expect to extract details of serious crime. Having said that, I just think that Sir Paul bought them and sold them with a smile on his face and I am ashamed to say that I just dont think they are any further forward than when they started.

A shameful and amateurish performance on the part of our politicians. Why am I not surprised.

Is this the end of the Metropolitan Police?

2011-07-18T06:35:00.000-07:00

I so like the way these people speak with wide eyed innocence about what has happened; it comes as a surprise to many of them. Clearly Sir Paul has been most taken aback by what has happened.

I cant help feeling that within London at least, the decay of morality and ethical behaviour has been going on for some years now. I just cannot imagine that this sort of behaviour would have happenbed in the same way 40 years ago. But there again, we are talking about a situation in the 1960's and 1970's whereby the ganglords held sway and looked after anything going on within their patch. Whats happening now however is that I feel that a large number of these spin offs from the old East End and other places have now moved into white collar crime; therefore you now have a proliferation of blagging, hacking and scamming. I also believe that the dividing line between those who are investigating crime and those committing it has got a lot thinner. In that way, there's a possibility that they are all in it together. You dont know who is who; the chief of police who is at a press luncheon, or the journalist who is sharing information with police with a view to potential hacking.

So in lots of ways, the characters are the same - Sir Robert Mark investigated corruption after the scandals of the Krays and Richardsons. Now the scenario has changed but only in the way that information is still exchanged under the guise of co-operation and corporate hospitality. But there is no doubt that it is still corruption.

Its just that whats happening appears to be that much more respectable because its done under the guise of corporate movement. Those who used to be gangsters have now moved into the area of media and exercise their influence in that way.

Nonetheless, the similarity between the 1960's and 1970's is that there obviously appear to be this unhealthy closeness between those committing crime of whatever sort (in the corprate sense) and those investigating it. And whatever is being said, there is also an unhealthy alliance between those in SW1, the Police and the Media. Too much time is being spent on all these people in "Westminster Village" with the result that the rest of London is suffering. Way too many resources are being poured into this concentration.

Where am I going with this argument? I think we require a whole new system of policing within Inner London. I dont think that the Metropolitan Police are the people for the job anymore. Therefore I think that the City of London police should be tasked to take over the position of policing for London and the Met should be disbanded and reformed into the Outer London police service. That should solve the problem of the Met having lost their way. I dont think there should be a Met Police anymore because I think the culture is getting in the way of them making any more advances in policing. Their focus has become too narrow; they are not police for London anymore but merely police for small sectionalised interests. We need a force that is for Outer London and a more specialist one for inner London. Sorry but if we cant clear up this institutionalised corruption then to me its clear that the Met have to go.

Too much history there, for my liking. As a postscript, as I am writing this, the resignation of John Yates has also been announced, Yates being the Assistant Commissioner (or one of them). It is clear that their wide eyed innocence is no longer serving them well; that what they have become embroiled in has certainly engulfed all of them and that we would now be better off if the Metropolitan Police Service were replaced in its entirety along the lines I have defined in this piece.

Solving the problem of bail under PACE 1984

2011-07-01T11:42:00.001-07:00

Now it has been discovered that there is a problem with PACE 1984 in that you cannot extend the period of bail beyond 96 hours. Previously the police had thought that you could interrupt the detained person's spell in custody, bail the detained person, continue the investigations and ask the person to come in when the investigations were complete. Now the Manchester case has meant that the police cannot bail at all unless the suspect completes the whole pace clock within the contemporaneous 96 hour period.

So what my suggestion is to this is that PACE is changed so that it cycles over a 14 day period and during that period the police have to complete the whole of their investigations with the detained person OR release them without charge (excepting that they can be re-arrested on the presentation of new evidence but then that was always the case anyway).

Further to this that the following rules apply:-

Custody Sgt authorised custody - 0 to 72 hours.

Superintendent Extension 72 hours to 96 hours.

Magistrate extension - 96 to 336 hours.

At any time during this period a detained person can be released on bail and asked to report in once every 24 hours or 48 hours. At the end of the period, if no new evidence is adduced, then the investigation terminates and the person is released without charge.

This solution gets round the problem of bail; it allows the police long enough to carry out their enquiries in most cases (including PACE interviews) and it allows the freeing up of cell space because most detained persons can be bailed up to 14 days. I think it is a commendable solution and I would think that the Ministry of Justice would take it on board. I have written to them with brief details and also to my Member of Parliament, John Denham.

BT Police - armed and dangerous?

2011-06-14T06:51:00.000-07:00

I have been investigating the internet edition of the London Evening Standard.

Someone has come up with the bright idea of having armed BT Police on the Underground network so that terrorists cannot come on to the network and blow everyone to kingdom come. This intrinsically sensible sounding idea is alright until you come to consider how every passenger is considered to be a terrorist and not just the terrorist themselves. Yes, the terrorist could be you and every member of railway staff on all the TOCs plus TFL is made aware of that fact.

So when you de-train from your broken down train at Woking, or elsewhere and start to walk down the track and find a police officer in a flak jacket gazing fondly down his Heckler and Koch at your goodself, remember that you are thought of as the terrorist.

Dont send to ask for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

South West Trains - and the vexed question of legal authority

2011-06-12T01:43:00.000-07:00

The question with which I am dealing in this part of my blog is whether the events of Friday 10th June 2011 at Woking give rise to any questions of law. What we are dealing with here is a situation in which passengers had to decamp on to the permanent way after being trapped in stationery trains for five hours or so due to a theft of signal cables. Apparently they were threatened with arrest by British Transport Police on their arrival at the platforms in Woking.

As I see it the central argument here is the question of lawful excuses; did they have the proper legal reasons to be on the trains and stations at the time and did they have legal reason to be on the permanent way. The central point that any police officer should have been seeing is that the passengers decamped to save their own lives and the lives of others; they were on the permanent way to prevent further distress or injury to themselves and others. Therefore they had lawful excuse or reason to be on the permanent way. And the other important thing to realise is that if they were all in possession of valid tickets, then they also had lawful and valid reasons to be on or about the railway property.

This is not the first time I have seen the BT Police get their facts mixed up about people's right to be on or about the railway. They have got confused with the fact that it is private property. But if people have permission to be on private property in the first place and you lock them in trains for many hours, they still have lawful excuse to attempt to free themselves and use whatever methodology they have within their powers to get to safety.

So it behoves the BT Police in the future to ask themselves what are the real reasons why things are happening and not to seek to arrest people on grounds which dont really hold water.

Rise and Rise of the Middle Classes within England

2011-05-30T10:30:00.000-07:00

Rise and Rise of the Middle Classes within England

This is a fun game that all can play. Basically at the time of writing, we have been through a series of prosecutions in which MPs and Peers have been tried and found guilty for their part in the expenses scandal. But I suppose that’s not the most fun that one can have with this particular subject. The most fun that one can have is realising that they genuinely don’t know what they have done and are genuinely confused with what they now know to be the outcome, ie prison time, or time outside prison with a tag and a home curfew. One of them leaving court just the other day looked genuinely bewildered as if to say “After all I have done for society and all the money I have put into it, why have I ended up in this particular mess?” The answer being of course, that its not the money which you put into it, or the so-called public service which you put into it; it’s the fact that you more than willingly helped yourself over the years to a substantial amount of money that was not yours, that you had not right to claim and after a while it became indefensible. That’s also when you are found guilty of an offence, when the mens rea (state of mind) of the person is such that any reasonable judge and jury come to the conclusion that the person meant to do it, that he or she felt that it was their right to do it. What makes that frame of mind is something which I feel sure is worthy of investigation. There has been a lot of argument that these people have been brought up no different from you or I; that they have all had an average middle class upbringing. Perhaps that’s the problem. No seriously, perhaps that really is the problem. Lets examine the myth of the middle class upbringing. Prep school, private school, then Oxbridge, then possibly a few years in the Civil Service, or teaching before going on to stand for a position as an MP, or councillor with a local authority, followed by elevation to the House of Lords. Thereby having missed most of the checks and balances that some people go through to see the wood for the trees. These are circumstances in which the person is protected by money; is protected by a nice home and a “good education” and later on is protected by the family that is the civil service in the higher echelons, or teaching. Then, the elevation to the gentlemen’s clubs which are the local council chamber and/or the House of Lords. Whether one likes it or not, such an upbringing is privileged and not within the normal bounds. That’s because no-one normal expects to get into the House of Lords; they know they are not going to get into it. That’s because it’s the province of the favoured set; the set of people who have had gilded lives. And if this sounds like sour grapes, well it is not. Because I would rather have had my life the way it is than any of these privileged lives. I say that because of the way that some of these people have ended up; totally bewildered and saying to themselves “If I have done all this, than why has x and y happened to me”? That’s because the upbringing, although not wrong, is inadequate. It is out of step with the reality. And it also means that during the time that the individual has had to eventually commit fraud or expenses overclaims, or whatever, that individual has themselves been unreal and has surrounded himself or herself with unreal people. Yes, I have honestly heard that sort of thing as a recent excuse “Well the rest of them did it in the House of Lords; it was accepted behaviour”. That’s very sad, reiterating what it is that was regarded as the group norm. It could not have been the group norm because otherwise a lot more Lords would be in the Crown Court; what I suspect was the group norm was a form of bullying, of sad chauvinistic behaviour, of picking on the weaker ones as a form of initiation rites and saying “Go on Fred, we’re all fiddling their expenses, its absolutely acceptable, old chap”. But if that was really the case why are they not all ending up in Southwark Crown Court. That sort of groupy behaviour only goes to make the thing even more terrible than it is already.

That’s not really the main point of what I am saying in this section; by the time Fred has been elevated to the Peerage, he or she is pretty unreal already. He or she is already part of the pomp and circumstance ceremony, which is nothing to do with everyday reality for most men, women and children within this sceptred isle. No the real point, is the way that the “middle classes” see things. That’s the way of thinking about things that can really see no wrong. There’s no real study of ethics and morals here. I constantly use the example of my ex General Practitioner as an example of this. Not only was he (or she) informed many many times that I thought I was diabetic but that they wanted to go against what I knew to be so about my own body and decide that they would treat me as some kind of psychiatric case who needed subduing. I needed tranquilising and I needed anti-depressants (and other things, like Stemetil) at every turn. This went on for absolutely years, at this particular practice. It went on for about 14 years until my greatest friend L suggested that I went to another practice across the road from the council estate where I have resided for the past seven years. The practice nurse there immediately diagnosed that I was diabetic. She said that I had sugar in my urine. When they took bloods I came back with 7.4 bg count, which is over the limit for being pre-diabetic and well into the diabetic range. I was immediately prescribed metformin and I have never felt so well for years after taking these tablets every day. That’s in comparison to the bad tempered and depressed person which I constantly was when I was with the other practice.

The reason why I have used my General Practitioner as an example is this is because of the way the middle classes think; they think in a narrow band and the people they collect around them are symptomatic of the way they think in that narrow band. So this General Practitioner was practising in one of the more middle class areas of Southampton, where a lot of the people were ludicrously well and where the babies were fabulously well cared for, even though their well heeled (and in some cases keeled) mums would bring them into the mother and baby clinic. What they did not see within that practice was people who were unwell (like me). People who were unwell would have been a drain on their resources. Yet all I would have wanted would have been for my diabetes to be diagnosed; was that too much to ask?

My next question is, can you imagine what sort of an upbringing that general practitioner must have had; been spoon fed through private schools, medical training, F1 and F2 positions in hospitals and then doing the examinations for the GP position? Although from the way he went on I sincerely doubt that he was ever an F1 and an F2; he looked as if he were too frightened to be anything at a hospital. But then perhaps that’s my nasty working class way of looking at his career? However to be right up there with very high earners, on about £100,000 a year and not even being able to diagnose diabetes; I think there must be something wrong there, surely. I think what was really worrying about that practice was that they knew nothing about illness; illness was for something else and somebody else. More likely to succeed was a surgery that catered for a population known to be a catchment area that would not cause too many ripples; where people had a nice standard of living with access to private medicine and fit young mums with disgustingly healthy children. That was their reality. Just like being at home. But my argument is, do not working class people deserve to be fit as well, do they not deserve a share of what the NHS has to offer; don’t they have children as well? What this general practitioner was doing was that he was operating on the basis of medical selection; he was doing a variant of genetic engineering that would not have been out of place within the Nazi regime. If that’s being too extreme for some readers, then I am sorry but how would you like it if you had been the one chosen to die whilst more “deserving” people had been chosen to live and all for the sake of 24 metformin tablets per week? That’s the sort of thing that cant be right. That’s what I mean about the rise of the middle classes; they don’t want nasty things like illnesses to blur their idyllic view of things and middle class doctors are the same as other middle class people in their idle and blinkered view of what really goes on.

As I have already stated, these people get really fabulous money in their roles as “doctors”. And it’s a never ending surprise to other, lesser, mortals when these “doctors” turn out to be less than salubrious. Lets not dwell on the case of Doctor Shipman, who first alerted us to the case of middle class doctors turned bad. Or maybe yes, lets concentrate on it. Because that man killed about 200 identifiable patients and probably a great deal more unidentifiable ones. We shall never know for certain how many people that man killed but I bet he did it with a smile and “It was all in their best interests” disposition. Just like some of the general practitioners I have been describing. Not Donald you have diabetes its been “Well we have counselled you because it has been thought you have pre-diabetes for the past year or so and we have warned you!” What codology that turned out to be. It was not the case at all; it turned out that I had full blown diabetes for years and that chap would not diagnose it; it’s a corollary of the Shipman saga whatever anyone likes to think. Sooner or later I would have become really ill with the complications of diabetes. He still would never have diagnosed it. There’s a real criminal act in there somewhere. Lets hope that someone discovers what this guy is really like before someone gets really hurt.

That’s not the only reason why I don’t like what is risibly called “The Middle Classes”. I don’t like it because the just don’t have any feelings about them worthy of the name. I noticed this because I had enough of it at teacher training college; I don’t want to be thought sexist but the amount of fur coat and no knickers there among the women had to be seen to be believed and the men certainly were not any too much better. That’s because it was a place where the rich and monied wanted to send their kids; more than a smattering of well to do names and well to do offspring peopled that place when I was there. All about money. But a lot of the people with money were some of the most disgusting specimens that you ever saw; they certainly would not want anything to do with the likes of “my sort” of person. Every woman who went there was engaged to some well to do, or the other; until they realised that these well to dos would chuck them over at the drop of a hat for a female that was nearer. After all, what price long distance relationships? They gave up their long standing relationships and found relationships with the few men that were brave enough to go to teacher training. That’s what I found with this particular college; that despite all that precious middle class talk about being happily engaged, most of those women found the reality of it to be too much and turned to the proximity of the nearest pair of trousers. In that respect, everyone a winner, I suppose.

Even then the stench of middle class hypocrisy and double standards did not manage to elude them; that’s why I was chucked out of teacher training college. Not because I was a bad student, not because I was lacking in brains, not because I was unable to write an essay, or dare I say it, an extended essay. No, it was simply because I had a close liaison with a woman that most teachers and senior staff there wanted to have the same sort of liaison with, Simple as that. I had got what they had most wanted and I was to pay the penalty of being kicked out for it. In reality I should have seen the writing on the wall. Only 12 months before that I had been openly criticised for seeing another woman whom lots of other blokes there had found irresistably attractive. But if that was the case why did she not go out with them. Some of these fatal embraces don’t seem to have an answer. What it generally boils down to is the feeling that the middle classes with their wealth and their education must get what they want. Damn it all they are entitled to it and devil take the hindmost. Damn it all I am the Lord High Executioner of this college and that damn student is seeing the woman I want; fie on him and devil take it. That man shall suffer for it. If that behaviour is not the behaviour of a barrel full of mad hatters then call me Shirley and have done with it.

A lot of this sort of behaviour makes excellent television of course. Everyone will be aware of the BBC series “The Apprentice” in which a lot of mostly middle class boys and girls are put together in a house which people would only ever dream of and asked to do various tasks in order to form up, or start a business. The fun of it is that its obvious from the very start that what is on their curriculum vitae is unsustainable, that none of them have really run their own businesses and that those of them who state they have been doctors have barely scraped their F1 without being shown the front door of A&E, or being asked to shut it from the other side on their way out of it. That such people have dreams way beyond their actual abilities is exactly what I have been going on about in this particular piece. They have eyes for the whole chicken and mushroom pie, whereas their tummies are saying that they only need one slice of it before their small appetites are satiated.

I suppose that’s the fundamental thing that I am getting at; being brought up middle class is a one way street with blinkers all the way down. It looks good provided that one does not look round but there is a danger in looking round. That’s not to say that there are not good middle class people; what I have drawn for the sake of brevity in the argument is the common stereotype.

You must forgive me. I don’t know what it is to be middle class because I am not from that class. I don’t kid myself that my education (of degree level standard, just working for my second BA degree) puts me into the frame for someone who is middle class. I live on a working class estate (council estate) in Southampton, my furnishings are as poor and as impoverished as it is likely to be. I have a new kitchen and bathroom in my studio flat which has made life far more worth living. I have come to pension age and I still have not got any money. Yet the odd thing is that I probably know and have known far more life than middle class people with all their flash cars, money and fancy houses. Heaven knows what class I am from or what class I am in now but I don’t think that its any readily identifiable one. What I do think is that its utterly essential to have good knowledge of what goes on in life, to continue to educate oneself about what really goes on and also to be humble. If that is something that I would criticise about the middle and upper classes it is that they are just not humble. They really think they have got the answers. Like the Peer who stood outside that courtroom after having been found guilty of fiddling expenses, he really thought that he had given his all to society. No, to give your all in a position is when you are really poor and you don’t claim expenses because you are morally and ethically decent. That’s really giving your all. The excuse of “Well the others told me to claim because they were all doing it (overclaiming) does not hold water. What they were really saying is, don’t show us up by not claiming because if people don’t claim then the money wont be available in the future. That’s how greed gets its start. Something’s owed to us and we (middle classes) should be the ones to get it. What a shame that we have never got over and grown out of this palpable greed in our society.

But as I have so often said in this piece, this is all to do with morals and ethics and that’s something maybe that’s the subject of future debate within these pages.

Clegg spouts off whilst Tsunami rages

2011-03-13T08:52:00.000-07:00

What has happened in Japan has been one of the worst earthquakes in living memory and the Tsunami which followed it of epic proportions. Our thoughts must therefore go out to those who perished and those who are dispossessed. We cannot possibly comprehend the magnitude of what has occured on these far shores.

To contrast this terrible thing, on this, our small island, we have to put up with the wailings of a selfish man who has lost a bit of popularity, or a few votes. Yes, I speak of Nick Clegg, the alleged Deputy Prime Minister, bluffing and blustering his way through the Liberal Party so-called conference.

This must be middle class angst at its very worst; to be as extremely blinkered as this. What would have been better would have been to have cancelled the heap of self-serving psychobabble of a conference as a mark of respect to the terrible tragedy that has occured on the other side of the world. But no, these middle class schoolboys and schoolgirls want to carry on their gibberish in the midst of suffering. Quite frankly, a plague on all their houses.

On becoming 60

2011-03-12T04:33:00.001-08:00

Well, that was definitely a bit of a shock. One day 59 years of age and the next 60 years of age. My memory wandered back to when I was about 19 years of age and I had just started work with the Inner London Education Authority but somehow I could not concentrate on it. All those days just seemed to be squeezed into a couple of seconds. Time goes by in a flash; its so incredible. I had started to hope that I had done enough in my working life to justify retirement. I think thats possible.

I remind myself of my curriculum vitae:-

1970 - 1973 Inner London Education Authority - Clerical Officer, students grants and transport manager at Educational Television Centre.

1973-1975 Teacher trainee at Bishop Otter College - unfortunately left without graduating, which I put down to youth and inexperience.

1975-1976 Freelance office manager

1977-1980 British Rail - Booking Office Manager at Oxshott Station

1980-1982 Galdor Computing, Surbiton - Operator and Administrator

1982-1986 - Inland Revenue, Tax Officer (Districts and Head Office Relief)

1987-1992 - Casual work and Accountancy work

1992-1995 - BA(Hons) Accounting Degree at Southampton Institute

1996-1999 Teaching and Accounting work as tax semi senior

1999-2006 Voluntary Welfare rights work

2006-2007 South West Trains Revenue Protection Assistant

Since 2007, I have not been well enough to do any work, having had a series of operations. Nonetheless, if you count 1970-2007, thats still 37 productive years.

If this seems like a whole series of justifications, its only justifying my career to myself; I seem to be my own harshest critic. Nonetheless its good to know that at least I can go forward into retirement knowing I have at least made an effort to do something. Cheers!

Appointment with the DWP

2011-02-28T13:36:00.001-08:00

I have been to the appointment with the Disability Benefits Adviser. They have said to me that the benefit of Income Support is being changed over and will become Employment Support Allowance. I have pointed out that I am not fit enough to get work because of my arm and my depressive state, which has been chronic for many years. The DBA has said that I will get a medical eventually and I will have to attend, although because they have so many to reassess it may be some time before I get an appointment. I have pointed out that I am 60 next week and will be 61 next year so they only have about 11 clear months to do anything about it. The Adviser did confess that I may only get the medical on the eve of my 61st birthday. I think this is probably a covert way of saying that nothing much is going to happen. For which I am extremely grateful. Illness is not the way I wanted to end my working career but I must say that my working life has spanned the period from 15 years to 57 years; a working life of 42 years has not been bad and I am grateful for small mercies.

At the risk of sounding smug I dont think I need fear the medical, whenever it arrives.

My appointment with DWP

2011-02-25T09:41:00.000-08:00

I have an appointment with DWP on Monday at the local jobcentre. They want me to see an Incapacity Benefit adviser in order that they can ascertain whether I am ready for work immediately, not ready for work at all, or ready for work in the future. I just do not understand what bit of not fit for work they dont understand. Are they not happy with the fact that I had a hernia operation at the beginning of 2008 which then developed a wound infection from which I almost died, then had another operation two weeks later to drain it. In the intervening period I was on drips for five days within the AAU.

That whole process took me virtually a year from which to recover; I was fit for nothing in 2009 and then in January 2010 I had another operation for a cubital tunnel in mt left arm. They may need to open that up again. In the meantime I have suffered from anxiety, depression, pre-diabetes and it is difficult to estimate the effect of so many anaesthetics on my system. I shall be 60 on March 10th, yet they have still called me up.

I dont understand what bit of "pensioner" they dont understand either. They seriously think that they are going to be able to find someone work who is of pensionable/retirement age, who has had very serious illnesses and who still needs to be hospitalised for more operations?

Its the complete and utter insanity of all these processes which really get me? I just dont understand how the DWP keep doing it, or what on earth they hope to get out of it? Perhaps if they tune into this blog, or to my FB page, which I understand is the kind of thing they do, they can explain to me whats going on.

Benefit cuts and how they will affect Londoners

2010-10-24T04:17:00.000-07:00

Do you recognise the house in the picture. Its likely that you do if you have seen the 1966 film "Bullit" starring Steve McQueen and Robert Vaughan. It was the house of Senator Walter Chalmers, the corrupt official trying to get his own way by bringing the mob to justice in San Francisco.

Its unlikely that anyone would get to live in a house like this in London, although there have been allegations that people have been living on benefits and lording it up in Kensington and Chelsea whilst people who are working are unable to get property in any part of London.

Well guess what? The ToriesLibDems have just made it that bit more difficult for anyone to get ANY property in London if they are on benefits. The reasoning is that they have said that the maximum limit for property will be set at £400.00 a week rented accommodation. That would just about lease you the average shoe box. There are many families whose accommodation costs more than this; where will they now go. Friends of mine are renting property in the suburbs for about £700.00 per month and the last I heard of them was years ago? Where will all these people live?

The scares of housing benefit people being cleansed out of the Smoke are now running so rife that councils are block booking bed and breakfast in Hastings and other places to deal with the overspill and the dispossessed. The ToryLibDams have also put the blocks on anyone under 35 being able to get anything other than the single room rate. In other words, you will virtually not qualify for anything other than a bedsit if you are under 35 years old. And I think there must be a shortage of bedsit stock in London, just as there is a limit to everything.

This reminds me so much of my experience in London, leaving home in my early 20's to find that all I had was a crabby bedsit or series of them, being too afraid to get a flat because I could not afford it. Ultimately and eventually being forced out of London and never able to go back because of the price of accommodation. The ToryLibDam idea of landlords lowering their prices because of the lack of availability of housing benefit is not going to work. So all we are left with is the professional classes being able to rent property. Whole swaythes of Londoners will be dispossessed under the new rules.

This is one of the most frightening things that I have seen since Thatcher. In lots of ways this government is going to be worse. Its kidding us that everything is fair. How about this for fairness. A judge has ruled that the taxpayer will have to pick up the tab for BT pensions. This could be as much as £22.4BN. Not something that Thatcher readily mentioned during her years in office when she privatised it.

We obviously recall someone in a country not so far aware that carried on this sort of cleansing regime during the 1930's and 1940's. The parallels are uncanny. Some years later people though it was not a terribly good idea. We must fight and fight hard the idea that whole cabels of people have to be transferred from London to bed and breakfast accommodation because they cant afford it. Oh and one last thing, I hope this government gets on ITS bike, rather than telling us to do so. Disgusting is not the word I would be seeking.

The Cuts - A response from your Sponsor

2010-10-20T07:47:00.000-07:00

Well campers, the spending review has come and gone and frankly I did not think that this was as horrible as had been heretofore portrayed. Lete start with the areas which I know something about: welfare and taxation.

In terms of welfare, he's broadly trying to save between £20-£30BN over the 4 years if I dont miss my guess, so thats £7BN a year. To do this, he will raise the pension age to 66 in 2020, cut housing benefit costs by about 10%, say that higher rate tax payers cannot have child benefit, make alterations to tax credits and create a Universal Benefit to replace income support, housing benefit and sundry other benefits. He will cap the number of benefits one can claim at about £26,000 per year.

Now call me an old stick in the mud if you must but I cannot see this as a decimation of the welfare benefits systems as a whole. In fact those who will be worse off will be those people insisting on staying in Mayfair or Belgravia at the expense of the taxpayer and claiming welfare benefits of about £5,000 per week including housing benefit. They of course will have to move (cries of shame) whilst people like me who live in a studio flat in Southampton for £60.00 per week will remain totally forgotten and untouched.

The tax situation will be challenged because for a premium of £900M the Chancellor of the Exhequer hopes to recoup £7BN tax avoided and evaded over the period; this seems fair enough.

So for me, maybe a broadly neutral or non-event and certainly not one which I would have thought would cause all the hype that it has. Maybe I have missed something in the detail but I have made ten or so pages of notes in my bijou Asda note-book so one would have thought perhaps not.

I await with interest what the major pundits have to say; at the moment I am awash with Labour people saying its an outrage. This from a government which was thrown out 5 months ago and will never be missed. Its a funny old life.

Post scriptum

I have had time to consider my words above; there is bad news after all. That is to say, that if you are on Incapacity Benefit for more than 1 years (or Employment and Support Allowance equivalent) and you live with someone (partner) then you will have your allowance terminated and your partner will have to take up the slack.

There will be a concerted effort on the part of this government to try to get people off Incapacity Benefit; there will be a programme of reviews and presumably the horrible ATOS origin will be at the middle of them. Where will all the jobs come from?

Those in care homes will lose their mobility allowances.

Security of tenure will be taken away from new social housing tenants and they will be allocated 5-10 year short term tenancies.

So, not such good news after all. I will be picking all of this up in future posts.

One law for me and one law for you

2010-10-16T06:11:00.001-07:00

Have you heard the one about the cuts? Me neither. Although what I suspect is happening is that lots of favoured causes are finding their way round the guillotine being wielded by Osborne and some of the causes are even being talked up by Cameron. Apparently no cuts for the two aircraft carriers, so that wont be much change out of another few £BN and of course those unlucky investors with Equitable Life wont have to forego a £1.5BN payout and the armed forces wont have to suffer more than a 7-8% reduction in their budgets.

Nonetheless, in other news, there is all kinds of trouble for benefit scroungers, child benefit claimants who are higher rates, policemen and other unworthy causes who are yet to get the axe. Let crime run rampant and oldsters go without bus passes while we bail out the pensions corporations and the banks. What is it with this government and finance? Why are they so transfixed on it.

Later still we learn that people are dodging tax to the tune of £128BN and Whitehall is wasting £20BN on spurious procurement (this according to Sir Philip Green, lest anyone gets upset with myself).

I think we are all answering our own questions here. As a natiom we are wasting money and are making non-attempts to do anything about it because "Not In My Back Yard". Everyone is a special interest group and all will have made their bleating representations to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. So there's nothing left for George to do except to roll over and play dead.

It will be a great day for this nation when something actually happens. In the meantime I am not holding my breath.

Waiting for Godot (2)

2010-09-14T12:18:00.001-07:00

Waiting for Godot. The world is full of surprises. The Court of Appeal has said that although they cannot technically take their cases to appeal at the Supreme Court,a point of important public interest has arisen. That point of interest is whether or not the courts can deal with such matters, or whether the Bill of Rights 1689 and Parliamentary Sovereignty stipulate that these matters can only be dealt with in Parliament itself, which is the highest court in the land.

I was under the impression that Article IX of the Bill of Rights stipulated that the rights protected were the rights to free speech and the prevention of being sued for libel by what has been said within the precincts of Parliament. It was not there to prevent MPs and others fiddling their expenses which have been paid for by the taxpayers.

The public purse is robbed by these sorts of actions. My opinion for what its worth states that these sorts of cases should be tried by the criminal courts as they would be in any other situation. I hope my instincts prove to be correct.

Waiting for Godot

2010-09-14T01:09:00.000-07:00

I have now spotted that our three musketeer MPs, Chaytor, Norley and Devine are listed in the Court of Appeal as to whether their cases are to go forward to the Supreme Court. Their argument is that parliamentary privilege protected their expenses activities and claims and therefore only Parliament can adjudge their activities. Whereas the thoughts of the Judge in Southwark Crown Court and the Court of Appeal was that in fact, the law is there to protect the privilege of freedom of speech within Parliamentary precincts and not to allow or sanction criminal acts.

It will be interested whether these three are allowed to go forward to the Supreme Court; it will surely only be along the lines of the same point of law that has been put forward to the Court of Appeal. I cannot honestly see it, as there is no fresh point of law that has been introduced that would make the case suitable for review by that Higher Court. So unless there is a novel aspect that my brain has not thought of, then I expect to hear by about 10.30 that their leave to appeal to the Supreme Court from the Court of Appeal has been turned down.

Interesting though how they just keep persisting in it.

Tax need not be taxing.

2010-09-13T13:19:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the relaunched blog. Top of my agenda today is the amount of uncollected taxes which are to the extreme detriment of HMRC. The amounts in fact are totally and absolutely staggering and could be as much as £128BN according to the tax pundits. So I ask why it is the Osborne, Cameron and Co are not dealing with the matter in the way that they should, instead of bantering on about benefits scroungers and knocking a further £4BN of the benefits bill.

This staggering amount of taxes uncollected and evaded must be at an all time high and I have already communicated with my MP to ask why this ConDem government is not doing something about it. Watch this space for future results. In the meantime I am flabbergasted by the sheer scale of the monies owing.

Denham plans for Universities crash and burn

2008-11-01T12:24:00.000-07:00

Happy after having taken money away from ELQ students which he then stated were going to assist the cause of new and younger students going to University, Denham has now said that the amount of additional university places 2009 will be capped at 10,000, which is 5,000 less than expected.

The link for this information is contained at this point in my blog today:-

Guardian newspaper web edition

As if the cap on the number of students is not enough, which goes directly against the grain of Denham's policy of opening things up for youngsters to go to University, he has also taken money from the ELQ budget to finance this very purpose, which is now failing. He cant subsidise the grant for the number of students who wish to go and therefore has set the limit on an income of £50,000 for middle income parents, which is way below what any Government Minister can earn and way below what most people actually do eatn.

What the government have done instead is to say that these students can have more loans. Thats exactly what I always said; who wants to leave University with a debt of more than £20,000. Thats no way to start a career, with a great big burden of debt around one's back.

The arithmetic employed by this government does not add up and as usual the students are the one's suffering from these bad and lazy decisions. When I think of this government, I can hear the sound of one hand clapping (Famous Zen saying).

Foundation Degrees to be awarded by FE Colleges

2008-10-17T16:06:00.000-07:00

After having made a lot of fuss about the government's ELQ policy, I now read with surprise that there is a cunning plan afooot, indeed encouraged by legislation that the Further Education Colleges should now award their own foundation degrees.

That would mean that the Further Education Colleges would have access to the very HE funding that universities were told would be theirs if they changed course and started verifying foundation degrees.

The question is whether the further education colleges are capable of verifying their own degrees and whether they have the technical, academic and pedagogic backgrounds so to do. Certainly, my own anecdotal evidence is that they do not. I speak of an incident ten or so years ago when I was teaching HND Business Studies at a further education college. Now this would be, one supposes, an equivalent thing to the foundation degrees of 2008. I was told that my efforts were no longer required and that it was not quite their thing. Even though I offered to get my own university (of which I am a graduate) to franchise the said HND.

What was their thing; health and beauty, cookery? Whither foundation degrees in those subjects. Of course they are needed but hardly to be verified by Universities.

What is being said is that there is a market, shall we call it sub-prime, in more vocational subjects, such as the ones I have mentioned and lets allow the FE colleges to do foundation degrees in these subjects and verify the degrees to the level of that required by the QAA.

This still takes much needed money away from the Universities. Am I being snobby; I would really like to know because I understood that the pot of money available was available for institutions of Higher Education to do higher education learning and not go do degrees in cookery at FE and thus divert even more funds away from Higher Education.

This government seems to have such a distrust of learning. I can see that they would pay out the Queen's shilling to FE to allow them to verify foundation degrees in toast making and basket weaving. But I am seriously asking, is this the way that our much vaunted educational system should be going?

Open University and the Dragon Issue

2008-09-11T04:46:00.000-07:00

The problem, as I see it, is that there is a speech recognition system used by disabled students for their examinations. This system seems to have been used for a number of years without question until some new versions came along which seem to make use of macros. That is the reason why the Open University have said that the students who are using this system for examinations now cannot use it.

There is a logic error in the thought processes of the Open University here. First of all, if the system had been used for years without problem, why is there now a problem. Secondly, Dragon software is not that easy to use, so if students can have the benefit of updated editions which are easier to use why not?

Third, we are talking about students who are already disabled and it is my earnest wish and the wish of a lot of others to get them on to a level playing field with able bodied students. So this problem about "Yes but they might cheat and use macros" is just the faintest bit ridiculous. Yes but so might lots of students. We are talking here about students who are disabled and are closely supervised during their examinations. They want to genuinely pass their examinations and are not interested in cheating. So its all a bit of an indictment about this set of students.

I do have every sympathy for the students that are trying so hard to do their work; they are very deserving of respect. I will call upon the Vice Chancellor of the University to hear all our calls in respect of this issue and allow this group of students access to Dragon software.

Co-funding issue? Are employers interested?

2008-08-29T09:19:00.000-07:00

There is an interesting article in the Times Higher Educational Supplement website about whether or not employers are actually receptive and interested in the ideas of co-funding which have been proposed and promulgated by this government. The article poses many interesting questions, among them what employers know about vocational degrees, which does not seem to be much, according to the article.

Yet this co-funding option is one of the fundamental tenets of the governments elq proclamation; what is it doing to see to it that employers themselves are educated as to the merits/demerits of the co-funding system.

Employers of all sizes of enterprise are likely to be asking the question, what can co-funding do for me, what are the tax breaks involved, can my company afford it, what will it mean in terms of human resources, increased productivity, what will it mean to the bottom line of my business?

So far the government has not got in touch with the employers to answer these important and many other important questions.

This is why the elq situation seems to me at best "half-baked" but why not go the whole hog and say, as I am sure Dustin Hoffman did in the "Graduate" that in fact the whole elq idea is "Fully baked". Evidently this government does not believe in doing its research and is hoping that the good fairy will wave her magic wand and that employers will get interested in co-funding.

The 3 month anniversary of the Select Committee

2008-06-20T08:33:00.000-07:00

It has now been three months, almost exactly to the day, since the ELQ Sub Committee posted their verdict on the DIUS website. Interestingly enough, out of more than 500 entries of pieces of evidence, 496 were not in favour of the proposal to move monies away from those continuing to further their education in a useful way by doing more qualifications. There has been a considerable argument that not only do people need to reskill again and again in the modern economy but need to keep minds and brains alive by continuing their education at whatever age. As well as the widening participation and lifelong learning arguments.

Now it is the three month anniversary of this publication which was not in favour of the ELQ argument as promulgated by Messrs Denham and Rammell, et al, is it not time for this government to formally state what their position now is. I am of the understanding that they should have given a response to the Select Committee by now, or at the very latest by 27th June 2008, which is at the end of next week.

It would be interesting to see what they have finally concluded about the Select Committee, which obviously was not on the side of this government.

Yes Minister - the Hefce figures (Open University) 2007-2011

2008-04-28T07:03:00.000-07:00

Donald Hedges – Following the attendance of Bill Rammell at Conference 2008

Pro-tem report for South Regional Forum on HEFCE estimates 2007-8 to 2011/11 (OU)

Item One – 2007 to 2008

Summary of funding changes 2007-08 to 2010-11

Institution Mainstream funding for non-ELQ students 100,777,907
2007-08 Mainstream funding for exempted ELQ students 2,061,610
2007-08 Mainstream funding for ELQ students aiming for a SIVS qualification 4,896,640
2007-08 Mainstream funding for ELQ students to be phased out 31,628,519
2007-08 Total Funding 139,364,677
2007-08
Open University

This table shows the figures as currently projected by Hefce November 2007. The total funding is £139,364,677 of which £100,777,907 is for current mainstream non ELQ students for the year just passed.

The mainstream funding for exempted ELQ students is £2,061,610 and the funding stream for Study in Vulnerable and Specialist subjects is £4,896,640. The money that is earmarked to be phased out from ELQ students is £31,628,519.

The money obviously has not obviously been phased out from the year just gone but it shows the government and Hefce thinking along these lines and what they do intend to phase out eventually., I think that is quite a clear statement of the rationale behind these moves.

Item 2 – 2008 to 2009

Mainstream funding for non-ELQ students 103,498,911
2008-09 Mainstream funding for exempted ELQ students 2,117,274
2008-09 Targeted allocation for non-exempt ELQ students aiming for a SIVS qualification 5,028,850
2008-09 Supplement to part-time targeted allocation 0
2008-09 Transitional funding for ELQ students currently in the system 22,955,962
2008-09 Safety net funding 5,763,681
2008-09 Total Funding 139,364,677
2008-09

This table shows the position from 2008-2009

The total funding is of the same value for 2007-2008.

The mainstream funding is £3m more, which I believe the Minister did mention in his speech. The exempted value is about £2m and the targeted allocated for strategic and vulnerable subjects is £5m.

In order to shield the University from the nastiest effects of taking £31m, the government and Hefce is giving £28m in transitional and safety net funding.

The difference thus indicated is £0 but the £31m is now cleverly hidden in three groups of numbers which themselves total £31m. This clever figure juggling shows that we have lost nothing. We have in fact still lost £31m but the reliefs and increases hide what we have really lost.

For the other years in question, the figures are broadly the same, for example in 2009-2010, the mainstream funding for non ELQs has again been increased by £3m.

I have attached a spreadsheet in another file so that delegates to the Regional Forum South can see what the figures are doing.

Now the real question is, what does the University do when the transitional funding and safety net provision comes to a stop in 2010-2011? That is the real question that needs to be answered.

Copyright Donald Hedges 2008 with specific permission for OUSA Regional Forum South Only to use this report.

The spreadsheet is not copyright because it is in the public domain.

New Facebook Group - 10p Rate of Tax

2008-04-20T16:30:00.000-07:00

I now append details of a new Facebook group I have set up to protest against the 10p rate of Income Tax being abolished. The initial results will be published in this blog but if the movement grows it will be transferred to a blog all of its own.

Cheers.

Facebook 10p tax rate group

The Open University - comment on debate about ELqs

2008-04-07T14:37:00.001-07:00

Please find, from the link below the comments of the Open University, specifically, the Vice Chancellor, Professor B M Gourlay and their stated intentions as to how they are going to tackle the problem:-

Open University commentary 4th April 2008

I think that this is a pretty fair assessment of what is going on. What is extremely worrying is that at the end of the period, the OU will lose £29.8m per anumn if they do not find funding from other sources. That is why this policy cannot succeed and I call on everyone to continue campaigning against this policy and especially the attitude of the Secretary of State for Universities who, it must be said, is hardly acting in a democratic manner.

Bill Rammell is coming to the Open University

2008-04-04T09:30:00.000-07:00

It is by no means certain that Bill Rammell will be visiting the Open University in the said vehicle illustrated above, by the way.

I dont normally talk about the Open University Students Association on the blog out of respect to them; I normally like to keep my involvements with this side of my higher education activities out of their way, as well.

However just on this occasion, I see that they have invited Bill Rammell to their esteemed conference on 25-27 April 2008 and he has accepted. I have therefore posed the following question of him:-

Now that your own Select Committee have come out against your plans and say that they are hasty, ill considered and out of sync with the forthcoming feees review of 2009 have you any foreseeable urge to amend your plans. If so, what amendment to your plans would you foresee.

I would anticipate a very interesting answer to that conundrum.

The multi-talented John Denham

2008-04-02T04:29:00.000-07:00

John Denham (Secretary of State, Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills) | Hansard source

It is important to understand that there have been no changes to the formula that determines how money to widen participation is allocated to universities. Part of the formula rewards universities that are successful in attracting students from a wider range of backgrounds. Many other funds are available to universities, including those that go into bursaries and other means of attracting students from such backgrounds, and it is clearly a responsibility on the universities that are making least progress to do better.

Comments
Donald Hedges
Posted on 2 Apr 2008 12:27 pm

Thats a very interesting point Mr Denham. Consider how much the Open University and Birkbeck College have done to widen participation. Then consider that you have agreed to withdraw £100 million of funding from them during the next three years 2008/11. Then consider whether or not your argument makes sense.

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

The Select Committee Report on ELQs - 27th March 2008.

2008-03-25T06:21:00.002-07:00

The report of the Select Committee of the Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills has been published and I would print here for the readers delectation, a summary of what has been said, with full acknowledgement to the preparers of the report:-

Summary

In September 2007 the Government announced that it was withdrawing state funding paid
to higher education institutions to subsidise the fees of ELQ students, that is those studying for a qualification at the same or lower level to one they already hold. The result is that from 2008–09 students starting a second degree could see their tuition fees increase by 200%.

The Government argued that its policy was in line with the recommendations of the Leitch Review of Skills to concentrate the extra resources that it is putting in to higher education on first-time students and expecting employers to shoulder more of the burden for retraining via second degrees.

We found that consultation on the withdrawal of the funding was restricted to the
implementation arrangements with the full effects of the changes and consequences for
other policies such as the need for re-skilling inadequately examined. We conclude that the decision to cut funding to ELQ students was insufficiently justified either by persuasive analysis of its likely effectiveness in achieving the desired goals or evidence of the likely wider impact of the policy.

Nearly all the submissions we received were hostile to the changes.

We conclude that the transitional arrangements and exemptions are inadequate—for
example, the change will affect some groups of students and some institutions more than others—and inconsistent—for example, those pursuing Turkish studies are exempt but not pharmacists. We believe that the change would have been better left until the independent review of variable fees due in 2009, which would have been able to weigh funding of ELQs against other priorities.

My analysis of the situation exhibited by the report is as follows:-

In short, this Select Committee does not believe that the Leitch Report on skills has bearing on ELQs either way, despite the government having said that their policy on ELQs would be in line with the Leitch Report.

Neither does this Select Committee find that first time buyers into Higher Education will be pushed out by the demand for ELQs. As Brenda Gourley, Vice-Chancellor of the Open University said, all requests for courses within the Open University are being met at the present moment. So, there is no evidence of unassimilated demand within the system.

It has been brought to the attention of the Select Committee that there were 100,000 applications last academic year which have been turned down and that this was a point which was worth investigation. Nonetheless there were very many reasons why students were not accepted on to courses, one of them being that may be the students were not exhibiting the requisite level of entry qualifications.

The Select Committee has said that the government has not provided sufficient evidence of the demand for the 20,000 additional students which the government has said could be provided for if the ELQs money were transferred to the account of HE first time buyers.

The Select Committee has said that there is no evidence of the phenomenon of "perpetual students"; mainly owing to the fact that most students have to contribute something towards their own education.

There was concern expressed over the timing of the presentation of the ELQ policy; it was thought to be ill-timed and out of sync with the investigations which were going to be carried out in 2009 of the Office of Fair Access and independent review of variable fees. Although the government would argue this aspect it was still felt that the government could have waited a bit

longer.

The Select Committee thought that there should have been consultations of a rather more extensive nature on the principles behind the changes; it thought that there had been insufficient consultations on these aspects.

The Select Committee has said that it thinks that support of a funding nature for part-time students is precarious and that the government's suggestions for ELQ funding do not do much to improve the situation.

The Select Committee thought that the proposed reliance on co-funding would remove the flexibility which now exists for students to choose their courses and that students without employer support would not have the same freedom which they have heretofore enjoyed.

The Select Committee was concerned that an impact assessment had not been carried out and urged the government to correct this error in the future.

It was recommended by the Select Committee that HEFCE should have an appeals system regarding its modelling to challenge the data about ELQs and how the funding for them is to be calculated (including the safety net).

The Select Committee does think that the safety net period of 3 years is sufficient but it has suggested provisos such as more interim help or additional help for those worst hit by the ELQs provisions (and I think that this additional help will be targeted at the Open University, Birkbeck College and other large scale providers).

The Select Committee felt that the exemptions proposed were not consistent or always viable. It also wants the government to clarify its positions on the exemptions announced by Hefce in January 2008.

The Select Committee has recommended that a clear set of guidelines be provided to higher education institutions regarding the policing of which students already have ELQs and whether or not higher education institutions have a duty of due diligence.

In summary, the Select Committee has said that it does not support the way that the ELQ issue has been handled. There needs to be more investigation and analysis.

It seems to me that we have won a minor battle in the war over ELQs. It remains to be seen what the government are going to do. They have three months in which to respond. It will be interesting to see what the response is but we wont hold out breath. In my view there is still plenty of work to be done and more battles to be won.

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

The DIUS Select Committee is now reporting

2008-03-18T08:16:00.000-07:00

I have been sent an email for and on behalf of the Select Committee of Universities, Innovations and Skills in which it states that embargoed copies may be requested electronically and will be sent out via e-mails on the 25th March 2008. Furthermore that copies will be available to the general public from the 27th March 2008.

I wont publish the email on here, just in case it breaks some taboo.

I dont know yet what is contained within the report. However, I will publish the fact on Facebook group that it is coming soon.

Interim Information on the ELQs Select Committee

2008-02-25T06:10:00.000-08:00

Dear Colleagues

As I also (along with many others) had made a contribution towards the report of the Select Committee of Enquiry on ELQs, I rang the administrators to the committee.

I have been informed that the conclusions of this committee are being prepared in report form at this moment and should be available between about 4-6 weeks.

The conclusions are presented to government when the particular report is published and the government has two months within which to make its response.

A word on evidence: a lot of the evidence presented will not be contained within the body of the report but instead will be referenced at the back of the report; such material will be available in the libraries of the House of Commons and the House of Lords. I have also been informed that only material which has been referenced in the Select Committee Report will be available in the actual report. For instance, if there is a report by OUSA to which reference has been made, the full text of that report will be available within the body of the report.

Therefore, it appears that there is a few weeks to go before we know the report conclusions. I hope that what I have found out in the interim may have been useful to all my readers. Many thanks.

I have been quite unwell

2008-02-07T07:55:00.000-08:00

I have been very unwell since about the turn of the year, when I had an operation that did not go entirely correctly, so that led to another operation which drained the wound from the first operation.

I would like to say a very big thank you to a very special person, without whom I would not have pulled through the ordeal. Thank you Lil, you have been my saviour.

I hope to be back in this space before Easter. Many thanks.

Why the ruling on ELQs contravenes Article 149 EU Treaty

2007-12-27T05:59:00.000-08:00

The following is an extract from Article 149 of the EU Treaty:-

Article 149 (ex Article 126):-

2. Community action shall be aimed at:-

developing the European dimension in education, particularly through the teaching and dissemination of the languages of the Member States.

encouraging mobility of students and teachers, inter alia by encouraging the academic recognition of diplomas and periods of study

promoting co-operation between educational establishments

developing exchanges of information and experience on issues common to the education systems of the Member States

encouraging the development of youth exchanges and of exchanges of socio-educational instructors

encouraging the devlopment of distance education.

Source: Foster, Nigel(2003), Blackstone's EC Legislation 13th Edition (OUP, Oxford)

In the light of the last of these contentions, that of encouraging the development of distance education, perhaps the government would like to explain to me how subtracting £31m from the budget of the Open University, one of the foremost distance learning establishments in the United Kingdom and indeed, within Europe, would be commensurate with this stated aim of Article 149 of the EU Treaty. I should be very interested in seeing what their explanation is for this one. Unless of course, they dont read the documents of which they are a signatory, which may or may not be the case.

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

The 2007 London Communique - European Higher Education Area

2007-12-24T02:15:00.000-08:00

First and foremost, here is a link to the London Communique of 2007 about the European Higher Education Area.

London Communique

This is what I picked out of the London Communique as being relevant to the ELQ question:-

1.3 Developments over the last two years have brought us a significant step closer to the realisation of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). Building on our rich and diverse European cultural heritage, we are developing an EHEA based on institutional autonomy, academic freedom, equal opportunities and democratic principles that will facilitate mobility, increase employability and strengthen Europe’s attractiveness and competitiveness. As we look ahead, we recognise that, in a changing world, there will be a continuing need to adapt our higher education systems, to ensure that the EHEA remains competitive and can respond effectively to the challenges of globalisation. In the short term, we appreciate that implementing the Bologna reforms is a significant task, and appreciate the continuing support and commitment of all partners in the process. We welcome the contribution of the working groups and seminars in helping to drive forward progress. We agree to continue to work together in partnership, assisting one another in our efforts and promoting the exchange of good Practice.

1.4 We reaffirm our commitment to increasing the compatibility and comparability
of our higher education systems, whilst at the same time respecting their diversity.
We recognise the important influence higher education institutions (HEIs) exert on
developing our societies, based on their traditions as centres of learning, research,
creativity and knowledge transfer as well as their key role in defining and transmitting the values on which our societies are built. Our aim is to ensure that our HEIs have the necessary resources to continue to fulfil their full range of purposes. Those purposes include: preparing students for life as active citizens in a democratic society; preparing students for their future careers and enabling their personal development; creating and maintaining a broad, advanced knowledge base; and stimulating research and innovation.

1.5 We therefore underline the importance of strong institutions, which are
diverse, adequately funded, autonomous and accountable. The principles of nondiscrimination and equitable access should be respected and promoted throughout
the EHEA. We commit to upholding these principles and to ensuring that neither
students nor staff suffer discrimination of any kind.

2.2 Mobility of staff, students and graduates is one of the core elements of the
Bologna Process, creating opportunities for personal growth, developing
international cooperation between individuals and institutions, enhancing the quality
of higher education and research, and giving substance to the European dimension.

Recognition
2.5 Fair recognition of higher education qualifications, periods of study and prior
learning, including the recognition of non-formal and informal learning, are essential components of the EHEA, both internally and in a global context. Easily readable and comparable degrees and accessible information on educational systems and qualifications frameworks are prerequisites for citizens’ mobility and ensuring the continuing attractiveness and competitiveness of the EHEA. While we are pleased that 38 members of the Bologna Process, including Montenegro, have now ratified the Council of Europe/UNESCO Convention on the recognition of qualifications concerning Higher Education in the European region (Lisbon Recognition Convention), we urge the remaining members to do so as a matter of priority.

2.11 The stocktaking report shows that some elements of flexible learning exist in
most countries, but a more systematic development of flexible learning paths to
support lifelong learning is at an early stage. We therefore ask BFUG to increase the
sharing of good practice and to work towards a common understanding of the role of
higher education in lifelong learning. Only in a small number of EHEA countries
could the recognition of prior learning for access and credits be said to be well
developed. Working in cooperation with ENIC/NARIC, we invite BFUG to develop
proposals for improving the recognition of prior learning.

2.18 Higher education should play a strong role in fostering social cohesion,
reducing inequalities and raising the level of knowledge, skills and competences in
society. Policy should therefore aim to maximise the potential of individuals in terms of their personal development and their contribution to a sustainable and democratic knowledge-based society. We share the societal aspiration that the student body entering, participating in and completing higher education at all levels should reflect the diversity of our populations. We reaffirm the importance of students being able to complete their studies without obstacles related to their social and economic background. We therefore continue our efforts to provide adequate student services, create more flexible learning pathways into and within higher education, and to widen participation at all levels on the basis of equal opportunity.

These are my comments in reply to the above propositions:-

Comments on the Bologna Agreement Ministers Communique 2007

On the section of the document 1.3, one would ask, how is it possible that shifting money away from ELQs would have the effect of increasing institutional autonomy, when it has precisely the opposite effect? What you are doing with this directive from the Secretary of State is restricting institutional autonomy, especially in the cases of Birkbeck and Open University by saying that they cannot carry on doing the excellent work of lifelong learning and widening participation that they have been doing heretofore.

This directive, in turn, does not enhance mobility, nor does it help the EHEA remain competitive. It restricts competitiveness by blocking off avenues by which candidates for university can afford to enhance their qualifications and upskilling, which surely is necessary in a competitive Europe.

Similarly with section 1.4. The directive on ELQs does not enable students personal development; it seeks to restrict their attempts at getting qualifications to a once only situation.

With section 1.5, this surely goes against the principles of adequate funding and equitable access. In addition the ELQs doctrine developed by this government is discriminatory in that it discriminates against access for students who wish to gain ELQs. It stops them enhancing their future education and therefore marketability within the European context.

With section 2.2, such a move by the UK government restricts mobility and does not create opportunities for personal growth.

With section 2.5, restriction of ELQ funding also goes against fair recognition of higher education qualifications; it is a measure designed to prevent upskilling and the gaining of further qualifications. Therefore it also goes against the mobility and ensuring the continuing attractiveness of the EHEA.

It goes without saying that the ELQ doctrine goes against section 2.11 "Lifelong Learning". The government’s ELQ doctrine goes against good practice within lifelong learning. Prior learning is not recognised under the ELQ doctrine either because what the ELQ doctrine says is that you cannot have prior learning; in its simplest form that is what the government is saying, if you have prior learning you cannot obtain further qualifications.

The ELQ doctrine also goes against section 2.18 of this document; it goes directly against fostering social cohesion, it does not reduce social inequality and it is anyone’s guess how it taises the level of knowledge, skills and competences.
The ELQ doctrine goes against widening participation espoused in this section.
These are just a few points that I have discovered about the ELQ process that goes against the spirit of the 2007 Communique.

Donald Hedges, Dip Eng Law(Open), BA(Hons)(Solent)
23rd December 2007.

DIUS Select Committee Inquiry

2007-12-19T05:54:00.000-08:00

The Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills will now hold its select committee of inquiry on the morning of 17th January 2008. The following are the details:-

FUNDING FOR EQUIVALENT OR LOWER QUALIFICATIONS (ELQS)

Thursday 17 January 2008

Evidence will be heard from:

Panel 1

Open University;

Birkbeck College;

National Union of Students;

University College Union.

Panel 2 (at 10.30am)

Bill Rammell MP, Minister of State for Learning, Further and Higher Education, DIUS;

and Professor David Eastwood, Higher Education Funding Council for England.

The original source of this information is as follows:-

DIUS Select Committee Inquiry

My comments on the John Denham speech to the Open University

2007-12-17T08:26:00.000-08:00

The subject of co-funding from employers.

John Denham claims that there is now conclusive proof that employers would want to buy in to co-funding higher level skills of their employees. This goes against my 35 years of experience of working life when only one employer (the Inland Revenue) ever wanted to fund me to do a higher level qualification, that is to say, beyond level 3. They would have funded me for an entire ATII course (Institute of Taxation) if I had wanted them to do so which I must say was very far sighted of them. However, the other employers whom I have had throughout my working life would not have done any such thing, preferring that the person came to the table "ready educated", so to speak.

The subject of first time buyers into Higher Education.The redistribution of £100 million for first time buyers.

There again, there is no real evidence that there is any shortage of first time buyers into Higher Education in the full-time sector and real evidence that an increasing burden of debt is putting people off going into higher education. That is why people are increasingly going into the part-time sector to fulfil their ambitions of achieving higher qualifications. But we must also remember that many people are going into the part-time sector of higher education to refresh their higher level qualifications or to change direction.

....... and the shortage subjects of Science, Mathematics and Languages.

although not, I notice, Information Technology, which surely is constantly a shortage area.

The subject of Leitch report and lower level skills came up.

I just cannot understand where it is that the government gets the idea that it must constantly emphasise and fixate on the higher level skills sector when there are so many people who are leaving school being innumerate and illiterate. To me this is where the skills investment must come in, at the level of encouraging pupils to be able to read and write before they leave school. This is not to do with higher education, yet these numeracy and literacy shortages are repeatedly being pushed into the higher education arena. What you are getting in higher education, if I might say so, is a lot of students who are nowhere near ready for higher education and one needs to spend time on a lot of remedial work with them which should have been done at the level of sixth form (or lower). This is not a higher education problem and the government seems to be confusing the two.

As far as Widening Participation went, the Universities were invited to work with Hefce and to try to find new ways of working to meet the potential targets

This is something which I thought was especially funny. In fact the Open University and Hefce have done nothing but identify a student market with which to work; now they were being expected to work extra hard to identify another market because 25% of their existing market had been stripped away from under them at the stroke of a pen.

The Secretary of State said that the re-allocation of monies would in fact result in 20,000 new FTE (full time equivalent) places, the equivalent of one new University in fact.

I really dont know how this figure got into the equation. This would be enough to sustain one new university for about one year with 20,000 * 5,000GBP for each student (including overhead costs and provision of courses).

In overall terms, I have to say that however pleasant the Secretary of State seems to be when explaining the position, what he says does not wash and the figures do not stack up. This seems to be something which has been prepared with indecent haste. Let us hope that we can prove in the Select Committee Enquiry that what has been said does not stack up and hopefully persuade the government to withdraw their plans.

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

Report of John Denham speech to Open University - 13th December 2007

2007-12-13T08:23:00.000-08:00

Report on Secretary of State speech to Open University, Berrill Theatre, Milton Keynes from 15.00 to 15.50 on Thursday 13th December 2007 plus accompanying questions.

The following is a sketch outline of subjects mentioned in the speech:-

The subject of co-funding from employers.

The subject of first time buyers into Higher Education.

The redistribution of £100 million for first time buyers and the shortage subjects of Science, Mathematics and Languages.

The feeling that we have to change our ways of working.

The raising of the targeted allocation towards part-time students to £20m.

The question of transitional funding and looking at submissions to Hefce carefully within the consultation exercise.

The possible changes and how these have been made – the figures are currently showing:-

£4m shifted away from ELQs next year – 2008-9
£8m shifted away from ELQs in 2009-2010
£12m shifted away from ELQs in 2010-2011

These are obviously all figures relevant to the Open University.

The subject of Leitch report and lower level skills came up.

The Secretary of State said that he had every confidence that the Open University would meet the challenge.

As far as Widening Participation went, the Universities were invited to work with Hefce and to try to find new ways of working to meet the potential targets.

Among the questions asked were:-

Why should the shifting of these targets be a price paid exclusively by part-time students? The Secretary of State said that the re-allocation of monies would in fact result in 20,000 new FTE (full time equivalent) places, the equivalent of one new University in fact.

The hostility of employers towards co-funding

The adverse effects on women returners to the workplace
The Secretary of State said that there would be protected routes in priority subjects. There would be a lot of protected opportunity.

Lisa Carson (President OUSA) asked whether there would be a change in the differentiation between full time students and part-time students. The Secretary of State said that this was something which constantly came up but he could not envisage a change at the moment or maybe for some years.

Gary Slapper (Head of Law) interestingly asked whether the Secretary of State would go down in history as the man who dealt a maiming blow to this unique institution of the Open University. The Secretary of State responded that one had to deal with the priorities and to engage with them and the ongoing discussions.

The Secretary of State said that in answer to other questions that he and the government only provided broad strategic direction and that it was up to the Open University to engage with the process and the discussion.

The meeting closed at 15.50 hours.

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

The DIUS Committee Inquiry into ELQs

2007-12-11T09:26:00.000-08:00

It looks as though there is some headway being made on everyone's campaigns towards getting this policy restrained, or rescinded. As many of my colleagues have pointed out there is now a select committee of the DIUS looking into the matter and details can be obtained by clicking on this link:-

Select Committee of DIUS Inquiry

I have made my submission to the Committee and have received an acknowledgement from them. Although I cannot go into details here about what I actually said because it is a standing order of the House of Commons that such submissions are evidence, I can give one or two tips here as to what might be required:-

Give details of the reasons why you are studying for ELQs at the moment, or in the recent past. Tell the committee what it has meant for you to be able to have a second chance at getting HE educational qualifications.

Express your views on whether the timing of the withdrawal of funding is correct; have your say about whether or not the range of exemptions is correct or should be expanded. Students of Birkbeck and the Open University can express their views about what the promulgated cuts might mean to these two institutions.

Give your own experience to the committee and "speak from the heart". Remember that your evidence will be published along with the report of the committee.

I would urge everyone who is keen and interested in the ELQ funding cuts issue to do this. Together I am confident that we can win if we just persist in what we are doing. I hope everyone will join in with this.

News from DIUS on ELQ Financing for OU and Birkbeck

2007-12-05T02:45:00.001-08:00

I have now received a further communication from the Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills, where it suggests that I am incorrect about the amount of £40 million being taken from the budgets of Open University and Birkbeck after 3 years. The missive I have received suggests that only £13million will be subtracted from the budgets of these two universities before then and that even then there will be transitional protection for OU and Birkbeck.

I reproduce the email in full below so that my readers can judge for themselves!

Mr Donald Hedges,

Thank you for your further email of 8 November, about our decision to redistribute institutional funding away from “second degree” students towards those entering Higher Education (HE) for the first time.

You suggest that £40 million of the £100 million we plan to redistribute by 2010-11 will come out of the budgets of the Open University (OU) and Birkbeck. This is not the case.

Firstly, the combined share of the £100 million to be redistributed which is attributable to these institutions will be closer to £13 million in 2010-11. Their combined annual income from all sources is well over £400 million. The £40 million figure which you mention is a steady state figure but we have never said we will reach steady state after only three years.

Secondly, the HE Funding Council for England is proposing to provide transitional protection so that no institution will lose grant in cash terms. I accept that neither the OU nor Birkbeck is currently in favour of our policy. However, I believe we are doing the right thing for the reasons I set out previously. But, as far as the pace of change is concerned, it appears that somebody is guilty of what has memorably been called ‘premature extrapolation’.

What happens after 2010-11 has yet to be decided and we are happy to talk to institutions about how quickly they should be expected to adapt to our new policies.

I hope this further information has clarified the position.

JOHN DENHAM

Department of Universities, Innovation, Skills, meeting 28th November 2007

2007-11-29T14:12:00.000-08:00

DIUS Committee Meeting 28th Nov 07

Please find attached a link to the Real Player audio of this important meeting (the DIUS Minister for Lifelong Learning Bill Rammell, the Chairperson of Hefce, David Eastwood and various others.)

The relevant bit of the audio to which there is a link above, comes between about 13 minutes and 33 minutes into the piece. There are a series of very important questions being put to Bill Rammell and David Eastwood about the effect that the cuts in ELQ funding will have on the Open University and Birkbeck.

From what I have heard of the meeting, the protests and concerns that we have all been voicing have been having some effect, not perhaps much in the direction of policy travel but in the fine detail, it would appear that there has been a concentration on those who will suffer the worst "headline" fates, ie the Open University and Birkbeck.

There is reason to suppose that there will be various other measures in the pipeline that will save the Open University and Birkbeck; these hints are all a bit vague at the moment but according to what David Eastwood said, all will become a bit clearer in January 2008. I hazard a guess that there will be some special measures put in place which have not yet been crystallised. In addition to that we can also look forward to the part-time student funding review in 2009.

This is what I ascertain from reading between the lines. I am now not altogether convinced that the government is as trenchant in its views as it was when this process started and am of the opinion that our protests have had some effect. However we need to keep on protesting and making our views known, whilst looking very closely at what the government and Hefce are actually coming up with in the case of the Open University and Birkbeck.

I thus leave you on this optimistic note and will report any changes in the forthcoming weeks.

Can I just refer you to Political Networking

2007-11-24T07:54:00.000-08:00

Political Networking

This link is to my friend and colleague's Lindas website and gives a multitude of good links to things like the early day motion and the letter to the Guardian of 21st November 2007 signed by leading Vice Chancellors and academics.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Here is the reply that I wrote to the Guardian in response to that letter. I dont know whether it will be published but it is just as good here(!):-

I agree totally with what is being said by the writers of this letter. This is an ill thought out policy which now has the further disadvantage that the government will not rationally discuss it with anyone and has given a series of obfuscating answers whenever it is asked about the subject matter of its intentions.

To say that it is fiercely keen on widening participation and lifelong learning and then to do this is a very strange thing to do indeed, reminiscent of the best of doublespeak and doublethink. It will not fulfil the requirements mentioned in the Leitch Report.

The effect that these measures will have on Birkbeck College and the Open University is quite obvious because lifelong learning, which is embedded in a lot of the programmes that these two excellent institutions offer, will suffer very greatly.

I for one, am not reassured that these two institutions will pick up the required funding later from additional souces; where is the proof? The additional shock is that these figures are obtained from incomplete data records in 2005.

I would urge the government to go back to the drawing board on this matter as it is clear that this is a most ill-thought out policy.

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

An excellent article by David Latchman in the Independent

2007-11-23T10:16:00.001-08:00

There is an excellent article in the Independent by the Master of Birkbeck College, David Latchman, in which he spells out what it means to all of us if these cuts go through and the cost to all of us who might want to revivify our qualifications by taking ELQ's in the future. I recommend that everyone reads it. Here is a link to the said article:-

David Latchman article

The mythology of redistributing the £100million

2007-11-12T07:23:00.000-08:00

There is an interesting bit of mythology that is doing the rounds about where John Denham perceives the £100 million going that he intends to take from Equivalent or Level qualifications and redistribute.

In the first place, he claims it will go into co-funding qualifications, including the foundation degrees and indeed 11 such projects have taken place, costing about £20 million. Thats about £2 million a project. So far so good. What I really want to know is, how far have these plans actually been advanced. How will they be done and will it be on the sad level that has taken place within the Train to Gain scheme whereby we had train to gain brokers that nobody knew about or ever used? I think we should be told?

In the second place, we have been told that the money will be redistributed to people who have not yet been through the higher education system. That also sounds good, until you realise that the average bod who enters higher education for the first time will come out with a debt of £25,000. Then it does not sound so fantastic; that £100 million is going to stop students paying tuition fees is it? I think not?

In the third place, we have been told that the money will be redistributed to youngsters who might wish to go into highyer education. All very good, except for the dip in the birth rate. Apart from that, very fair. So all in all we might not have the students of a younger age group to fill the places.

The system we have at the moment of lifelong learning and widening participation and embedding them within university departments is a system that works. But what we are now proposing is to take the money away from this system into what does not work or what has no proof as to be a viable solution.

In the meantime good universities such as Birkbeck and the Open University will suffer. This is against the avowed policy of the government to have lifelong learning and widening participation.

The £100 million is going to be mythologically redistributed. It does not stack up; lets defeat this silly argument once and for all.

My Reply to John Denham - 8th November 2007

2007-11-08T13:57:00.000-08:00

I have written again to John Denham in the following manner:-

Dear John Denham

First of all, thank you for your response to my email of 11th October. I must put to you some other supplementary points which I am sure will be cogent and will also be of concern to the government, as well as the Open University and Birkbeck College.

I will quote from what you have just said to me as follows:-

____________________________________

We are only planning to re-distribute about 0.2% of the total income HE providers generate. I do not accept that, across the system as a whole, there will be insufficient capacity or infrastructure to deliver more opportunities for the additional students we want to attract. But of course, the changes imply that all 250+ providers will have to compete to maximise their share of the £100 million we are re-distributing. So at the level of individual programmes or departments, there could be changes. I make no apology for that. It depends on how well providers respond to the new incentives we are putting in place.

________________________

This would be fair enough were it to be a fair distribution of the deduction across the board. But somehow or the other, your designers at Hefce have decided that £40 million of this amount should come out of the budgets of Open University and Birkbeck College. These are the two leading proponents of Lifelong Learning, which I am sure you will appreciate is one of the government's avowed aims. Would you agree with me that this is not a fair reward for what the Open University has done for the United Kingdom in terms of lifelong and distance learning. I would also include my colleagues at Birkbeck College in the same sentiment.

40% of the total redistribution is being taken from the very people who stand a chance of delivering lifelong learning within the United Kingdom. I find that very hard to believe.

I believe that you are sincere when you say that the government believes in the redistribution: I dont have any quibble with that. But what I am saying is that the redistribution of resources in this way is unfair and inequitable and goes against the avowed intent of the government to promote lifelong leearning.

I would therefore agree with the Vice Chancellor of the Open University that you should seriously reconsider your decision to take so much money from the distance learning universities and put that particular decision on hold until the spending review of part-time HE provision in 2009. I look forward to your considered reply on this.

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

My Letter from John Denham - Further details of Funding Reallocation

2007-11-08T08:57:00.000-08:00

I have received an email message from John Denham, who is my Member of Parliament, which I reproduce here. Within it, he gives further reasoning for the funding cuts and does say that the fine detail will be worked out at the end of the consultation exercise.

I will have further comments on what John Denham has said later on because I have asked colleagues within the campaign to consider what the email is saying. There are implications within the document that have not been fully considered, such as the woefully adverse effect on distance learning organisations.

Dear Donald Hedges,
Thank you for your further email of 11 October, about our decision to redistribute institutional funding away from “second degree” students towards those entering Higher Education (HE) for the first time.
You asked a range of supplementary questions about the withdrawal of funding for students doing second degrees and, as a constituent of mine, I shall be happy to answer them. Before I go into the details I ought to start by saying that we are doing this firstly because we think it is fairer and secondly because we need to change the financial incentives in the system to increase the proportion of the workforce with graduate level skills.

In answer to the queries you raised, we know this applies to all higher level qualifications at the same or equivalent level, not just degrees. While we will not decide on which subjects and courses should and should not be treated as exemptions until the end of the consultation, the proposed exemption for Foundation Degree courses is because they are co-designed by employers. You will know from my previous letter that we are keen to change the system in ways which encourage greater employer engagement with HE, both financially and in terms of helping to shape the content of courses.

We are only planning to re-distribute about 0.2% of the total income HE providers generate. I do not accept that, across the system as a whole, there will be insufficient capacity or infrastructure to deliver more opportunities for the additional students we want to attract. But of course, the changes imply that all 250+ providers will have to compete to maximise their share of the £100 million we are re-distributing. So at the level of individual programmes or departments, there could be changes. I make no apology for that. It depends on how well providers respond to the new incentives we are putting in place.

I do believe that employers in both the public and private sector will increasingly be prepared to co-fund HE provision. The Government would not have responded to Sandy Leitch's report in the terms it has if we did not believe that this should happen. Employers are of course already paying for what HE can offer, in the form of the wage premium they pay for graduates which is amongst the highest in the world. There is also more scope for HE providers to get involved in accrediting employers’ existing continuing professional development for their staff – a potentially large market (now estimated at £4.4 billion, of which higher education currently has a £250 million market share). We will not be forcing employers to do anything but many employers in all sectors realise that if they are to be competitive in the 21st Century, they have to be able to develop the skills of their workforce and it is not unreasonable to expect them to meet some of the costs given the extra benefits associated with higher skills.

To take the example of "fairness" you mention. If someone took a degree forty years ago, their lifetime earnings after taxation are likely to be over £100,000 more than someone with just A levels. I strongly believe that it is a fairer use of taxpayers' money to give someone who has not been to university before the chance to benefit from HE.

On the other issue you raised, I am afraid that we do not recognise the figures you mention. HEFCE's total administration costs on all of its services are about £17 million a year which is about 0.2% of the total grant it distributes. Universities of course are large organisations operating on an annual turnover of over £15 billion. If their collective expenditure on administration was in the region of £250 million, that would only represent about 1.6% of their total funding.

To recap, I know that this is not the most popular reform we have ever announced. But if we are serious about widening participation and enabling more of the 70% of the existing workforce who do not have graduate level skills, it is one of the things we need to do to encourage HE providers to recruit more first time students who, in my view, have to be given priority.

I hope this further information helps clarify the position for you.

And whither the PhD - are they any good?

2007-11-06T10:07:00.000-08:00

Did you have a nice PhD? I never did one myself, so I would not know. There was a discussion in the Guardian today by an Alex someone, I am sure he will forgive me because I gave him the address of this blog. I am not wishing to insult him. I am here on a frolic of my very own. Whither the PhD, what use was it and what flavour was your one?

What is the use of a PhD. It is designed to show that you can research a subject in depth and come up with something original at the end of it. Thats wonderful if you are going to produce a new Beecham's poweder, or something but even then you would probably just produce that. All that a PhD seems to me to be is the result of sitting around musty old referemce libraries and study centres for about three years, writing 50,000 words of what, at the end of the day, might be utter drivel.

Worthy though a lot of academic enterprise is, in this way, it hardly matters because mostly nobody is going to read your stuff about "How many Angels can dance on the top on a pin". It does not move the human predicament on one iota. There are so many things that Universities can do and so many things that researchers can do but sanctioning drivel and turgid writings about lacklustre subjects should not really number among them.

It has been said to me in the Guardian blogging that really what the PhD is about should be teaching. Question is to my mind, is it really even about that? Just because universities (and now even colleges of further education) put a PhD in the person specification does not mean that they mean anything.

If anything, I would prefer that the Doctorate was reformed so that anyone with two degrees could have one. That does not count me in of course because I boast only a Diploma in English Law (Open University) and an Honours Degree in Accounting, so only 480 CATs points there, I am afraid. Then we must look at my 240 CATs points towards my Open Degree! So ever so nearly there! Anyway, look at your average GP. He has two degrees, such as: Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery. He has earned his flying colours but has done something useful with it. Yet we dont say that he has to have a PhD to earn the epithet "Doctor".

Or maybe we could confer the "Doctorate" title on someone who has got one BA amd one MA? I only throw this out as a spur to the Universities maybe reforming this lacklustre form of learning! Lets take this out of the dark ages; I have to admit that most people who are doing a range of subjects at University or have one or two degrees are at least as worthy as those doing the PhD. Research is one thing; gibberish is another. We need to separate research out from the PhD. Keep the former and do away with the latter. Cheers.

Skills and the School Leaving Age - 5th November 2007.

2007-11-05T07:13:00.000-08:00

On television this morning, there has been what I would call a spokesperson for the government, saying that the school leaving age will be raised to 18, or the alternative is, that the students can do training, so as to keep up their level of skills. Or I believe if they still dont come out with any skills, then they can have vocational credit for later. I believe that is what is being said.

I dont know quite what to make of what is being said; we hear to many promises about skills and how the government proposes to improve the situation. What if students/pupils did improve their level of skills, would that really make a difference? That is what I mean, these are all buzz phrases, like "lifelong learning".

I hate to go over old ground but I have practised lifelong learning since the age of seven years of age. Since I was first big enough to fit on one of those piano stools at the Guildhall School of Music, sit at a huge Steinway grand piano and do my pianoforte grade examinations, of which I did six, between the ages of seven and eighteen. Then I came out of school, having passed 3 Certificates of Secondary Education, Five Ordinary Levels with the apposite correct grades (equivalent to more than a grade C these days) and one Advanced Level. Obviously by this time I could read and write.

What good did this do me - none, because when I was first working with the Inner London Education Authority, their argument was that I had two "O" Levels in History, so I must take their internal examination for Clerical Officers Grade 2. I did so and passed 2nd out of 117 candidates and with a score of 462 out of 700 - thats about 65% I believe. However, that was the first inclination I had that nobody in the employment world took any notice of learning, or skills. To tell someone they have not got five O Levels when they have certificates which indicate that they have got 5 O Levels is a bit short of bombastic. However the ILEA is not with us anymore, so we cant quibble with them overly.

However skills and education. Thats quite amazing. I read in the newspapers yesterday that they regarded Sir Ian Blair as not a "copper's copper" because he had been to Oxford University and had received a degree from them. Quelle dommage! Oh I see that he would not be able to be a policeman then if he's got a degree. I mean, lets not allow learning to stand in the way of "progressing up the ranks". Except of course, that a lot of officers dont progress up the ranks but stay exactly (more or less) where they are.

This is all a quite extraordinary proposition; that in this England we seem to hate so much those that have bothered to skill themselves, or educate themselves, or both, really. I often wonder whether this was why I lost my job in a train operating company because they found out that I was "educated". I know that they watched me like a hawk to try and prove that I had not got the requisite skills to be able to issue tickets; even when they knew that I had been in a railway operating company before for three years.

What the government is trying to do is talk out of a lot of sides of its face all at the same time. Its trying to battle against an anti-intellectual society and an anti-skill society. We really dont want anyone thats skilled and educated because then they might be able to do the job and make the rest of us look silly. Its like all that conversation that goes on in newspaper blogs about Sir Ian Blair - the rumours that he might be educated, that he might have done something about racism in the force, that he might have allowed equal opportunities to have taken place and displaced some of the machismo within the police service. Oh an educated man - better steer clear of him.

A lot of these criticisms are taking place from armchair pundits who have never really done much in their lives. I am not saying that the Metropolitan Police is so perfect but there is no need to assasinate the head of it just because he's an intellectual and a liberal. Thats far from being the point. Most of the people who do criticise such a person have never been on the front line themselves of ANY service, thats for sure.

My feeling is, that the English society has come so far down, that we dont want to do anything; that we despise people with skills and intellectual ability really and that we cant wait to do them down. In short, we are a miserable shower. If the government really wanted us to have skills (and education) it would not talk out of the other side of its face and take away £100million from lifelong learning either. As the man from del Monte would say "Its all a bit of a lash up really". Or maybe Francis Urquhart would have said "Skills and education. You may well say that. I could not possibly comment."

How many qualifications do we need before we dont get the job?

2007-11-02T11:08:00.000-07:00

I am fervently a supporter of Lifelong learning. However, now I am getting towards the end of my career, rather than at the beginning of it, I am beginning to ask questions, such as, how many qualifications do you need before you dont get the job?

I was one of the believers in lifelong learning as I said. I have practised that credo for the last (embarassingly many) years, through music school, secondary school, Colleges of Further and Higher Education and Universities. However, one thing has begin to strike me over the past 15 years and that is, the amount of lifelong learning you have had and the attention to reskilling you have put in does not guarantee you the job, whatsoever.

I had this conversation with the government in 1998. I asked them why I could not get a teaching job. Various scenarios were suggested by them, like I got a PGCE. Surprise, I never got into a PGCE either. Something about O Level Mathematics, even though I have a degree in Accounting which includes Quantitative Methods and Advanced Calculus. I never got a teaching job in Further Education either despite masses of silly interviews where a lot of interviewers demonstrated the most profound lack of knowledge of my educational qualifications and background and some of them were downright rude, if I remember rightly.

At one and the same time as that I remember reading various publications of a personnel nature, whereby it was being stipulated that everyone has degrees now. That's strange, I thought only about 10% of the total population of the UK had degrees but I am sure someone will correct me if I am wrong.

So, no teaching; however my complaint does not stop there. I have found this to be the attitude of many employers over the past 15 years, yet there is nothing wrong with my ability to hold down a job; I am in good health and very capable.However, on the other hand I hear nothing but complaints from employers that their staff are semi-skilled cant read and write, etc. Well whose fault is that if they dont employ the right people?

There is a series of fatal embraces in all these arguments. One can only go so far in lifelong learning and get so many qualifications before one is duty bound to say to oneself that it is not a fault of lifelong learning and one's individual efforts that one does not get the job. The problem is with employers who do not know what they want, or how to achieve it. So maybe its time that employers themselves did a little lifelong learning, or got a little bit of knowledge. And as for the government's latest pronoucement about shifting funds away from LLL, I think that illustrates the amount of ignorance there really is about the whole process.

It seems to me that people dont really want lifelong learning; sadly, because if they did, the employers would have nothing to complain about and nor would the government. One wonders in fact, whether there is not a deliberate attempt to deprive people from learning, so that the government can stay in business? Certainly precious little is being done to help the lifelong learner. Were it so, then someone as educated as me would be able to get work and that, I am afraid to say, is simply NOT the case.

What the Open University Means to me

2007-10-31T17:17:00.000-07:00

I herewith reproduce the entry that I sent to the President of Open University Students Association - personal stories about what the OU has meant to them.

What the Open University means to me……

Having already achieved an honours degree in Accounting, it was a personal dismay to me that I just could not use the qualification, to be able to teach Accounting after graduating in 1995.

I then thought of improving my qualifications and thought of the OU. I enrolled for my first Law Course in 2003 February, having been given credit transfer to enable me to go straight on to a Level 2 course. I studied for W200 “Understanding Law” which is an excellent course run by the Open University in conjunction with the College of Law.. Having a very great measure of success in that module, I did W201 “Law, the Individual and the State” in 2004 and passed that module as well. I went on to do W300 “Agreements, Rights and Responsibilities” the year after that, with a resit in 2006.

I have found all the materials and the service provided by the OU to be absolutely excellent. The upshot of me studying my two Level 2 courses was that in 2007, I was able to claim the Open University Diploma in English Law, backdated to December 2004.

Mine is a success story, because the Open University gave me another chance at a qualification which I can use to get work; I can get legal work, or welfare rights work now, or company secretarial. It has broadened my outlook and enhanced my job-chances. If it had cost a great deal of money I would not have been able to do it. My second chance at higher education is therefore very highly valued by me.The Open University is to be applauded for giving me that second chance. It goes without saying I think it is an excellent university.

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

Open University Students Association joins the fight

2007-10-31T10:15:00.001-07:00

I am very glad to be able to report that the Open University Students Association has today thrown their hat into the ring with everyone else. They have asked for stories from students about how the Open University has changed students lives, or how it has enhanced students ability to get work, etc. The appeal from the President of the Open University Students Association, Lisa Carson, is that students are asked to do a small (but beautifully formed) 300 word essay containing their personal stories. I think (and I have said so on Open University First Class) that this is an excellent idea.

The link to the Open University Students Association webpage is as follows:-

OUSA

I have sent them a message wishing ALL of us the very best of luck with the campaign to get this unjust ruling overturned.

How our money is still being wasted

2007-10-30T05:39:00.000-07:00

There is a very interesting article in the Times Online today as follows:-

Why do Students Drop Out

The subject matter is why students drop out from their courses? This is a matter of concern obviously. Nobody in Higher Education likes to see students dropping out, or taking the wrong courses or discovering that they have taken the wrong courses, or taking fright, or any of the other things that students may be liable to do.

This is not what I have at issue with the government. It is that, according to yesterday's meeting of the Public Accounts Committee that £800 million is being thrown at the problem. This staggering amount has produced what kind of answer, might I ask. I have already commented in the Times that I would have given the government the answer for £10.00 and a packet of crisps.

This is an absolutely monumental waste of money, on top of the other monies that have been highlighted in my columns here as being wasted, such as the NHS University, the E Learning University, the administration of the Hefce scheme and other causes celebre.

All this is beginning to make the £100million that could still have gone into lifelong learning look very tame. Admit it, Mr Denham, your Department has not got a leg to stand on with these changes to the higher education budget. Oh and by the way, perhaps you would like to explain to us, why this £800m is being wasted, along with the best part of £1BN which I have already identified.

Employer engagement with co-funding

2007-10-27T03:22:00.001-07:00

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

The NHS and E_University fiascos.

2007-10-25T13:19:00.000-07:00

You could not make it up. Even though these events happened two or three years ago, I would like to refresh readers' memories of some of the funding mistakes that have been made, for example, the government decision to scale down the NHS University "At Arms Length" or whatever it was called. Staffing is to be cut back to 300 from about 1500 and the budget is to be scaled back by £500m by 2007/8.

I am so appalled at this failed project, which must be along the same lines as the disasterous computerisation projects within the same organisation (I wont mention too much, public liability you know!!)

How can the government spend this money when it is cutting £100million from widening participation in the higher education budget.

Apparently to add insult to injury, the Director of the NHS University was reassigned to a widening participation project.

In another slightly older piece of bad news I have read, the e-University was cancelled; that also cost the taxpayer another £50 million. Is it not amazing that these little pieces of public expenditure information keep on cropping up. At this rate, our little bit of something worth £100m will be dwarfed by these mega spending blunders.

I stick to what I said some weeks ago on these pages; it is time for the Public Accounts Committee to have a look at all these projects, or bring forward the spending review on part-time students, widening participation and lifelong learning, so that we can really see what is going on. I suspect that joined up government is not happening and that public spending is getting out of control; the wrong public spending is happening and the right public spending is being kicked into the long grass.

I have edited this post so that it reflects that what I have said are not current news items but nonetheless are relevant to what is going on in the current situation.

Pay Attention I will say this only Once......

2007-10-25T09:03:00.000-07:00

Pay attention I will say this only once. Please have a look at my colleagues blog today. Linda has some excellent suggestions as to what we can do to keep the campaign going. At the time of writing, I have written to the Guardian, Daily Mail and to the Women's Institute. Dont let them forget us!! The link is as follows:-

Political Networking

Foundation Degrees

2007-10-24T13:24:00.000-07:00

I had a look at Foundation degrees earlier this evening; I wanted to make sure that they really existed and were not a figment of someone's imagination. For a cost of about £330m between 2001/2 and 2005/6 I was definitely hoping that they were not.

The government's website, as follows:-

Foundation Degrees

Apparently this is the first new higher education qualification for 25 years; it is a 2 year course full time, or somewhere beyween 2 and 4 years if taken on a part-time and/or distance basis, can be done at work and is con-funded by employers. It is relevant to the world of work, rather than just the world of academe.

I had a look to see whether my own University, the Open University does Foundation degrees; yes, in fact they do. What I am saying is that anything that can be done by the Open University, which is a very discerning institution, cannot be all that bad.

The most important part of what I have to say is, that, why cant foundation degrees be integrated into the lifelong learning movement in any case. Why does it have to be that the government is saying that we must trim £100m of the lifelong learning budget but that does not include foundation degrees.

We should be looking to expand all forms of lifelong learning and not favour one form of learning over the other. What about some joined up thinking from this government, rather than divide and rule?

Earn as you learn - BBC Website article

2007-10-24T07:46:00.000-07:00

I want to put my readers in touch with a BBC webpage, in which they go into "Earn as you learn", or what John Denham and Hefce would call "co-funding". Here is the link to the said BBC page.

Earn as You Learn

This pleasant article gives details of a co-funding enterprise between Coventry University and the Automobile Association and one of its call-centres in Hull. Basically, the idea is to give group managers confidence at dealing with difficult problems. They are required to do case studies and present their fundings for assessment. At the end of the course they get their certificate in lifelong learning.

There is no doubt that this exercise is an exercise in co-funding but is it actually education as we know it (or even lifelong learning). Is it not more the case that this is nothing more or less than good old fashioned training. Nothing wrong with that but let's be careful out there. It would be a shame to mislead.

There are examples of the genre in the United States, where I read that one can put a number of years industrial/commercial/business training towards a degree. I would be glad of that; if that were the case, I hereby claim another two degrees on the strength of my work experience. So what I am saying is that the split between vocational and educational is not deeply pronounced in the United States.

Nonetheless I believe that there is a deep misunderstanding/split between what is educational and what is vocational and that this is brought about by the culture of resolutely insisting that there is an integrated qualifications framework (see QAA for details, weblink to be provided later).

For it to be educational and for it to be real lifelong learning, there must be more to it than tickboxes and cases studies. Education (Teaching and Learning) demands that one knows about why one is learning (the philosophy of education), the hows and wherefores of learning, the ethics and morals of situations and the broader applications of education as applied to the wider society. It is likely that all these things will be woven into the fabric of university degrees; not so likely that they will be woven into the fabric of workplace training.

There is a distinct absence of any philosophy with the scheme that the BBC has outlined (interesting though the scheme is). However I am sorry to say that the article misses the point completely, that this exercise is neither education, nor lifelong learning.

It would be good if we could all write to the BBC and our Members of Parliament pointing out that these exercises in co-opted funding are all very well and good but there is a tendency here to deconstruct education and bring it down to a series of workplace tickboxes, which is far from good.

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

Political networking blog

2007-10-23T11:35:00.001-07:00

Can I please direct you to my colleague Linda's site today; she has received some encouraging materials from the Universities Association for Lifelong learning showing us what we must do to protest against these measures.

The relevant blogspot of Linda is:-

Political Networking

I was absolutely astounded to find that so confident of the £100m funding reshuffle is the Secretary of State for Universities that it is even mentioned in the Pre Budget Report for 2007. Lets make sure that this is one funding reshuffle that never comes to pass.

Pre Budget Report and Comprehensive Spending Review 2007

2007-10-23T04:15:00.001-07:00

Unfortunately the committment to extracting £100m from the Higher Education budget in favour of first time buyers within the system is still out there and contained in the Pre Budget Report and Comprehensive Spending Review, at page 214.

Comprehensive Spending Review & Pre Budget Report 2007

There is also an indication within that report that there will be a £2BN increase in the money spent in furtherance of the Leitch Report between 2007-8 to 2010/11, although there is no specific mention of details within the PBR-CSR 2007.

Why this tiny amount of £100m should be one of the focuses of the report (within the DIUS section) is not at all clear to me; this tiny amount being focused upon in all those billions is most puzzling. I can only conclude that the Secretary of State felt that it was really worth mentioning. I notice he did not put in the facts that this helps to destroy the widening participation and lifelong learning agenda.

In the government's own words - Higher Education White Paper 2003

2007-10-21T12:27:00.000-07:00

I have discovered this little gem from the government's own Higher Education White Paper 2003. As it is all in the public domain I shall reproduce it in full:-

1.27 And this is true not just of work-focused provision. Our system is not good enough at offering students real choice about how they learn. Higher education should be a choice open to everyone with the potential to benefit – including older people in the workforce who want to update their skills. There are not enough choices for flexible study – including part-time courses, sandwich courses, distance learning, and e-learning – and there must be an increasingly rich variety of subjects to study, which keep pace with changes in society and the economy.

White Paper On Higher Education

Taken from the governments White Paper on Higher Education {2003},
Chapter One (The Need for Reform). Accessed 21st October 2007.

This part of the report, shows a real confusion with what is exactly going on with the actuality of the provision which is already out there and the government's perception of the provision.

Everything within the paragraph is most assuredly being carried out by the Open University and Birkbeck College and other like minded institutions, yet there is no real recognition of this within the paragraph. And the bit about encouraging people to study, including older people within the workforce - how is this going to be achieved by withdrawing funding from the very institutions that are doing most to foster this credo?

The government's failure to recognise what is being done within the part-time sector of education is very alarming indeed. The sooner that they can stop being myopic about what is really beimg achieved with this sector, the better all round I would have thought. It is presumably attitudes like this which have led this government to withdraw funding from the OU and Birkbeck without a second's thought.

One last question, how informed is this government about higher education? Answers would be gratefully received.

The Vice Chancellor of the Open University has commented

2007-10-19T15:16:00.000-07:00

Vice Chancellor of the OU

My comments on what the Vice Chancellor of the Open University has said in her briefing:-

The Vice Chancellor of the Open University, Brenda Gourlay, in her briefing on the matter of Equivalent and Level Qualifications, has rightly pointed out in paragraph one of the briefing that the government has appointed Sandy Leitch to have a look at Britian’s skills agenda and lifelong learning. Indeed the Secretary of State for Universities John Denham has said that 50% of us must bring our skills up to speed for Britain to succeed in the modern economic climate. So how strange then, that the first action of the said Secretary of State when getting into office was to strip out funding from the lifelong learning agenda?

The Vice-Chancellor goes on in her second paragraph to talk about the rationale of what I would call “tinkering around the edges” of the Higher Education budget. There is a theory within the DIUS that employers will co-fund second or equivalent qualifications. This goes directly against my own personal experience of 35 years within the workplace, where I was lucky to have seen one employer who ever did this and that was a government agency and even then 20 years ago.

The Vice Chancellor notes the exemptions, which I have already explained in a previous posting.

In terms of help, the Vice Chancellor has noted that there is short-term help; however what help can the government really give when it has already thrown the system into turmoil. It has kicked the Open University and Birkbeck, offering them an elastoplast as a paliative.

In her fifth paragraph, the Vice Chancellor has spoken about the increased amount of bureaucracy within the system, trying to work out who has previous qualifications. I have already pointed out within these pages the disgrace of the money being spent on the administration of the HEFCE system both within the organisation itself and within the Universities, namely £250million a year. This should be the subject of a select committee enquiry in and of itself but I notice has gone largely uncommented upon by the DIUS.

In the seventh paragraph of her letter, the Vice Chancellor touches upon the policy changes which impact so much upon the part-time sector and how the part-time sector is deeply underfunded (and will be unfunded at the present rate).

The eighth point is that the unfunding that is proposed will impact upon 25% of the Open University’s students from 2008/9 and that 19% of teaching funding will be lost from that year.In 2010/11 the Open University will have lost about £19m worth of funding. That is really not the way to treat a university which has done so much for the cause of part-time study, equal opportunities in education, lifelong learning and widening participation.

I am with the Vice Chancellor in that I think that this sort of decision would be better held in abeyance until we have had a proper opportunity to really look at part-time funding issues.

I would not disagree with any of the key facts.

This measure which has been proposed by the Secretary of State is destined to hit the part-time sector extremely severely. From what people including the Vice Chancellor of the Open University have said and in my personal view, it is an extremely chaotic and badly thought out measure, which I suspect the present government will not live to see the full implications of, if the voters get their way at the next general election. It should be abandoned as a bad idea and I would ask everyone once again to enjoin with all of us already in the campaign to protest in the most vigorous terms to your Members of Parliament. At the same time I would congratulate and thank the Vice-Chancellor of the Open University for coming out and saying what a lot of us have been thinking since this disgraceful announcement from John Denham.

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

My comments on what the UCU has said

2007-10-19T07:36:00.000-07:00

I wish to make a comment on what the Union of Colleges and Universities had said. The first thing is, that their comments and input are very welcome.

May I refer to the first paragraph of what Sally Hunt has said in her letter. That is to say that reference is made to the Government argument that teaching existing ELQ students is not usually as high a priority for public funding as those entering higher education for the first time, or progressing to higher qualifications. I am wondering whether that is really the case because the government is allowing young people who enter higher education to get into thousands of pounds worth of debt, unless they have extremely rich parents. The average debt of a first time undergraduate I understand is now about £23,000. So the government is not really setting an example here; in fact it is setting anything but an example by permitting youngsters and those entering HE for the first time to get into piles of debt. It is creating an indebtedness that will last a graduate about 10 years if not longer. This is something which is putting first timers off going to university in any case and I do not see the government addressing this any time soon. So switching money away from ELQ’s to first timers may not solve the problem anyway. First time buyers of HE are already as put off as they can be from embarking on this debt-ridden of occupations.

The government, as Sally Hunt has pointed out in the letter, has gone to a lot of trouble to explain what ELQs are; it has explained to us that for instance, if a student has a foundation degree and wishes to study for an honours degree then this will not be regarded as an ELQ. This does not explain, however, the thousands of students who are studying for leisure purposes, for health purposes (to keep mind and body alive), or for people who need an ELQ for work purposes and are already a tax and national insurance, VAT payer and contributor to society. These people have all been conveniently forgotten in the scramble to take away this funding.

The obvious categories of students have been exempted from the ELQ diktat, such as nurses, teachers, etc. This is to be expected. There is a safety net provision.

In terms of funding, the Open University and Birkbeck will suffer the worst cuts, having nearly £40 million taken away from them. These are the two institutions that have done the most within this nation to provide innovative courses for widening participation and lifelong learning. This is how they are to be repaid for their efforts by this government.

The Universities and College Union has asked for a response; the above obviously is my response. It is a complete an utter disgrace that the government should seek to chant the mantra of lifelong learning and widening participation and then do this; mostly affecting the aspirations of people within the part-time sector who are already full taxpayers and who have paid into the system many times over during their lifetimes. For all these reasons, I would urge the UCU to vigorously oppose the cuts.

Donald Hedges, Dip Eng Law(Open), BA(Hons)(Solent)
A campaigner against the HEFCE Funding cuts

Donald HEFCE Blogspot and Facebook group

Encouraging news from UCU

2007-10-18T10:32:00.001-07:00

I have it on good authority that the Universities and Colleges Union have looked at the situation of HEFCE funding and are of the same mind as the majority of us, that what the government proposes to do undermines widening participation and lifelong learning.

The UCU response is contained in the following pages:-

UCU Comments on Cuts

I will be back when I have had an opportunity to study what UCU are saying.

The final Burgess Report - Higher Education Achievement Report

2007-10-17T07:54:00.000-07:00

Universities UK Bookshop

The tag above will give access to the Universities UK bookshop. The edition of the Burgess Report in question is in PDF Format.

This is an enduring topic within the higher education world, the debate revolving around whether the final summative judgment that a student gets at the end of his
(or her) Bachelors degree is indicative of the amount of ability that the student has, or whether in fact it is just a number.

This is a conundrum which academics have been battling with for a number of years; the situation has become ever more urgent because the number of 1st Class and 2.1 degrees has increased exponentially during the period 1994-2007, so that in some universities 60% of graduates get them.

So the topic which was investigated by the Burgess Group was whether a single summative judgment was in anyway suitable or whether that single summative judgment could be replaced by something more apt and more reflective of the student's abilities.

The Burgess Report reminds people reading it that people who have got a Third Class Honours Degree or a 2.2 are just as likely to be worthy students as those who have got the higher classifications.

So the Burgess Report recommends that there be a transcript published along with the summative figure, which shows the skills and ability that a student has put into the work; this would be much along the lines of the Bologna Agreement Diploma Transcript. I did not get out of the Burgess Report how rich the report would be (or transcript) but it would be perhaps more indicative of a student's ability than a single summative figure.

There has even be a hint in the report that things could be published about the student's social abilities, whether he contributed to sports or assisted in the students union (good, I would qualify for a first class honours on that basis).

I would recommend to my readers that they have a look at the report and there is a tag to it at the front of this article. I shall be writing more about this later.

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

Why employers should not decide what is taught in Universities

2007-10-16T07:54:00.000-07:00

There is a very interesting Guardian article on this subject, which was published way back in May 2007:-

Why employers should not decide what is taught in Universities

This is one of the government's ideas, having been encouraged by Lord Leitch, that somehow the curriculum of the Universities should be driven by what employers want and indeed there are rumours coming out of this particular government that funding should be a co-operative venture between employers and universities.

So far, so bad. Except that the government does not seem to be taking into account that students learn on a broad canvas in University and indeed are taught and teach themselves to learn. This is quite different from the kind of tick box approach that is required in vocational training and/or the modern workplace.

I am getting very worried that we are trying desparately to prepare a nation of roberts (with apologies to "Not the Nine O'Clock News") rather than a nation of people who have been through higher education and can think for themselves.

University and higher education is where people learn to think for themselves; the dangers of co-funding are that employers will co-fund only those projects where students can parrott for themselves. That is why the government's plans on co-funding and the withdrawal of HEFCE grant aid for lifelong learning must be resisted, otherwise we shall have no universities left and some kind of "Westworld" supplanted instead.

Westworld for those of you who dont know, is a science fiction film by Michael Crichton about robots who started to grow feelings and would not take orders anymore from humans. There are strange parallels between this film and what is happening in higher education; I leave the reader to draw their own conclusions.

Westworld

New Zenfrog Group

2007-10-14T12:34:00.000-07:00

I thought I would put in the link for the new group which has been started by my friend Linda:-
StudentsAgainstthe FundingCuts

I wish you all the very best of luck with the group of which I have become a member.

The future becomes the past (again)

2007-10-14T03:57:00.000-07:00

I think I have already stated in this very blog the ignimony of being labelled a higher education "failure" at the age of 24 years of age and all that for a few personal problems and an urge to change courses. Then, the search to see whether I could get back into higher education, a search that went on for 17 years, until I felt confident enough to say to the authorities "I want to get back into higher education because I feel that I can get a degree and I have found a subject in which to get my degree". But I dont think that I ever got over the acute sense of rejection that I felt when I left teacher training college; I even tried to get back in the following year and did all the work set, only to be told that I could not.

So you will all pardon me when I say that what this present government appears to be doing is reminiscent of what happened thirty years ago to myself. Then I was being consistently told that I would not get a grant (that meant fees and a maintenance grant). Now students who already have dared to get a first degree (or other qualification) and find it out of date or not suitable because society has moved on, will find themseves in the same boat. There will be no funding for second chances; so that person will be effectively finished, or educationally grounded. And I certainly know what that ignimony feels like. It does not feel as if there is any future.

Aha says the government. But fear ye not because there will be funding for foundation degrees. Yes but suppose one wants to go into a profession, for example, business, or law, where foundation degrees are simply not enough. What are foundation degrees anyway. Suppose one has a degree in physics and wants later on to become a barrister; what use a foundation degree and a foundation degree in what?

These are examples from my own learning; however I am sure my colleagues can give many other examples of people who would benefit from second chances, including people who are severely disabled and have degrees - why are we taking hope away from all these people. Do this government not like the principles of learning?

I come on to the principles of co-funding. Here is the news...bong. In all the 35 years that I have been left school, I have never seen one example of it. Well maybe one example but that was 20 years ago. I think employers will be asking, of what relevance is it to co-fund little Jimmy to get a degree when I am happy for him to be a floor-sweeper. Whats in it for me? And what guarantees that the government will legally bind employers to let employees do further or higher education.

I was extremely lucky to get a chance with the Open University to do a Diploma in Law and I was funded for it and achieved it. However, under the new regime the funds would not be available for me to do this, so I would have no chance at a legal career, or even to get a job in local government doing welfare rights.

We have seen from the figures, how the government proposes to strip out £31million from the Open University; this will be replaced with transitional funding but the result of people with pre-existing qualifications going to the Open University and asking for another bite of the cherry will be "Sorry no funding for you so please pay the full amount".

Oliver Twist, eat your heart out. Thats why the campaign to stop these cuts must and will continue.

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

Sector wide administration costs of £250m?

2007-10-12T17:28:00.000-07:00

A friend on the Facebook group has been good enough to advise me that Hefce does not itself cost £250m; he says that this is an estimate of what the system costs sector wide. I have already given the link to the Guardian article in which this figure appears.

Like it or not, this figure comes from somewhere and presumably from some audit group or the other. Would someone perhaps let me know why this money is being wasted when the government is now proposing chopping limbs from the sector, in the form of disposing of life long learning, not to say widening participation.

As I have already said, in the case of my own University, £31m has been taken from the budget for 2008-9 to be replaced by we know not what, but lets call it transitional twiddles, to be on the safe side. Now all the OU has to do is to find the students to fit into the twiddly bits to make sure that its funding is £139m. Eh voila, another set of tick boxes fulfilled.

I hate to say this but I dont think this government likes learning very much; its an inconvenient thing really. All those people who might be able to challenge those stories put out, that we do all this in your name.

All through my life, I have seen successive governments pull up the drawbridge on lifelong learning. Now we have got back to the 1970's situation of "No you cannot have another grant!" Oliver Twist had nothing on New Labour. Of course they keep on forgetting that this is our money and not theirs.

I got my pension forecast six months back. I have nade 28 years contribution into the system, have three years to pay and have another eight years to go through. Its just a reminder; have I paid taxes and national insurance all these years just to see the money I paid shifted about in an aimless fashion. I think not.

HEFCE Modelling at last revealed - 2007-2010

2007-10-12T09:39:00.000-07:00

The HEFCE modelling has at last been revealed and is in the form of an Excel spreadsheet which may well be available as a link in a future blog. At first I thought that it looked as if the Open University would not suffer over the next 3-4 years as the figures are all the same, £139m this year, next and so on.

However, on reading the Guardian, my esteemed collegaues in that excellent newspaper have put me right. Please read this:-

The Guardian

What it is saying is that over that period the Open University is set to lose £31m and the Birkbeck College, University of London, £7.8m. These are the two institutions that have done so much for lifelong learning. Needless to say, the Vice Chancellor of my University, the OU and the Master of Birkbeck are not at all pleased.

The transitional relief will have a paliative effect because students who have already signed up for these programmes will have a modicum of protection and there is obviously the beginnings of some consideration for shortage subjects. But taken at its baldest and basest, £40m or so has been stripped out from the budgets of these two great universities. There is the ongoing mantra being chanted by the government that the money will be resassigned to people who will have a chance to do first degrees. But that is not, I repeat not, lifelong learning, which the government has said that it is committed to. So much for lifelong learning, as I said to the readership of my local newspaper.

Along with our colleagues in the Open University and Birkbeck, we must all fight to resist these cuts, which are being peddled by the government as something which is good for us all. But how can something which totally strips out and annhialates lifelong learning within the HE sector be good for us....answers on a very small postcard if you please.

POST SCRIPTUM PERHAPS THE GOVERNMENT WOULD BE GOOD ENOUGH TO EXPLAIN TO ME THE EXPENDITURE OF £250MILLION ON HEFCE ADMINISTRATION. THAT SHOULD REALLY BE THE SUBJECT OF A SELECT COMMITTEE ENQUIRY IF I DONT MISS MY GUESS.

Links - 12th October 2007

2007-10-12T04:46:00.000-07:00

Donald2000.blogspot.com
This is a link to this blog, so dont try it if you are already in this blog

HEFCEFundingCuts
This is a link to the Facebook group, students against the HEFCE Funding cuts.

DonaldsYahooBlog

No10DowningStreetPetitions
This is a link to 10 Downing Street and the petitions to the Prime Minister

FatmanonaKeyboard
This is a link to Fatman on a Keyboard - he does a brilliant blog about education and other subjects!

Politcalnetworking
The excellent blogsite of my colleague Linda.

Dont be fooled by the rhetoric!!

2007-10-12T03:04:00.001-07:00

There is an article within the Times Educational (Higher) Supplement today, of which I hereby give this link:-

THES-ARTICLE

which states that the petition to save the funding now amounts to 1071 signatures but also gives details of transitional protection, co-funding and also the reassurance that things will stay much as they are for the next three years.

I think the mistake being made here is that some of the largest institutions will not suffer because they are fairly astute with money. So institutions with economies of scale will not suffer as much as smaller ones. But that still does not mean, after transitional protection has work off, that the path towards getting qualifications if one has already got a degree will be particularly easy. The long term effects of the diktat of the Secretary of State for Universities is going to be forgotten, I fear, and when people have to pay a lot more for their courses in years to come they will be complaining. So I would urge everyone to join the protests now.
Think of the long term effects of these cuts, would be my advice.

Secondly, this scheme of HEFCE costs a lot to administer, according to the Guardian article of which I have lately provided a link, £250 million per anumn all told, which is an outrageous sum of money. Where does this money all go? I think we should be told. I have written to the Secretary of State for Universities in order that he provide an explanation, which I must admit, would be interesting to hear.

Dear Member of Parliament, now for my supplementary questions.

2007-10-11T03:49:00.001-07:00

I wish to acknowledge and thank my colleague "Fatman on a keyboard" (please see links to that blog in my links of 8th October 2007). I have now sent a series of supplementary questions to my Member of Parliament, John Denham and these are posted below -

Dear John Denham

In addition to the enquiry which I made earlier today, I now have some supplementary questions for yourself. I am a constituent of your goodself in the Southampton Itchen constituency.

Your letter has referred to shifting institutional funding away from "second degree" students. With that in mind, my supplementary first question is:

whether you realise that this is not just about people taking second degrees but the whole range of Lifelong Learning qualifications in Universities. These include University Certificates, Certificates, Diplomas and, above all, short courses that can include all types of work such as, liberal adult education, continuing professional development, work related learning, community development, etc.? The government clearly realised the damage that would be done to Foundation Degrees, which is why they have exempted them. Why not these as well?

2. The letter mentions the government wants more people of all ages and backgrounds to enter Higher Education for the first time.

So do we all, but my second question would be whether you have considered that taking out around a third of the students in Lifelong Learning could so affect the financial viability of programmes and departments that the very flexible provision and infrastructure required to deliver these new opportunities could be lost?

3. The letter says "we will also support students doing second qualifications, provided the costs are co-funded by their employers, as Sandy Leitch recommended".

My third and main question would be, given that large amounts of work related learning and continuing professional development will be lost as a result of the decision, do you seriously think that co-funding can possibly replace what will have gone?

There are a range of supplementaries to be asked too. What is your position over employers who are unwilling to pay? Will you be proposing statutory rights for employees to further their education? What about areas of the country or industries (such as tourism or the creative arts) that are dominated by Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) who are simply unable to pay?

4. The letter is full of the word 'fairness'. I want to use an unfashionable example. Take a retired student now studying in adult education. The person may have got a degree forty years ago. After paying taxes for those forty years to pay for others to take adult education classes now it is her turn, but she finds herself barred as she has just been made unfundable. Is that fair?

I look forward to your considered reply. Many thanks,

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

Dear Member of Parliament, where is the money going in HEFCE???

2007-10-11T03:11:00.000-07:00

Dear Mr Denham

Thank you for your reply to my recent email to yourself, as one of your constituents for the Southampton Itchen constituency. I hope you will not mind me making further comment on what you have said.

As someone with an honours degree in Accounting my primary concern is the money that is being displaced out of the system which is currently operational. Because of the way that HEFCE is funding the universities at the moment, all the grant is being used to fund and innovate courses which are used for the benefit of all students.

Therefore, there are going to be some fairly advanced and estoteric modelling exercises going on to find the money (£100million) which you and your department say is going to be displaced. These exercises alone will cost £millions to finance, let alone the restructuring of university finance departments and other deconstructions. Let us sincerely hope that this exercise is not going to cost another £100million to fund.

I am extremely sceptical about what you have said in your reply for another good reason; that it has come to public notice from the Guardian web pages that HEFCE and the Universities are spending £250 million per anumn on administration of the present scheme, which surely must be the most outrageous use or misuse of taxpayers money. By the time this money has been spent, the proposals which you have had to put into practice will have been dwarfed by the administrative charges.

So it seems that the picture is by no means as clear as your Department would have us believe. Perhaps you would clarify whether or not your Department intends to correct the colossal overspend on HEFCE administration and perhaps reinstate the money on widening participation and lifelong learning which you are at present taking out of the system?

Regards, Donald Hedges.

Administrative costs for HEFCE and Universities - £250m per anumn?

2007-10-11T01:58:00.000-07:00

I have previously commented that it would take £100 million to find the £100 million worth of cuts that the Secretary of State proposes. Just have a look at the Guardian article to which I have posted this link:-

£250mAminCostsHEFCE

If there was ever an excuse to review what John Denham proposes, this must be it.

Will there be co-opted funding

2007-10-10T14:25:00.000-07:00

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!!!

A letter to me from my Member of Parliament....

2007-10-10T12:14:00.000-07:00

Complete with a picture of Holborn Viaduct Station (in the good old days when there was a Holborn Viaduct Station)

Now back to business -

I have received a communication from my Member of Parliament, who happens to be Mr John Denham:

In that response to my email, the person replying (my member of Parliament) says that my concerns about people taking second qualifications are noted; that first of all I have to be reassured that no existing students doing such qualifications will be affected. In fact only those who are entering higher education from 2008/2009 will be affected with the pace of change being fairly slow to commence, to allow institutions to adjust to the changes.

I have been informed in this communication that the Minister for Lifelong learning has been in touch with the Vice Chancellor of the Open University to discuss the position; my source has acknowledged that there will need to be transitional protection for some universities and there is a substantial possibility that the Open University will receive this protection. However, the Open University like others will have to mull over the detail of what it is going to do because the policy has been put into place and now there needs to be thought put into the detailed planning.

My Member of Parliament says that all of the £100 million would be redistributed to support the priorities; the government wants people of all ages and backgrounds to go into the higher education arena for the first time. My MP wants the increase in those of the workforce with graduate level qualifications to go from 29% to 40%.. The source says that this means targeting money on people who are not already graduates.

My member of Parliament says that the Leitch report is going to be followed, whereby it is recommended that employers con-fund second qualifications and this will be applicable in both the private and public sectors. There is also a concern that it costs too much public money to reskill existing graduates, whereby it is cheaper to encourage people into higher education to get a first qualification at public expense.

There will be exemptions for shortage subjects, for example medicine and HEFCE have been asked whether or not there are other categories of students who should have attracted funding to do second or other equivalent level qualifications.

My Member of Parliament says that universities which adapt to these spending proposals and do it well stand to gain both money and reputation; my source says that after all there is £100m on offer here and possibly more to come in the spending review.

I will make a comment on what has been said at a later stage.

My story of lifelong learning(2)

2007-10-10T02:16:00.000-07:00

The picture is of Mitcham Station (which is now part of the Croydon Tramlink). It has the curious aspect of looking like a house but is actually an ex British Rail property, part of which used to be a booking office for the Wimbledon to West Croydon Line.

Lifelong Learning - my story - Part 2

I said in the previous part of this epic story how pleased I had been to be given a second chance. However, being given a second chance at University does not mean that you can get a job with the qualification. There have been plenty of employers that have rejected me; also I have read things since I graduated like "Everybody's got degrees now!" I thought that quite comical. As regards an Accounts degree, this has been traditionally regarded as second only in difficulty to a degree in Physics. So I thought it a bit insulting to read all these personnel journals with these gross overestimations inside. In fact, only about 1/5 of the UK population have degrees, despite protestations to the contrary by employers and personnel organisations.

I dont know what it is about the tendency to downgrade people's qualifications; dont we like success in this country or something. It makes me wonder?

Apart from teaching jobs in further education colleges and three years when I managed to get some taxation work, I have mainly been in the voluntary sector doing welfare rights and helping people get the benefits that they were entitled to.

In fact so interested have I beel in this sector, that in 2003 (after having waited another 8 years to do something with my hard fought degree), I applied to the Open University to embark upon an LLB degree. They allowed me full funding for this course, right up until the middle of the W301 course in August 2006, when I decided that I would transfer to the BA(Hons)(Open) degree. And I have to say that I am extremely grateful to the Open University for that further chance.

In the eventuality I have received an Open University Diploma in English Law for the courses I have done in 2003 and 2004. I applied for this in August 2007 and was retrospectively awarded it from 31st December 2004.

Where does my philosophy of "another chance" tie in with what I am saying. Well simply because I was not give a fair crack of the whip with employment since I graduated in 1995 with a BA(Hons) Accounting and was compelled to change direction yet again in 2003. The Open University gave me that chance and hopefully I did not let them down by working hard and obtaining an Open University qualification. Was the HEFCE funding wasted on me; I do not think so. I have been able to contribute to society by doing voluntary work, not the least of which is this campaign to save the HEFCE funding and also hopefully I have been able to repay the University in some small way for what they have given me by sitting on the Regional Committee for the Open University in the South, the Central Consultative Committee, the Senate of the Open University and the Curriculum and Awards Board (2004-2006).

When I hear the government say that they are going to redirect this £100million to the youngsters I cannot say that I regret this, except that we all have things to contribute to this society throughout our lives and we grow and we can experience and give back throughout our lives. Now John Denham and the government are going to take these lifelong learning experiences away from us whilst at the same time vigorously emphasising that he is going to widen participation. This is obviously not the case!

So I would say, sign the petition against the funding cuts, join the facebook group and keep fighting for the right to have lifelong learning and widening participation. Education is not "either or" it is a lifelong process which people have earned the right to have.

My story of Lifelong Learning

2007-10-09T13:22:00.000-07:00

There is a definite reason why I have taken to the concept of lifelong learning and you could say that it was the reason that it took me 17 years from when I first went to higher education to get a second chance, a chance to get what I eventually thought was a well earned degree in Accounting with honours, from Solent University in 1995.

I wont mention where I went first of all to higher education. It was when I was 22 that I did arrive at this small but prestigious teacher training college, having waited for three years from 19-22 so that I could be an independent student and so that my parents (out of respect for them) did not have to maintain me.

When I got to the establishment, I found that I was very keen on student union activity and time has not dulled my campaigning edge, as everyone can see. However, in the first year I was on the student representative committee, was hostel representative, was on the grants action committee and so forth.

In my second year, I became Vice President for External Relations for a while. However things with my studies became a little fraught because of my union work. I began to get a bit lonely and home sick and took on personal situations that I was a bit less than ready for (I say this to be kind to all concerned). In view of this, I was allowed to take a year off; however because of the shock of having to shall we say "intermit"m the programme of work that I was supposed to do never really got done in the order that it was supposed to do. I was refused re-admission the following year.

Apart from always having wanted to be a teacher, I wondered when I was ever going to get back into higher learning to fulfil what I believed to be my potential. I made many enquiries throughout the years 1977-1991, only to get the same answer, that grants were not given for second chances. Despite achieving quite a few more further education qualifications, I was not allowed to have that second chance, that second bite of the cherry, or so I believed.

In 1992, after I had changed direction from what I was doing at teacher training and was now on the way to becoming quite an accountant (or at least an educated one at that), I had a very fortunate interview with Southampton Institute and they accepted me for the Honours degree course in Accounting. After a tempetuous battle with Surrey County Council, they agreed to fund me for the whole of the honours degree course. I had finally received my second chance and I worked throughout the whole of my degree, taking summer jobs when and where I could and receiving hardship funding. In November 1995 I graduated from Southampton Institute with an honours degree from Nottingham Trent University. Ten years later Southampton Institute was to become Solent University.

That someone had given me a second chance was all that I wanted; I have to say that it was Surrey County Council and Southampton Institute that gave me that second chance between them and I have got to express my gratitude, I really have. They had more confidence in me that my first higher learning establishment. I repaid my second chance by really working.

The moral of this first part of the tale is that nobody can be written off at the age of 24 or 25 years of age; nobody should have to listen to that age old tale "Well you had your chance and now we are not going to let you back into higher education". Does this somehow seem familiar in what we are seeing with this present government's attitude? I believe I am living proof that society can quite easily and should quite easily be prepared to give people second, third and fourth chances and chances to go into and out of higher education, without being made to feel as guilty and useless as I was, just because I was so young when I had a setback. Lets hope that younger people are not going to be treated quite as badly as I was if they do make mistakes. There's a lot more about lifelong learning that this government needs to learn before it becomes something more than a mantra, quite frankly.

I will continue with my personal journey of lifelong learning in the next instalment.

What is it with buses and trains?

2007-10-09T13:11:00.001-07:00

I am writing to clarify why it is that there are always buses and trains on my blog; this is a throwback to when I was very small and used to travel around London on my own, bus spotters book and note book in hand, trying to see what buses I could to add to my ever growing list. To me this was like giving myself an education about the greatest city in the world and sussing out the infrastructure and what went where.

I still come up to London on a very frequent basis and am obviously excited about the transport projects that the capital has lined up, for instance, the possibility of extending the Croydon Tramlink to Crystal Palace, Crossrail, the extension of the Piccadilly Line to Terminal Five and many other exciting projects.

It seems that the fact that I post pictures of buses and trains on my blog has also become something of a trademark. I am glad of it; at least someone will remember my blog this way and it might well have some more bite. Cheers!

My Letter to the Southampton Evening Echo

2007-10-09T05:57:00.000-07:00

Daily Echo (Southampton) Page 12 Letters:-

Soapbox -Higher education budget cut.

So much for lifelong learning.

I want people to know about the government's proposal to shave £100m off the higher education budget from 2008-2010.

Despite this Government's avowed commitment to lifelong learning, Secretary of State for Universities, John Denham (also Labour MP for Southampton Itchen) has give instructions that this amount be taken from the universities budget, lest students might be taking an equivalent level qualification to their existing degree. So much for lifelong learning!

This means that anyone who wants to do an Open University course and they already have a degree, watch out because that course is set to increase by three times the amount currently paid.

The Government obviously does not realise that ine higher education qualification does not fit one lifetime, let alone the potential of higher education for keeping the mind alive and preventing dementia, etc.

So I would ask everyone to protest these cuts to their local MP.

Donald Hedges, Bitterne, Southampton.

Published today - I am so thrilled that at last this issue is coming to people's attention. This is truly an issue for our time, for us, our children and indeed, our children's children.

This is the widening participation

2007-10-09T01:00:00.000-07:00

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).

Links

2007-10-08T15:44:00.000-07:00

8th October 2007 (2)

2007-10-08T10:15:00.001-07:00

Dear Sirs or Madman

This is the second of my daily epics. I am quite excited because if you go to Google and Google HEFCE Funding cuts you will see one that I prepared earlier; a letter that I have written to about 60 student unions telling them about the cuts and what it means for the future of ourselves, our children and grandchildren. What not in those words exactly, but it gives the picture, if you know what I mean.

Lifelong learning is not all about giving the money to one sector, indeed, we dont even know whether Mr Denham is proposing to give the money to the "first time buyers" of higher education that he has said that he might. And lifelong learning is not about first time buyers anyway, it is about those who have decided to make a commitment to educating themselves on a lifelong basis. To cast them out into the cold and all their aspirations, is pretty mean, to say the least.

Mr Denham has said that if people want to re-skill, then let them do it through their employers. But again, there is no real proof that employers will take on this burden. I have worked for employers that will do something for you but it is more than likely to be on the scale of Learn Direct to learn a second language; it is not likely to be on the scale of an entire re-skilling.

Let me give another example, say, for example, one has a degree in Physics and one cannot get a job with that. One has only managed to get a job as a supermarket assistant. One sees an Open University degree in Law and one might manage to get funding for it because one has a low income. Under the present HEFCE regulations, one can apply for it to the Open University because it is subsidised, so even if one did not get a personal grant, one might well be able to still get the course for £1550, or whatever the price is per anumn. Now the government are saying, no, you will have to pay the full rate, which could be £3000 or even more. People on low incomes are not going to be able to pay that. What you are doing is depriving society of people who could potentially be brilliant in another career. The government is putting an end to people's aspirations and in the other arm of their campaign, they are also attempting to decimate brilliant universities like the Open University and Brikbeck (plus all the other universities) who are doing so much for life-long learning.

So what I am saying is, fight the cuts now. Thank you.

8th October 2007

2007-10-08T01:48:00.000-07:00

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5335572035

The Facebook group - students against the funding cuts.

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/HE-GRANT-CUTS/

The petition to the Prime Minister on the Downing Street site.

I would urge everyone who can to sign the petition on the Downing Street site, so that we can let the government know that we are serious about our opposition to the funding cuts. These cuts will not have the effect that John Denham said they would; they will have the effect of cutting the universities provision of courses within lifelong learning and widening participation most drastically, leaving these sectors to be a second rate part of the system. The fact that the money may go to school leavers to enable their participation in HE is not sufficient compensation for the loss of the money.

These changes are explained by Fat Man on a keyboard. Have a look at his blog as well. He tells it like it is.

Until we meet again and the case is solved.

Introduction - 7th October 2007

2007-10-07T15:01:00.000-07:00

Hello, this is the second blog that I am writing; this one though is specifically about the HEFCE funding cuts and my part in the campaign to get them stopped.

The other blog which I write is a more general blog and that can be found at http://uk.360.yahoo.com/bty726686

The funding cuts - the start of this was the letter by John Denham, Secretary of State for Universities, stating that £100m was to be shaved off the budget to prevent aspiring students getting what are known as "second first qualifications", that is qualifications at an equivalent or lower level to the ones they have already got, assuming that they have already got degrees.

What Senor Denham forgot to conveniently mention was that this would wipe out the other categories of student which he was trying to encourage, the widening participation students and the lifelong learning students, but hey, what does it matter when you are trying to do something which is politically expedient.

He also conveniently forgot the aspirations of the two universities which are trying to take the sector forward, which Denham would most decimate with his cunning plan - that is to say, the Open University and the University of London, Birkbeck College.

I will publish the links to the funding campaign petition on the 10 Downing Street website and the Facebook group which is in existence; watch out for the next exciting instalment.

Donald Hedges.